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Deepening the Knowledge Base
Student Learning
Faculty Learning
Institutional Learning
Of all the community colleges in the network of ??? two-year public institutions in Massachusetts, Bunker Hill Community College is well known for its innovative curricular opportunities for one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse communities of students.
Physical description: what does it look like? feel like?
BHCC is a diverse urban institution. Two-thirds of the student population is made up of students of color, including 12% Asian students. BHCC is designated by the U.S. Department of Education as a Minority Serving Institution (MSI) and an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI).
Learning Communities: BHCC strives to provide a humanities curriculum grounded in scholarship and responsive to students’ educational needs. In an effort to connect the humanities curriculum and students’ cultural experiences, BHCC has prioritized integration of global and local cultural exploration into its Learning Communities. Learning Communities such as Who Are We? Exploring Cultural Identity and Voices from the Margins: Examining Gay and Lesbian Literature in America have sparked dialogue on strengthening the College’s humanities curriculum.
BHCC is one of the most diverse institutions of higher education in Massachusetts.
Approximately sixty-seven percent of BHCC students are people of color, and more than fifty percent are women. The average age of BHCC students is 27, and the majority work while attending college. The College enrolls more than 800 international students who hail from nearly 100 countries and speak over 75 languages, making BHCC one of the most cosmopolitan institutions of higher education in New England. The College aspires to incorporate diverse perspectives in its courses, programs and institutional climate.
As the largest urban community college in Massachusetts, Bunker Hill Community College
(BHCC) enrolls over 14,000 students from the greater Boston metropolitan area. Founded in
1973, BHCC ranks among the 25 fastest growing public two-year colleges in the U.S. As a
minority-serving institution with a student body composed of 67 percent people of color, BHCC
reflects the diversity of Boston, a
majority-minority city. With its own “T”
stop—Community College—on Boston’s
mass transit system, BHCC is a
springboard to new futures for its
students, many of whom are low-income,
are academically unprepared, and speak
English as a second language (see Figure 1).
Although the College motto invites students to “imagine the possibilities,” facing barriers of
language, cultural differences, poverty, family responsibilities, and job commitments, students
too often find themselves falling behind, and ultimately dropping out. For Asian American
students in particular who comprise approximately 12 percent of the student body, the likelihood
of achieving a college degree diminishes as they struggle through multiple levels of pre-college
coursework without earning one college credit toward graduation. It is this academic challenge
that the proposal tackles.
Leadership
The curriculum is the central sustainable core of values and content at a college over time. The curriculum is the bedrock of institutional culture, a reflection of the college’s values as it translates into the currency of exchange, the teaching and learning process. As the stewards of this process, the faculty and staff of the college must be actively and constantly engaged in undrestanding not only the lived experiences of their studnets, but-as important—the ways in which the institutional can change what it does on a daily basis based on what is has learned about new student popuations. Institution is also checking out the level of convergence between what is being learned and what has already been learned to be important for other new student populations.
Grounded knowledge of lived student experiences, particularly of those students who are more recent participants in higher education, is important to creating and sustaining robust, reciprocal teaching and learning environment that benefits all students.
Working with faculty is at the core of sustainable organizational change in colleges and universities.
Cultural Responsiveness is critical to student success
It’s important to clearly establish the link between initial articulation of the “problem,” the subsequently implementation of a set of activities designed to respond to it; the thoughtful assessment and evaluation of the activities in aggregate and individually; and, finally, the individual outputs from each activity as well as the generalized outcomes which have resulted from the project as a whole.
The design of the project carefully accounts for the essential components of institutional, sustainable change within a college: careful assessment of challenges; reflective opportunities to devise potential solutions; collegial design and implementation as a set of suitable responses are devised leading to deliberate assessment and evaluation of outcomes. This leads to modification of all existing responses wihtin the college at that time, modifying those that are worthy of further devleopment, and building new initiatives when necessary
Purpose of the Project
Why use a case study format?
What are the goals of the study?
What is the purpose of the study?
Who is the intended audience for the study?
this is not intended to be a comprehensive report, documenting all of the activities of the project. Instead, it’s an effort to identify key goals of the project and support the ways in which these goals were amplified through subsequent events supported by the project.
This is a snapshot of activities as documented through a series of interviews, focus groups, and reviews of related documents that helps to clarify critical events over the life of the project. More important, this is an attempt to appreciate the impact of these events on the key stakeholders in the project and its outcomes.
It’s a way of looking at the nature of the project and its impact and then consider recommendations for change.
Faculty: Characteristics
Faculty Change Process
Bridging Cultures within Local/Global Asian American Communities (2014-2015),
Bridging Cultures between Asian American Generations (2015-2016), and
Bridging Cultures through Asian American Intersections in Civic Life (2016-2017).
shifts in curricula;
I changed the way I teach. It’s completely different from the way I learned [my subject area]. I now put a lot of culturally relevant projects into my class. It’s very beneficial for my students.
shifts in pedagogy
Faculty have created a series of e-portfolios which capture the curricular outcomes of their individual and collective work. Syllabi were generated by faculty working individually and in co-teaching units and addressed a variety of disciplines, including Statistics, Math, English as a Second Language.
Assessment of the e-portfolios was guided by the VALUE rubrics developed by the AACU. As important was the collective process by which the assessment was conducted the reflective outcomes which resulted.
Summarize findings from Mizuho and Enzo’s memo and from other reports that were issued.
Create list from previously submitted reports.
Campus Lectures.
Roundtable Discussions
Cross institutional collaboration is important for its reciprocal benefits. Bringing the richness and depth of expertise that is content specific and research-based to domains where faculty expertise extends to serving students who would not typically benefit from learning contexts that are influenced by this depth is important.
Learning opportunity for leaders at multiple levels, including the senior level and including individuals who are charged with translating the larger institutional mission into set of institutional practices which move the entire campus toward its goals.
Outcomes:
Professional development LEADING TO
Curricular change AND
Pedagogical change RESULTING IN
Student learning
Institutional Impact
AANAPISI
Establishing New Models for Teaching and Learning
New Models for Community Based Learning
Professional Development: New Models and Forms
Opportunities and Challenges
Development of a rubric by which structural efforts at cultural responsivness can be appreciated and refined. This would include large-scale efforts which are intended to affect the campus as a whole and—in some cases—multiple, external partners or collaborators with whom there are reciprocal relationships as well as smaller, but equally important efforts at the departmental, program, or classroom level.
challenge to Bunker Hill is to use its diversity and its commitment to diversity as a relational engine to generate a conceptual framework for designing professional development approach
Cross institutional collaboration that is deep can strengthen curricular ariculation pathways on a structural level but can also establish more meaningful possibilities for grounded research and shared activities which will —- when taken together— can augment the civic benefit.
Continued conversation about the areas of overlap and connection between the engaging cultures work and the focus of the AANAPISI on the broader contexts which affect low-income Asian American students
What are the structural legacies within the administrative sturcture of the institution that reinforce the key learnings?
Re-examination of distribution of resources and structural considerations which affect innovative practices.
Professional Development for Faculty
Sustainability
Contextualized Learning: Place Based; Experiential
Value of Cross Institutional Collaboration
Value of Humanistic Learning
Engagement: Student Engagement, Civic Engagement
Student Success
Though driving is a popular way to get to Bunker Hill for many of its ?????? full- and part-time students, most students arrive via the Orange Line, one of four major subway lines traversing the City of Boston. Observing the many students who click through the station turnstiles abutting a walkway leading to the main entrance of the college is to appreciate one of the institution’s primary hallmarks: its cultural and ethnic diversity.
Opening the front doors to the college, visitors find a cafe area busy with students whose physical appearances only hint at the ???? of ethnic and cultural groups represented at the institution. Flyers on hallway bulletin boards announce ????, ??????, ???????. Conversations between and among students and staff blend English with Spanish, Haitian Creole, Arabic, and ???? other languages and dialects.
What are the features of cultural responsiveness that are most useful to this study?
What is less appreciated is the complex array of Asian-American populations from which BHCC’s student enrollments are derived.
An Asian-American President, the first in the history of the institution and one of a handful across the commonwealth had taken the lead of the college in 2016?
Demographics: how many students in general? How many Asian-American students? Background for these students… context, context, context
Summarize history from initial RFP and subsequent annual reports.
This case study is intended to appreciate and richness of an institutional change process grounded in a faculty-based commitment to better understand a core population of students, historically familiar in aggregate but relatively unknown in the rich diversity reflected in the countries of origin and in the class structures in which the students were embedded.
The case is designed to capture as many of the unique features of the institutional context and the intentional and unintentional learnings which occurred as a result of the implementation of a set of core activities. Critical to the design of these activities was a set of assumptions about institutional change processes as well as the more specific assumptions about the value of increasing the depth of cultural responsiveness as a hallmark of institutional excellence and student centered learning.
The study is guided by four goals:
1) To affirm and appreciate the accomplishments of the project in relation to the original goals set out by the college in the Fall of 2014;
2) To document these accomplishments with artifacts resulted from project activities;
3) To explore opportunities and tensions which affected the college’s capacity to realize its original goals; and,
4) To outline ways in which the college and its partners can sustain beneficial activities which were originally funded by the grant, particularly through linkages with more recently funded initiatives and institutional priorities and related resources.
1) What changes in skill, knowledge, and disposition have project participants experienced in relation to integrating Asian American studies content into their respective curricula?
2) How has participation in the project affected the development and assessment of student learning outcomes in the areas of reflection/self-assessment, intercultural knowledge and competence, integrated communication, and critical thinking?
What happened during this institute? Consult previously submitted reports.
What happened during this institute? Consult previously submitted reports and write brief summary.
What happened during this institute? Consult previously submitted reports and write brief summary.
what impact did the project have on students?
Nurtured significance of diversity both within the context of students who attended but also as it relates to diversity of thinking of exposure to diverse experiences and personal backgrounds
The importance of using personal and collective narrative as a tool for encouraging student engagement
meaningful connections between professional aspirations and more humanistic goals of helping, developing community capacity, making a difference in the interests of democracy, freedom, and human rights
There’s doubt about the level of coherence among the administrative leadership
Exploration of professional development model which affords ongoing opportunities for re-definition of community college teaching and scholarship and administrative leadership
Creating an overarching conceptual framework for professional development related to supporting student success which integrates cultural responsive teaching and is aligned more clearly with the college’s established commitment to grounded research-to-practice within the classroom.
Opportunities for understanding how the principles of pedagogical and curricular change can be applied to co-curricular and student support efforts, such as success coaching.
How can the interest in community-based, experientially based professional development influence the faulty, staff, and administrative leaership development that is provided through the AANAPISI?
Important to perceive the AANAPISI as the natural and incremental extension of the work of the Engaging Cultures project.
Deeper commitment to the content —- the deep dive into the discpline is required and that this can and should take the form of a set of curricular and co-curricular experiences that form a strong link between discpline specific content, in this case in Asian American studies
Faculty member notes the importance of narrative during AANAPISI conversation. this is one of the important legacies of the NEH project as it continues to influence AANAPISI work
Project value: emphasizes the Humanities within a context where significant numbers of students are seeking short- and mid-range career opportunities
Project Value: Expands transfer pathway to major University partner and for vulnerable student population.
Responsiveness to context has become a hallmark of the kind of documentation that validates form and process simultaneously; in this sense, the importance of narrative—of stories—becomes increasingly significant in organizing the recollections of groups of people whose collective participation in an effort to make changes on behalf of individuals whom they serve an account that can be fully appreciated. Recounting… Listening to the recounting of events that particpants in the change process deemed useful… and then attempting to make sense of them…. reweaving them into forms that may yield the kinds of results, observations, and questions that will prompt further,deeper exploration and change-making, both at BHCC and at other institutions seeking to expand the possibilities for teaching and learning at their own institutions.
It makes good sense, then, that this effort to explore the experiences of faculty and staff engaged in the building Bridges project takes the form of a case study—an effort to weave a set of individual and small group narratives into a larger account of a critical institutional change project, in this case focused on the
………….
Culturally Responsive Teaching is a pedagogy that recognizes the importance of including students’ cultural references in all aspects of learning (Ladson-Billings,1994).
Some of the characteristics of culturally responsive teaching are:
Positive perspectives on parents and families
Communication of high expectations
Learning within the context of culture
Student-centered instruction
Culturally mediated instruction
Reshaping the curriculum
Teacher as facilitator
Five essential characteristics further define culturally responsive instruction.
• RESPECT
• RESPONSIVENESS
• RELEVANCE
• RIGOR
• RESEARCH-BASED
Cultural respect is demonstrated by instruction that values and acknowledges each student’s knowledge base
prior to entering the classroom. Responsiveness describes the teacher’s ability to adapt professional behaviors
so that every student’s knowledge and experiences are valued. Relevance describes the degree to which
instruction reflects students’ experiences. Instructional Rigor is driven by high expectations for all students
through the use of exercises that are challenging and engaging. Instructional strategies and curricula should be
based in strong research demonstrating effectiveness and reflecting best practice. http://empoweringeducation.net/downloads/factsheets/Culturally_Responsive_Practices.pdf
Because of the emergent frameworks for appreciating and assessing cultural responsiveness, Ladson-Billings frameworks have been integrated into grounded work that is occurring in schools and universities. Exploring the various frameworks is useful as there are factors which each offer which may inform the eventual re-organization of more meaningful, applicable criteria by which we can continue to evaluate ongoing efforts within given institutions and deepen their meaning through application in the field.
http://libguides.verona.k12.wi.us/content.php?pid=302610&sid=2498845
What Are Key Features of Culturally Responsive Teaching
This past year, the Verona Area School District, was assigned by the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to work with a national organization whose mission is to help educational organizations create equity for otherwise disenfranchised students and families. Equity Alliance visited our District in the spring of 2010 and observed and spoke with multiple stakeholders across our district. A report following the Equity Alliance visit indicated several needed areas of improvement. During the 2010-2011 school year, Equity Alliance returned to our district to work on coaching for equity skills for 4, full-days with a team from Country View Elementary School and school and central office administration. Following is a brief description of the key features (values/activities/approaches) to culturally responsive teaching recommended to our District by Equity Alliance.
“Communicate high expectations: Make sure that you let each student know that you expect them to engage, perform, and achieve at high level, rather than making excuses in your own mind for some students who don’t participate at optimal levels at times. Make outcomes clear and give students tools to reach outcomes.
Actively engage your students in learning: Coach your students to question, consult original material, connect content to their own lives, write to learn, read broadly, build models, test hypotheses, and make time to build relationships with them so that the disappointments that come from trying and not quite succeeding does not cause them to quit learning.
Facilitate Learning: Build students’ capacity to handle new material, solve complex problems, and develop new skills by scaffolding their learning from what they already know through a series of increasingly complex experiences that shift the locus of control from the teacher to the learner. Make sure you have strong command of the material you are covering.
Understand the assets and capabilities that students’ families bring to their parenting: Understand the cultures represented in your classroom by getting to know your students. Visit the neighborhoods where they live. Listen to them talk about their lives. Understand what and whom they care abut. Consistently engage in real conversation and dialogue with your students. For example, if you have English language learners in your class, go to lunch with them. Try to understand their reality by actively listening to them and the sense that they are making of the curriculum. Use small group, personalized instruction to help students develop their academic language skills.
Anchor your curriculum in the everyday lives of your student: Connect their knowledge and skills to content knowledge. Spend time on helping student learn the content. Use real life, authentic texts. Engage students in inquiry about things that matter to them. Provide varied choice of media to show their learning to build off their cultural strengths.
Select participation structures for learning that reflect students’ ways of knowing and doing: Put yourself in situations where you are not dominant, where you are a noticeable minority or in a group where you don’t know the norms and unspoken rules. Recognize what that feels like and sit with the discomfort. Ask yourself these questions: What did I do to make myself more comfortable? What did I do to be effective or survive in that situation? What did others do that either helped or hindered my effectiveness? What would have helped me in that situation? Use the answers to these questions help you to structure how you include students.
Share control of the classroom with your students: Challenge yourself to see yourself in the opposite situation of which you identify. For example, if you see yourself in the non-dominant culture as a woman, in which situations can you see yourself as the dominant culture? Stretch yourself to expand your own self-definition. To help you see life from a different perspective, consciously read books or watch movies about groups other than your own. In addition, explore your own privileges and the impact those have on the organization and the people in it. Ask students about their school experiences.
Engage in reflective thinking and writing: Teachers must reflect on their actions and interactions as they try to discern the personal motivations that govern their behaviors. Understanding the factors that contribute to certain behaviors (e.g., racism, ethnocentrism) is the first step toward changing these behaviors. This process is facilitated by autobiographical and reflective writing usually in a journal. Look at classroom set up and practices through cultural lens.
Explore personal and family histories: Teachers need to explore their early experiences and familial events that have contributed to their understanding of themselves as racial or nonracial beings. As part of this process, teachers can conduct informal interviews of family members (e.g., parents, grandparents) about their beliefs and experiences regarding different groups in society. The information shared can enlighten teachers about the roots of their own views. When teachers come to terms with the historical shaping of their own values, they can better relate to their colleagues and students who bring different histories and expectations.
Acknowledge membership in different groups: Teachers must recognize and acknowledge their affiliation with various groups in society, and the advantages and disadvantages of belonging to each groups. For example, for White female teachers, membership in the White middle-class groups affords certain privileges in society; at the same time being a female presents many challenges in the male-dominated world. Moreover, teachers need to assess how belonging to one group influences how one relates to and views other groups.
Learn about the history and experiences of diverse groups: It is important that teachers learn about the lives and experiences of other groups in order to understand how different historical experiences have shaped attitudes and perspectives of various groups. Further, by learning about the other groups, teachers begin to see differences between their own values and those of other groups. To learn bout the histories of diverse groups, particularly from their perspectives, teachers can read literature written by those particular groups as well as personally interact with members of those groups. Engage students in discussions about their experiences at school and dialogue with them about race, ability, disability, culture.
Visit students’ families and communities: It is important that teachers get to know their students’ families and communities by actually going into the students home environments. This allows teachers to relate to their students as more than just “bodies” in the classroom but also as social and cultural beings connected to a complex social and cultural network. Moreover, by becoming familiar with students’ home lives, teachers gain insight into the influences on the students’ attitudes and behaviors. Additionally, teachers can use the families and communities as resources (e.g., classroom helpers or speakers) that will contribute to the educational growth of the students.
Visit or read about successful teachers in diverse settings: Teachers need to learn about successful approaches to educating children from diverse backgrounds. By actually visiting classrooms of successful teachers of children from diverse backgrounds and/or reading authentic accounts of such success, teachers can gain exemplary models of developing their own skills.
Develop an appreciation of diversity: To be effective in a diverse classroom, teachers must have an appreciation of diversity. They must view difference as the “norm” in society and reject notions that any one group is more competent than another. This entails developing respect for differences, and the willingness to teach from this perspective. Moreover, there must be an acknowledgment that the teachers’ views of the world are not the only views.
Participate in reforming the institution: The educational system has historically fostered the achievement of one segment of the school population by establishing culturally biased standards and values. The mono-cultural values of schools have promoted biases in curriculum development and instructional practices that have been detrimental to the achievement of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Teachers need to participate in reforming the educational system so that it becomes inclusive. As the direct link between the institution and the students, teachers are in a pivotal position to facilitate change. By continuing a tradition “conform-or-fail” approach to instruction, teachers perpetuate a mono-cultural institution. By questioning tradition policies and practices, and by becoming culturally responsive in instruction, teachers work toward changing the institution.
Taken from “Culturally Responsive Teaching Matters!“ Elizabeth B. Kozleski, Equity Alliance,
Intercultural Knowledge and Competence is “a set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts.” (Bennett, J. M. 2008. Transformative training: Designing programs for culture learning. In Contemporary leadership and intercultural competence: Understanding and utilizing cultural diversity to build successful organizations, ed. M. A. Moodian, 95-110. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.)
Knowledge
Cultural self- awareness Articulates insights into own cultural rules and biases (e.g. seeking complexity; aware of how her/his experiences have shaped these rules, and how to recognize and respond to cultural biases, resulting in a shift in self-description.)
Knowledge
Knowledge of cultural worldview frameworks Demonstrates sophisticated understanding of the complexity of elements important to members of another culture in relation to its history, values, politics, communication styles, economy, or beliefs and practices.
Skills
Empathy Interprets intercultural experience from the perspectives of own and more than one worldview and demonstrates ability to act in a supportive manner that recognizes the feelings of another cultural group.
Skills
Verbal and nonverbal communication Articulates a complex understanding of cultural differences in verbal and nonverbal communication (e.g., demonstrates understanding of the degree to which people use physical contact while communicating in different cultures or use direct/indirect and explicit/implicit meanings) and is able to skillfully negotiate a shared understanding based on those differences.
Attitudes
Curiosity Asks complex questions about other cultures, seeks out and articulates answers to these questions that reflect multiple cultural perspectives.
Attitudes
Openness Initiates and develops interactions with culturally different others. Suspends judgment in valuing her/his interactions with culturally different others.
The call to integrate intercultural knowledge and competence into the heart of education is an imperative born of seeing ourselves as members of a world community, knowing that we share the future with others. Beyond mere exposure to culturally different others, the campus community requires the capacity to: meaningfully engage those others, place social justice in historical and political context, and put culture at the core of transformative learning. The intercultural knowledge and competence rubric suggests a systematic way to measure our capacity to identify our own cultural patterns, compare and contrast them with others, and adapt empathically and flexibly to unfamiliar ways of being.
Modifications in existing curricula and expansion of pedagogical repertoire
1) KNOWLEDGE BASE: What faculty knew then and what they know now, based on participation in the project. How have participating faculty increased their intercultural knowledge and competency as related to the experiences and histories of their Asian-American students and the communities of which these students are a part? How has faculty knowledge of their Asian-American students increased because of this project?
2) CHANGE IN DISPOSITION, ATTITUDE, EMOTIONAL RESPONSE to Asian American students.
3)CHANGE IN PRACTICE: How has the project affected faculty practices in the classroom, including pedagogy, student learning assessment, and curriculum development based on their participation in project-sponsored activities? The project focused on supporting new ways to design and deliver curricular content and teaching practices like place-based learning and digital storytelling. It also supported reflecting on how to value Asian American communities, family and personal histories/experiences as vital sources of scholarship. How has this focus affected how faculty design their curricula and engage with students in their courses?
What impact did the alterations in attitude, pedagogy, and curriculum have on forms of assessment?
What was learned from the assessments that were conducted?
What impact did what was learned have on ongoing efforts to build knowledge, enhance dispositions and attitudes, and change practice?
What did students say they learned from the experience?
What did faculty say they learned from the experience?
The conversation typified the themes that were articulated by the students about their value for diversity across the institution and for the experience within the different classes in which they were enrolled in which the focus on the experience of Asian-Americans and the refugee experience was included. Student identifed the diversity of the campus as a major factor for bringing them there, as much because it facilitated a rich venue for cross-cultural opporthjnities which would function to broaden the array of potential learnign experiences. Students saw this diversity an important ingredient in meeting their academic and social goals. some students saw homogeneity as a being a barrier to improving language learning skills.
Clearly this is a group that already values diversity.
US students saw it is as a component that was missing from their upbringing and schooling and which had attracted them to the Boston area in general and to Bunker Hill in specific.
International students saw diversity as a necessary ingredient for social mixing, valuing the common experiential ground that a place like BHCC creates so that they don’t feel as isolated. They also identified the significanct of diversity as an outcome for larger democratic values which inform how education is transacted. One student declared that when she left her native country —- a place where citizens risk being killed if they speak critially of the government— without knowing clearly what her career aspirations might be. After studying at the school, she is now considering being a lawyer: “I want to understand how freedom works. How human rights can be supported.”
The features of engaged learning that students described as being important to them within the classes which were being taught by faculty who were involved in the project were demonstrated within the interviews themselves. Students used contemporary news stories to exemplify their points; they posed questions about possible ways in which the information gained from the current study could be used to improve the curriculum for more students. The students also asked about how studies of other topics related to other disenfranchised groups could be encouraged so that a set of parallel learning experiences could be developed which would, in turn, enhance the apprecation of other underserved groups, groups—liek Asian-americans—didn’t have the recognition that they deserved.
It’s somewhat surprising that one outcome of the student interviews was the clear value for humanistic study as an engine for individual self-development and academic learning. The group also demonstrated this value by the animated conversation about the topics as a group that mirrored this diversity in its composition.
Call for deeper consideration of the impact of cultural responsiveness and community engagement on administrative leadership. Need for ongoing assessment and appreciation of strategic steps which are aligned with supporting culturally responsive policies and practices within the classroom, in the stuent support, and in the broader co-curricular context.
Often, the influences related to cultural responsiveness are superimposed on already existing institutional cultures and structures, many of which bear the imprint of a more homogeneous cultural framework.
What’s needed is professional development and ongoing examination of hiring procedures that support new forms of leadership that are embedded in awareness of how to be a leaders that enacts a commitment to cultureal responsiveness in clear ways that are measurable and incentivized.
Features:
• RESPECT
• RESPONSIVENESS
• RELEVANCE
• RIGOR
• RESEARCH-BASED
For example, what are the multiple meanings of “success,” given the nuanced, disaggregated cultural profiles which comprise the term “Asian-American?”
It’s a challenge to see the larger institutional vision which knits these initiatives together. Important to avoid the sense that these are “grant driven” efforts that are important to a small group of people while external funds are available.
Structure exploration of disciplinary content and context is critical to more effective service delivery, both within the classroom and outside of it.
Innovation requires resources; stewardship
Articulates insights into own cultural rules and biases (e.g. seeking complexity; aware of how her/his experiences have shaped these rules, and how to recognize and respond to cultural biases, resulting in a shift in self-description.)
Demonstrates sophisticated understanding of the complexity of elements important to members of another culture in relation to its history, values, politics, communication styles, economy, or beliefs and practices.
Interprets intercultural experience from the perspectives of own and more than one worldview and demonstrates ability to act in a supportive manner that recognizes the feelings of another cultural group.
Articulates a complex understanding of cultural differences in verbal and nonverbal communication (e.g., demonstrates understanding of the degree to which people use physical contact while communicating in different cultures or use direct/indirect and explicit/implicit meanings) and is able to skillfully negotiate a shared understanding based on those differences.
Asks complex questions about other cultures, seeks out and articulates answers to these questions that reflect multiple cultural perspectives.
Initiates and develops interactions with culturally different others. Suspends judgment in valuing her/his interactions with culturally different others.
Building the knowledge base about Asian American students and the community context from which they have emerged
Example of structural change that will sustain focus on student success:
This also implies the necessary application of key principles of profesional development which are useful in working with faculty on these issues. What are these facets?
This professional development was typified by: