Teachers learn the culture of education

Some teachers thought The House that Crack Built might not be appropriate reading material for their elementary school students. But research presented at this weekend's Ethnography in Education Research Forum suggested that the illustrated book by Clark Taylor -- as well as others about the Holocaust, racial bigotry and gender issues -- were more familiar and more welcomed by students than teachers imagined. Educators and students flocked to Penn for the forum, which was hosted by the Center for Urban Ethnography at the Graduate School of Education. Throughout sessions on Friday and Saturday, researchers presented about 100 papers on a range of topics that focused on the effect of culture on education. All used ethnographic methods, meaning they studied smaller sample sizes and did qualitative, not quantitative research. The research largely focused on whether where learning takes place -- inside or outside of the classroom -- affects the learning process itself. "Learning is part of every practice," keynote speaker and University of California at Berkeley Professor Jean Lave said. "It's part of educational, institutional practice -- [but] where we have a harder time seeing learning is as part of everyday practice. Learning is a part of all social procedure." One study described how children are "language brokers" for each other in bilingual settings. "Because of the hegemony of English, usually English speakers don't even bother, because they assume that everything is going to be translated for them," Cleveland State University Professor Dinah Volk commented. "It's a challenge to the whole notion that literacy is just about written texts." Another researcher described how she hid in the closet of a nursery school to see how three- and four-year-old children develop social understanding by using the telephone. Manchester Metropolitan University Professor Julia Gillen had recorded children's toy telephone conversations with each other, but wanted to examine their communications with adults. But, Gillen said, the only common natural conversations were with grandparents, who were too domineering to produce a sample of children's conversations. The study of controversial literature for children focused on a different angle of learning. Researchers spoke not only about how children responded to multicultural literature, but also about how teachers reacted to the same works. "The teachers, we found, were very cautious," Sage Colleges Professor Peter McDermott said. McDermott, along with other researchers, questioned teachers before and after playing recordings of student's reactions to the books. "[There was a] switch from broad ideas to a social, emotional and personal response that [the teachers] didn't show the first time they responded to the stories," Sage College Professor Kim Baker added. "We think it got teachers thinking about diversity themselves -- the teacher has to be a mediator between children and literature." Teachers, like the professors who presented papers, came to the conference to gain a better understanding of how culture impacts the ideas and aptitude children bring to the classroom. "I think it's really important to examine relationships between students and teachers, and teachers' knowledge and capacity," said forum attendee Stephanie Spencer, principal of Hampton Elementary School in Lutherville, Md. "When students' results go up everyone is happy, but the question is why [they go up]. It's not just what you know, but teacher relationships, discourse," Spencer continued. "These are the things that I am looking to bring back to my teachers. How can I better support them in the work they do every day?"