scholarly journals Strength-Based Approaches to Meeting Culturally Diverse Student Needs

2021 ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Rose M. Ylimaki ◽  
Lynnette A. Brunderman

AbstractA strengths-based approach to education is essential for successful school development in culturally diverse schools. Chapter 7 reflects that education lies in the pedagogical relations and provocations into the self-realizations and growth of young people. In this arena, provocation refers to intentions to provoke thoughts, ideas, and actions that help students to learn and grow. A provocation should be grounded in the child’s cultural background strengths. We explicitly worked with school teams to recognize the equal value of different cultures in their students’ ethnic and linguistic backgrounds and to lead in culturally responsive ways with regards to pedagogy, curriculum, data-analysis, education and community engagement. We drew on research to include positive perspectives of parents and families, communication of high expectations, learning within the context of culture, student-centered and culturally mediated instruction, reshaping the curriculum, and teacher as facilitator. Thus, culturally relevant teaching requires teachers to embrace diversity, build on strengths, and recognize that students learn in a variety of ways. It is the job of the leader to help teachers gain an understanding of those cultures, and how to incorporate that into their classrooms. Sample activities and case studies expand the concepts.

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (18) ◽  
pp. 1074-1077
Author(s):  
Kathleen Markey ◽  
Margaret Efua Sackey ◽  
Richard Oppong-Gyan

Nurses continue to experience challenges when caring for culturally diverse patients and while working with staff from different cultural, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. The widening landscape of cultural diversity in the nursing classroom provides a vehicle for intercultural learning, supporting intercultural competence development. However, students must embrace culturally diverse learning environments and maximise opportunities to learn with, from and about students from different cultural backgrounds. This requires developing the courage, curiosity and commitment to maximise all intercultural learning opportunities. Drawing on experiences of international students studying in culturally diverse classrooms, this article presents some practical suggestions for meaningfully engaging and capitalising on intercultural learning opportunities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-30
Author(s):  
Xigrid T. Soto-Boykin ◽  
Anne L. Larson ◽  
Arnold Olszewski ◽  
Veena Velury ◽  
Anna Feldberg

Young children with and without disabilities who are bilingual or in the process of learning multiple languages have many strengths; however, educational policies and bias related to bilingualism for children from linguistically minoritized groups have typically included deficit-based views. The purpose of this systematic review was to identify how researchers describe these children and their caregivers. Thirty research studies were included in the review. Each study was published in Infants and Young Children, Journal of Early Intervention, or Topics in Early Childhood Special Education between 1988 and 2020. Studies were coded to determine participant characteristics and whether deficit- or strength-based descriptions of participants were used. Although researchers’ descriptions of participants’ linguistic backgrounds varied, most were English-centric, and deficit-based descriptions of bilingualism were more prevalent than strength-based descriptions. Preliminary recommendations are provided for describing children and families from linguistically minoritized communities and including strength-based language in research and practice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis-Joaquin Garcia-Lopez ◽  
Lourdes Espinosa-Fernandez ◽  
Jose-Antonio Muela-Martinez ◽  
Jose Antonio Piqueras

Despite the availability of efficacious treatment and screening protocols, social anxiety disorder (SAD) in adolescents is considerably under-detected and undertreated. Our main study objective was to examine a brief, valid, and reliable social anxiety measure already tested to serve as self-report child measure but administered via Internet aimed at listening to the ability of his or her parent to identify social anxiety symptomatology in his or her child. This parent version could be used as a complementary measure to avoid his or her overestimation of children of social anxiety symptomatology using traditional self-reported measures. We examined the psychometric properties of brief and valid social anxiety measure in their parent format and administered via the Internet. The sample included 179 parents/legal guardians of adolescents (67% girls) with a clinical diagnosis of SAD (mean age: 14.27; SD = 1.33). Findings revealed good factor structure, internal consistency, and construct validity. Data support a single, strength-based factor on the SPAIB-P, being structure largely invariant across age and gender. The limited number of adolescents with a performance-only specifier prevented examining the utility of scale to screen for this recently established specifier. It is crucial to evaluate if these results generalize to different cultures and community samples. The findings suggest that the SPAIB-P evidences performance comparable with child-reported measure. Parents can be reliable reports of the social anxiety symptomatology of the adolescent. The SPAIB-P may be useful for identifying clinically disturbed socially anxious adolescents.


Author(s):  
Ioannis Karras ◽  
Julia A. Spinthourakis ◽  
Vasilia Kourtis-Kazoullis

Preparing teachers to assist linguistically and culturally diverse students to integrate is difficult as the paradigm is not limited to students but radiates outwards. Preparation of teachers in Greece has involved the incorporation of foreign languages and courses in multiculturalism in their program of study in an effort to promote multilingualism (ML), multicultural efficacy (ME), and intercultural sensitivity (IS). In this research brief, the authors attempt to look at how we prepare teachers to meet increased challenges migration of very different populations brings to their teaching as well as how their attitude toward multilingualism, ME, and IS may be interrelated. The study's main objectives are to measure this group's level of IS, ME, and multilingual language attitudes and examine their relationship. The goal is to determine how well equipped these pre-service teachers are to deal with the linguistically and culturally diverse student populations they will be called upon to teach and what facilitates them achieving this end.


Author(s):  
Hyesoo Yoo

The inclusion of musics from varied cultural traditions in school music curricula has become increasingly important. Research findings indicate that providing students with opportunities to learn musics from diverse cultures can increase acceptance and appreciation of different cultures, enrich music and cultural experiences, and nurture intercultural competence. The following research-to-resource article provides eight instructional strategies for integrating culturally diverse musics into music classes more effectively. These eight strategies can help expose students to culturally diverse musics in more traditional ways and deepen their knowledge of music styles.


2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (6) ◽  
pp. 503-520
Author(s):  
Allison Ringer ◽  
Michael Volkov ◽  
Kerrie Bridson

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role Australian University marketing students’ cultural backgrounds play in their learning and their perceptions of assessment and explores whether current assessments appropriately address the differing needs of a culturally diverse student population. Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts a qualitative approach utilising five focus groups, each comprised of 12 students. Findings – Results indicate learning environments, learning and assessment approaches and assessment tasks each bring their own benefits, constraints and challenges to studying in a culturally diverse environment. Principles are presented for adoption by marketing educators in order to foster a vibrant, inclusive learning environment which meets the educational needs and wants of a culturally diverse student cohort. Research limitations/implications – The number of students representing different global regions or countries limited this study. With the exception of students from Australia and the Asian region, there were minimal students representing other cultural backgrounds despite every attempt being made to be culturally inclusive across global regions. Practical implications – The paper presents the principles of C.U.L.T.U.R.E. and recommends their integration into learning approaches and assessment practices across Schools and Faculties at the tertiary level. Originality/value – This paper fulfils an identified need to study a culturally diverse student cohort's perceptions and attitudes towards learning approaches and assessment practices and their perceived relevance to the provision of core graduate business and generic skills necessary for employability in the global marketplace.


1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Moore

One of the most important and divisive issues facing heterogeneous or culturally diverse states—and most states are culturally diverse—is the relation between these different cultures and the state.This question was raised initially in contemporary liberal political philosophy in terms of the fruitful debate between liberals and communitarians. Sandel, for example, criticized Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and, by extension, all liberal theories for falsely abstracting from conceptions of the good, abstracting from culturallyspecific conceptions, and grounding his liberal principles in terms of an abstract Kantian individualism. Liberal theorists countered by complaining that communitarians falsely conceived of a single homogeneous community. Although Rawls’s revised defense of liberal justice in his 1993 book Political Liberalism does not refer directly to the liberal-communitarian debate, nevertheless, his new grounding of liberal political principles, as principles which would be acceptable to individuals with diverse conceptions of the good, seems to justify liberal principles in terms of contemporary conditions, and, at the same time, challenges the relevance of those theories which appeal to any notion of a homogeneous ‘community’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-256
Author(s):  
Parisa Badrkhani

There are large number of students from around the world who are planning to continue their education in the U.S. universities. They have different nationalities, cultural backgrounds, social beliefs, and so on. Moreover, the educators who are from different countries have the special cultures. This is their task to manage the culturally diverse classrooms to obtain the best results for the educational purposes. In this study, the focus was on three main issues: (a) teaching in multicultural higher education, (b) students’ attitudes toward the different cultures (especially their classmates), and (c) the strategies the educators apply in the multicultural classroom to establish peace. Five Iranian faculties who were teaching English language literature subject, in California State universities, were selected and interviewed via Skype. The results showed that they had a very positive attitude toward teaching in multicultural classrooms. The educators claimed that they apply the emotional empathy, empathy training, culturally proportional curriculum, and the structured rules for the multicultural classroom. One of them argued that holding conferences regarding the diversity is very useful, and the other one proposed that holding involuntary service, sport, and community programs for both the immigrant and the local students is considerable to make the students closer and establish the sense of peace among them.


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