Fifteen Eighty Four

In my forthcoming book Cultural Learning in Urban Schools and Minority Serving Institutions, I explore one of the most urgent human capital challenges in the American workforce today: how to staff K-16 schools serving students from low-income and other minoritized cultural communities (LIMCCs) with teachers prepared to learn and work effectively across cultural differences between them. This challenge is driven by the longstanding reality that the American teaching workforce across both K-12 and higher education sectors is predominantly white, approximately 80 percent and 70 percent White respectively. Educators, education researchers, and policymakers have referred to this phenomenon in terms of diversity, equity, or student-teacher racial gaps. In this book, I explore cultural incongruence between K-12 students and teachers in urban schools and minority serving institutions as a driving factor in maintaining what some organizational theorists have called a knowing-doing gap. In this context, I argue there is a gap between what educators in these urban schools and minority serving institutions (MSI) think they know about how to work effectively with students from LIMCCs, and what they are actually able to do in practice.

Cultural learning is a term originating from the cultural psychology literature – and it refers to the process through which people learn which normative beliefs, practices, and values to adopt from trusted members of their own cultural communities. From this perspective, cultural learning happens everywhere humans form groups – so everyone can benefit from learning about the psychological processes through which we learn who we are and who we are not that we share in common. In the book, I explore the educational research which suggests that K-12 educators working with students from LIMCCs are socialized into a culture of urban teaching that is strongly influenced by a societal curriculum that perpetuates negative stereotypes about people from LIMCCs by reproducing them primarily through mass media. I also explore evidence that urban K-12 teachers learn culturally accepted meanings and understandings about their students from multiple sources across three phases of organizational socialization – most readily from colleagues who pass on traditions and “normal” ways of doing things that have long been embedded in their schools’ organizational memories or within cultures of urban teaching themselves.

Importantly, this book does not deny that each educator is responsible for their own beliefs and values – but it strongly suggests that the cultural meanings and understandings they learn both prior to joining the profession and while on the job influence every dimension of their work. I argue instead that their choices of which individual and collective action strategies to use when working across cultural differences between themselves and their students can yield two types of learning identified by seminal organizational scholar Chris Argyris in the 1970s. The first type – single-loop learning – is what happens when we realize we have made an error without investigating why that error occurred, and the second – double-loop learning – occurs when we trace the thinking that led to that error back to the beliefs and values that inform it. In accordance with the organizational literature informing this framework, I assume throughout the book that educators from all backgrounds are capable of double-loop learning across student-teacher cultural differences. In the second half of the book, I explore evidence that both of these learning styles exist amongst instructional staff working on one campus of a high-performing MSI – where students’ cultural differences often amount to more than matters of race and class. I explore how instructors in higher education grapple with the residual effects of the same social inequities which drive educational inequalities at the K-12 level. Specifically, college students from LIMCCs often experience college differently as student-employees, student parents, and as members of cultural communities that expect they will prioritize familial responsibilities as much as if not more than their academic commitments. 

The book is coming into the world at an interesting time to talk about cultural differences in any public arena. Despite the noise, it is both realistic and sincere in making the assumption that cultural learning – by its very definition – is not only accessible to people from all cultural backgrounds, but is literally a rite of passage we share in common across cultures. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to this topic in this context in order to provide the reader with relevant key concepts and terms from across the cultural psychology, organizational behavior, and organizational psychology literatures that were actually developed in what psychologists agree have been largely WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples and populations – so they are certainly applicable to the majority of the American teaching workforce. In Chapter Seven of this book, for example, I argue that research from cultural psychology helps us understand how educators working with students from LIMCCs across K-16 contexts are socialized into cultures of urban teaching.

As the author, I was intentional to avoid any assumptions about who is more or less likely to have developed intercultural sensitivities across the lifespan based on their social identifiers when collecting the empirical data in particular. I believe that educators from all backgrounds can use this book as a tool for self-guiding their own foray into the very personal process of tracing one’s beliefs and values back to their sources. I hope that this book will give them the evidence and the languages needed to articulate much of what they already suspected to be true about their experiences with learning across cultural differences in the workplace and beyond. Most importantly, I hope readers are inspired to interrogate the data, beliefs, and values informing their thinking and actions in ways that challenge their prior thinking about what there is to learn from people who they perceive to be very unlike themselves.

Title: Cultural Learning in Urban Schools and Minority Serving Institutions

ISBN: 9781009377089

Author: Tiffany Brown