WORKING ON CULTURAL PROFICIENCY
Consider that over half of the children in American schools today are children of color. Some of their families have come from central and south America, Asia, eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Like all chil- dren in all schools, they need to feel known and valued to have their energy available for learning. Zaretta Hammond (2015) argues that culturally profi- cient teaching allows children to process information.
Nuri-Robbins and colleagues (2012) describe six stages of cultural proficiency illustrated in Figure 4.1. They define these points as follows:
1. Cultural destructiveness is any policy, practice, or behavior that effectively eliminates all vestiges of another peoples’ culture (p. 79).
2. Cultural incapacity is any policy, practice, or behavior that presumes one’s culture is superior to that of others (p. 83).
3. Cultural blindness is any policy, practice, or behavior that ignores existing cul- tural differences or that considers such differences inconsequential (p. 87).
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4. People or organizations that are culturally pre-competent recognize that their skills and practices are limited when interacting with other cultural groups (p. 90).
5. Cultural competence is any policy, practice or behavior that uses the es- sential elements of cultural proficiency as the standard for the individual or the organization (p. 94).
6. Cultural proficiency is manifest in people and organizations who esteem culture, who know how to learn about individual and organizational cul- tures, and who interact effectively with a variety of cultural groups…not a destination but rather a way of being (p. 97).
When teachers’ beliefs and practices are not culturally proficient, when children feel that they and their cultures are “the other,” that they are outsiders, unwel- come, or that their cultures are ignored, absent, or “less than,” their learning is seriously compromised. The message is received as, “I am treated as an outsider and less worthy. Less is demanded and less is expected of me in school. My very identity is devalued. Therefore, school is not for me. It’s an alien environment.”
As teachers of all children, committed to equality of opportunity and raising capable and involved citizens, we must figure out how to make students from diverse cultural backgrounds believe that we, as individual teachers, and we, as a school community, know and value their cultures. Therefore each of us must
Cultural Destructiveness
Cultural Blindness
Cultural Competence
Cultural Incapacity
Cultural Pre-Competence
Cultural Proficiency
Cultural Destructiveness
Figure 4.1 Six Stages of Cultural Proficiency
Based on Nuri-Robbins, Lindsey, & Lindsey (2012)
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(1) learn about the cultures of our students and (2) find ways to make their cul- tures appear in validating ways in our curricula and our instructional examples. That is the starting point for cultural proficiency, and cultural proficiency is a new skill set that all American teachers must have. This is true even for those teaching in homogeneous white communities. Otherwise, we inadvertently sup- port developing into two countries instead of one nation that attempts to inte- grate diverse populations.
The literature for developing cultural proficiency as a teacher skill set is broad and deep, and it must now enter our professional knowledge base, our lexicon, and our commitments.