Cultural stereotyping in education

In Week 1, you looked at culture and the impact intercultural encounters can have on your thinking. However, it’s important to examine our assumptions about cultures, and learn to distinguish between culture, socio-economic factors, cognitive and linguistic abilities, to avoid discriminating against certain learners in educational settings. Here, Dr Chiara Cirillo explains how culture can be used in educational discourses to hide social inequalities in places of learning.

1. Cultural assumptions

Cultural stereotyping, or culturism, is defined as ‘allowing the notion of culture to become greater than the people themselves’¹, and can be understood as a form of discrimination on the grounds of cultural norms.

Preschoolers in Germany²

This study of a thousand pre-schoolers in Germany, compared five groups of German and Turkish children. The childrens’ cognitive abilities were compared by dividing them into groups depending on where their parents were born.

Group 1: ‘Native’ group, both parents and grandparents born in Germany.

Group 2: ‘Second generation’ group, both parents born in Turkey.

Group 3: ‘Third generation’ group, both parents born in Germany but at least one grandparent born in Turkey.

Group 4: Similar to group 2 in that both parents were Turkish migrants, but one was ‘first generation’ (born in Turkey) and the other ‘second generation’ (born in Germany).

Group 5: ‘Intermarried group’, one parent was first or second generation Turkish migrant and the other parent was German ‘native’.

The research found that the children from Group 5 outperformed all the others in the cognitive tests, and that the Turkish children achieved the poorest results. At first sight, this could imply a correlation between culture or ethnicity and cognitive ability. But when the researchers also took into account the economic status and the educational resources the parents could offer (time to read at bedtime, visits to zoos, etc), it was the poor level of education of the parents, their low-status occupations, time and fewer resources for their children that made the difference. In a nutshell, socio-economic status correlates more strongly with educational success than culture. The strong cognitive performance of the children of intermarried couples can be explained by the higher socio-economic status of the ‘native’ parent, their linguistic proficiency and cultural knowledge of the country, but also ‘openness’ to intermarriage, which is often linked to higher educational and economic status. These cosmopolitan parents had the resources, money, time and education, to give their children an advantage.

Japanese students at university in Australia³

This research showed how these Japanese students were stereotyped as being shy, with ‘shyness’ as a Japanese cultural trait expected by lecturers and fellow students. From the interviews it emerged that the Japanese students didn’t talk much in class because they lacked confidence in their English language and in their understanding of what is acceptable in an Australian university classroom. The study concluded that ‘silence’ was not something they chose to do, but something that was done to them. They were ‘being silenced’, missing out on participating in group discussions which is a key learning experience in higher education.

2. Socio-economic factors

A dual-immersion primary school in Hamburg, Germany⁴

This project, which started over 20 years ago, offers dual-immersion programmes in Italian, Turkish, Portuguese and Spanish, the languages spoken by the larger migrant communities in the area, in their elementary schools. The purpose of the German and Portuguese programme, which enrols equal numbers of children who are either dominant in German or dominant in Portuguese, is to develop high level bilingual proficiency (including reading and writing), average or above average proficiency in maths, science and social sciences, and intercultural competences⁵. To achieve these goals, half of the curriculum is taught bilingually, with music and maths taught by a bilingual teacher. Both German and Portuguese are taught explicitly (not assumed as already known) and the other subjects are co-taught by a German-dominant teacher and a Portuguese-dominant teacher. The project found that, by the end of six years of school, the initial linguistic differences between children disappeared. After taking into account socio-economic background and cognitive abilities, the students outperformed both monolingual German peers and their Portuguese-speaking peers in a traditional monolingual school in Germany. They also fared as well as their Portuguese-speaking peers in Portugal.

The Hamburg programme was successful because it didn’t apply a deficit model to its students from migrant communities, it didn’t focus on the dominant German language being ‘missing’. Instead, the programme focused on what transnational children had more of: languages. And it supported all children in achieving this, creating a more inclusive and more just school, which supported differences instead of erasing them.

3. Aspiration

16-year-olds in the UK⁶

This study focused on the power of teachers and policy-makers and their expectations. It is well-known in educational research that teachers’ expectations have a powerful effect on learners’ performance. When teachers offer higher expectations, motivation, praise, belief, support, challenges and high aspirations, students develop and behave in ways that correspond to their teacher’s expectations and do well. This phenomenon is known as the Pygmalion effect. In contrast, lower expectations and negative stereotyping produce the Golem effect, negatively influencing students’ results.

Teachers’ expectations are based on their beliefs which often match the dominant beliefs of their society. In the UK, one of these beliefs is that migrant children have low aspirations.

The study highlighted the mismatch between the lower expectations teachers have for migrant children and the high aspirations of their students. It exposed the bias of the teachers and their unpreparedness in supporting the students’ complex identities as ethnic and linguistic migrants. The fault is not with the individual teachers but with their training and, more importantly, with the educational policies in place. Being just over 16, these children were not in mainstream schools but in adult further education colleges with a vocational focus. Although one of the children wanted to become a doctor and had the academic abilities to do so, the vocational route chosen for him prevented him from fulfilling his aspirations. By confusing linguistic abilities with cognitive abilities and by retaining low expectations, UK society fails young migrants.

References

1. Holliday, Hyde & Kullman (2021, p. 26) in Holliday, A., Hyde, M. & Kullman, J. (2021). Intercultural Communication: an Advanced Resource Book for Students (4th ed). Routledge.
2. Becker (2011, as cited in Piller, 2017)
3. Nakane (2007, as cited in Piller, 2017)
4. Duarte (2011, as cited in Piller, 201)
5. Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: a Critical Introduction (2nd ed). Edinburgh University Press.
6. Cooke, M. (2018). ‘What we might become’: the lives, aspirations and education of young migrants in the London area. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 7 (1), 22-40.