Page 10 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
physical discriminatory behaviour, unequal access to resources, an inability to achieve goals, and violence. It is also common for students who do not speak the language of instruction in class very well and who cannot cope with the material being 'covered' to be considered less intelligent, and for teachers to start demanding less from them than from other learners, resulting in even greater differences in student achievement. This form of education can repress and weaken speakers of other languages whose habits are different from the accepted norm (Corson, 1993, p. 7). This phenomenon is perfectly illustrated by an excerpt from a Massachusetts teacher, Mary, which I present below:
Every child needs to feel welcome, to feel comfortable. School is a foreign land where most children land (where else in the world would you spend your time filling in the answers and filling in the blanks?), but the more distant a child's home culture and language is from the school culture and language, the more vulnerable that child is. A warm, friendly, helpful teacher is nice, but it is not enough. We know the work of warm, friendly teachers who gently tell children to forget their Spanish and ask mom and dad to speak English to them at home; who give them easier tasks so they don't feel bad when the work in lessons becomes difficult; who never find out what life is like at home or what they eat or what music they like or what stories are read to them at home or what their history is. Instead, we smile, hug them and tell them to eat our food, listen to our stories and dance to our music. We teach them to read our words and wonder why this is so hard for them. We ask them to sit quietly while we tell them what is important to them and what they need to know to move on to the next grade. And we never ask them who they are or what they want to achieve. (Nieto, 1999, pp. 85–86)
A situation in which students are asked to give up their identity in order to fit into the dominant reality has nothing to do with learning. If, on the other hand, we accept the view that culture is a component of differences in background, language, national culture, and customs, then we do not see them as obstacles to learning. After all, it is impossible to separate learning from the context or from the norms and understanding of how culture and society influence learning processes. The acceptance of cultural difference, the equal treatment of the Other with the Own, are necessary for the existence of heterogeneity in society.
Therefore, the role of teachers is to accept the cultural differences between the students and themselves and to create a bridge between the student's cultural differences and the dominant culture. The bridge metaphor helps us to understand the task facing teachers and the responsibility that comes with it. Following Esteban Diaz (1992), such teachers could be called sociocultural mediators. In a rapidly changing world, sociocultural theories can give us insights into the problems with education. Nevertheless, even without knowing these theories, it should be strongly stated that every teacher should respect the identity of their students and get to know them better in order to work more effectively with them. As Freire put it:
It is necessary for teachers to understand that students' expressions, manners, tastes, ways of addressing teachers and peers, and the rules governing their disputes with each other and play are part of their culture and identity. All this must be accepted by teachers. Only when learners recognise that their right to say "I be" is respected will they be able to learn the dominant grammatical structures and know why they should say "I am". (1992, p. 49)
This quotation reminds me of a situation I am familiar with, when a new pupil of Polish origin joined a class having returned with his parents to Poland from Germany, where he had lived since birth. On his
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