“Our Greatest Songs Are Still Unsung” † : Educating Citizens About Schooling in a Multicultural Society

Theoretical Framework

This study draws on the work of theorists such as Dewey (Dewey, 1899/1980, 1902/2001, 1904/1965, 1913, 1916) and Piaget (Piaget, 1970). In addition, we draw upon the work of Vygotski and other social constructivist theorists, who emphasize the students’ capacity to draw on existing knowledge and experience when encountering new information. Furthermore, social constructivism assumes that problem solving in the context of an authentic task allows students to engage in an ongoing process of revising understandings and comprehending anew as students co-construct understandings in collaborative, social contexts (Vygotski & Cole, 1978). Thus, the design of the TLHI unit deliberately positioned students to engage in a moment of teaching practice from three different vantage points, working collaboratively with others throughout, while engaging in ongoing written reflection as a way to surface and inform assumptions about the nature of teaching and learning in contexts characterized by diversity.

Participants

Participants in this study were enrolled in a school of education course devoted to examining schooling in a multicultural society. Sixty-one undergraduate students participated in this study and 73 participated in the course. Eighty-five percent of the study sample identified as White; 8% identified as African American, 5% as Asian American, and 2% as Arab American. The sample consisted mainly of students who attended suburban (77%) and public high schools (85%) prior to enrolling in the university. Students in this sample characterized their high school settings as serving a relatively homogeneous population of students in terms of race, ethnicity, or economic status. Only 21% of the sample characterized the student population of their high schools as “diverse” or “very diverse.” Finally, 15% of the students declared education as their major at the time of the study. However, slightly more than half the students indicated they were interested in teaching in some capacity (55%).

Course

The unit under study took place at a large public Midwestern university in the United States in an undergraduate class that fulfills the university’s race and ethnicity requirement. In this course, students investigated three questions:

Across this set of questions, instructors and students attended to school’s competing goals of assimilation and diversity, opportunity and competition. The course was designed to help students wrestle with the multiple aims and conceptions of schooling in a multicultural society (i.e., schools as a social and economic equalizer; Mann, cited in Cremin, 1957) or schools as a place centrally concerned with the learning of academic content (Bestor, 1953). A central and unifying theme of the course was the evolving, complicated, and often problematic ways that differences have been understood and experienced in U.S. schools. As such, the course traces the history of schooling from the anti-Catholic Bible Riots to the ongoing saga of segregated schools to the movement for multilingual rights. Students were supported to develop a perspective that is at once historically rooted, based on knowledge of teaching practice, and attentive to current educational policy.

The instructor cultivated this perspective through three successive units in the course. The first unit traced the foundations of public education in the United States with particular attention to ongoing responses to differences in the schooling system (i.e., the advent of tracking). The second unit focused on developing an understanding of the practices of teaching and learning, moving from a macrolevel understanding of schooling to a more microlevel analysis of interactions in the classroom. The third unit asked students to apply their developing knowledge of educational history and teaching practice to current policy debates, and to articulate a stance on a critical issue facing today’s schools.

Data Sources

The teaching and learning unit culminated with a final paper that asked students to describe their experience as both a student and a teacher of the TLHI as well as make three to five assertions about “learning and teaching and about how these are affected by a host of different factors” in the environment.

Analytic Approach

Teaching and Learning as Interactive Work

The students in this study saw the student and the teacher as both actively contributing to learning outcomes. More than 40% of the TLHI students saw teachers and students in a kind of partnership that operates as “a two-way street.” As one student noted,

I have found that the most effective learning is accomplished through a process of give-and-take. The pursuit of knowledge is not a one-sided effort, but a collective journey in which the classroom must be seen as a forum, and teaching and learning must be seen as two sides of the same coin.

For students in this study, teachers and students work together closely in what another student described as a “complicated relationship that connects them.” This relationship is important because what teachers and students do in the classroom depends on one another. In a representative comment, one TLHI student noted, “Through the investigation of teaching and learning, I have been able to understand the importance of the relationship between teachers and students, and how each of their roles is directly affected by one another.”

Our students’ understanding of teaching and learning hinged on the insight that teaching and learning are highly interactive works. For example, students saw teaching as dependent upon students’ engagement, and wrote that teachers’ reliance on students increases the complexity of the iterative enterprise:

Teachers have a tough job—they are responsible for fostering the learning and success of others and therefore must be able to challenge students, be cognizant of student struggles and bias tendencies, and be able to alter their teaching to increase student learning.

They saw teachers as “responsible” not only for their own work, such as planning, but also for the actions of others—what students do with the opportunities and resources teachers provide.

Student Differences

The majority of these students (59%) were surprised to learn that not everyone learns like they do, in classes like they did. For example, one student wrote, “Since every student approaches learning with his or her own perspective and experiences, every student comes to understand knowledge differently.” This suggests an important breakdown in assumptions about schooling. As another student commented, “I was originally under the impression that there was always an easier way to learn something, and that that was the best way for everyone. But after observing my peers this was easily not the case.” Instead, TLHI students realized that students learn differently. Because students learn differently, teachers must know their students to meet their needs. On this, one student wrote, “It is also important for teachers to know how their students learn, or at least to acknowledge that different students learn in different ways.”

Teachers need to understand not only a student’s learning style but also what students know, and what they bring to their work in classrooms. This point reflects a growing understanding of the importance of knowing students to be receptive to their learning. This view was represented in students’ writing. Students asserted that the social and motivational aspects of learning are defining aspects of successful classrooms. Forty-five percent of the TLHI students asserted that teachers need to know them, relate to them, and make learning experiences meaningful and relevant to their lives. To this end, one student wrote,

It is important to give learning a purpose and a meaning while teaching so that your students are motivated to learn. If students believe that they have no reason to be learning the information that you’re teaching them, then they will most likely not pay attention or will not have any interest in the lesson at all.

For these students, learners not only interpret information differently based on their background and experiences, but they are motivated and engaged by teachers who know them and connect content to their lives.

Expanding on this point, just more than a quarter of our students (26%) acknowledged that a student’s racial, ethnic, economic, or cultural background was an important determinant in student engagement and learning in the classroom. In a representative comment, one student wrote, “When the pedagogical content is culturally relevant to the students, they will optimally learn.” For this subset of TLHI students, what students know and bring to their classroom work is, in part, shaped by their social, economic, or cultural backgrounds, particularly in terms of the extent to which instruction is relevant to their everyday lives. Notably, despite the emphasis of the course on multiculturalism and the centrality of different social positions in shaping understanding in the TLHI unit of history, relatively few students noticed how social, economic, and cultural positioning might inform learning.

A subset of students (25%) found that differences in perspective, understanding, and background help students to learn. As students experienced the TLHI as students, this portion of students wrote about the benefit of differences in classrooms. For example, one student wrote, “Some of my classmates have commented that hearing the diverse opinions of other students helps them to add new knowledge to what they already know.” Another recalled,

Very quickly my partner and I established we had very different political viewpoints. We disagreed about a few interpretations and our stories reflected very different concerns with the Japanese internment. Reflecting on this, I realize the many benefits that come with a diverse classroom—diverse in terms of not only backgrounds, but also in cultures and in this particular example, viewpoints.

Although student differences pose challenges for teachers’ practice, they can enrich student learning when teachers position students to work with one another. In this way, TLHI students saw how students could be resources for one another’s learning.

The Role of the Teacher: Planning and Adapting

Students experienced and wrote about “difference” in two contexts: the impact difference has on students’ learning and on teacher’s actions. One student wrote, “Every student comes to class with a unique learning style and perspective, and, it is the teacher’s mission to teach the same information to every student despite those discrepancies.” For these students, difference seemed to be a natural part of a classroom environment, and teachers must adapt to an array of understandings, viewpoints, strengths, weaknesses, and needs. Although these students acknowledged that teacher actions in response to student difference often contributed to the difficulty and complexity of teaching, they saw how teachers react to difference is a vital component of effective instruction. For the TLHI students, teachers respond to student differences by preparing “for variability,” “identify[ing] the learners’ strengths and weaknesses,” “mak[ing] the schoolwork fit each student’s style of learning,” and “explain[ing] different concepts in different ways.” One student wrote, “Each student has a unique type of learning style as well as different cultural backgrounds; therefore teachers must be flexible to match the needs of their students.” TLHI students not only viewed difference as a challenge to teachers but also argued that difference should inform and even determine a teacher’s pedagogical choices and behavior. Students wrote that teachers should constantly adapt to student understandings and differences.

Seeing teaching and learning as highly interactive, students felt teachers needed to be able to “expect the unexpected” and engage in detailed planning as well as in-the-moment adjustments. For instance, one student wrote,

The teacher needs to be prepared for the unexpected, the lesson plan may not go the way that they exactly planned, or the students may ask questions that the teacher doesn’t expect or cover in the lesson plan. It is important for the teacher to be able to answer these questions or change the lesson plan on the fly; otherwise the class won’t run as smoothly.

For these students, teachers need to demonstrate a kind of nimbleness, flexibly altering plans in the moment. Although the students recognized the value of planning, they noted, “While a teacher can plan out a lesson, they cannot plan their students’ reactions, forcing teachers to deal with reactions as they come.” As such, students wrote that teachers must both plan for the unexpected by preparing in an organized way and be able to alter their lesson plan fluidly, in the moment. Although students saw adapting to students as a challenging but indispensable aspect of teaching, they also recognized the benefits that stem from the interactive nature of teaching and learning. One student wrote,

I learned to be prepared for things to possibly go in directions you don’t expect. Obviously it is still important to keep the goals in mind, but sometimes the most profound learning can be a complete surprise even to the teacher.

TLHI students wrote that teachers’ practice should be responsive and iterative, and that they need to adapt their work precisely because of the interactional nature of teaching and learning. They asserted that teachers adapt to the unexpected by “over-preparing,” organizing, preparing for unexpected questions and preparing for the unforeseen. For example, one student wrote,

Another large segment of what I learned is to prepare oneself for the unforeseen. While this is a metaphor, the premise remains unchanged when you apply it to the instruction of a child; they can ask surprising questions and construct strange truths of their own. A teacher must strive to allow his or her lesson plan to not be diminished by an unknown question, but strengthened by the want of students to explore a concept further.

The TLHI students wrote that the highly interactive nature of teacher necessitates that teachers plan for the unexpected in advance of teaching, and that they adapt their practice while teaching to accommodate their students’ needs and learning goals.

Interestingly, the TLHI unit occasioned students’ understanding of the differences that students bring to the classroom and how those differences bring about diverse responses to learning opportunities in the classroom. For the TLHI students, diverse and unexpected understandings require a nimble teacher, capable of adapting instruction according to in-the-moment interactions in the classroom. This conception of classroom learning derives, at least in part, from the fact that the TLHI unit did not help the students, in this study, see how individual students wrestle with learning challenges in patterned ways, which help teachers anticipate common problems and misconceptions during planning and classroom instruction. Consequently, as first-time instructors, the TLHI students could not see how some student responses might cease to be “unexpected” after increased teaching experience.

The Role of Student Discovery

Just above 60% of students wrote of the importance of student discovery. Students asserted that teacher adaptation and student discovery are highly related—that is, teachers must adapt to “let” students discover:

For teaching, I found that in order to be able to make sure that a student gets as much as he or she can out of a lesson a teacher must be able to adapt to different situations, and that allowing students to work things out on their own, with only giving leading questions when needed, can be a great tool while teaching them because instead of spitting back out what they were just told, the students form their own ideas.

Because teaching and learning are carried out in interaction with others, teachers must continuously be responsive to what students bring to their work. One student described this relationship by writing, “Everyone brings a different perspective to the classroom and it is important to cultivate that by letting their own ideas grow.”

Teachers are also, in this view, dependent upon students as much as students are dependent upon teachers. Thus, “discovery” is not only what students do to learn but also what teachers enable. Describing how teachers enable student discovery, one student wrote,

I began to think about the value of the “Ah-Ha” moment. Like the very first video we watched in class and the debate over if six was odd or even, the teacher took the back seat and allowed self-discovery to occur. (Mathematics Teaching and Learning to Teach, 2010)

A second student described teachers’ work by saying, “Teachers must help without doing.” For the TLHI students, the work of teaching involves letting students do the work—analyzing, questioning, and discussing information. Teachers enable student work by providing resources and adapting to student understandings, but they cannot learn for students.

According to our students, self-discovery is important because it makes learning more “memorable,” it enables students to “learn deeply,” and it is “motivating.” One student wrote, “In learning, a student’s direct discovery, or the process of finding knowledge and information for oneself, creates a more memorable and effective experience because these connections are being made inside the student’s head.” Emphasizing the value of such learning, our students contrasted insights that their learners discovered on their own with information that is “regurgitated” or “spitting back out what they [learners] were just told.” For the TLHI students, student discovery created conceptual understanding, which they recognized as more valuable than more superficial demonstrations of learning such as memorization.

Students wrote that adaptive teaching and self-discovery can lead to sophisticated learning. For example, one student wrote, “by fostering an environment of student self-discovery, teachers of students of all grade-levels are capable of eliciting high-level, analytical theory building.” But, they ascertained that enacting adaptive teaching and engaged “discovery” is challenging work. For example, one student wrote,

It is extremely important but difficult for educators not to simply tell students what they want to know. While it may seem easier, this is a disservice to students because it inhibits them from formulating their own, unbiased ideas. It is both a challenge for the student to come up with conclusions on their own and a challenge for the teacher to let students come to conclusions on their own. But this challenge ultimately pays off.

TLHI students concluded that teaching is challenging work that necessitates time, skill, and effective teaching practices. They also found that negotiating these challenges “pays off” by positioning students to come to their own conclusions.

The Complexity of Teaching and Learning

The TLHI students saw students as taking up or using the resources and opportunities that teachers make available. They wrote that students must engage with content and each other if they are to learn. According a prominent role to individual student differences, students noted that teaching is challenging precisely because classrooms consist of a multiplicity of individuals. In a representative statement, one student wrote, “trying to understand my single learner in teaching Japanese internment and cater to her needs was difficult enough, even while it lacked the complexities of a larger classroom that is more typical of the American education system.” Students wrote that classrooms are comprised of individual students who understand and take up work with their teachers and content in differential ways: “As a teacher next year, I am likely to be charged with negotiating students of all different backgrounds, aptitudes, abilities, and work ethic.” Because effective instruction necessitates adaptive teaching practice, individual student differences challenge teachers’ work. One student wrote,

Having students with varied learning styles and differing interpretations of information poses a challenge because the teacher must find a balance between teaching styles so that all students have a chance to learn in a way that suits them and how they interpret the information.

Schooling in a democratic, multicultural society necessitates this careful balancing between the individual and the group; “finding that balance” contributes to the complexity of teaching.

A key theme that emerged from the data has to do with the complexity of teaching; nearly three quarters of our students wrote about the complexity of the work of teaching. Students wrote that the interactional nature of teaching makes it a fundamentally complex endeavor. One student asserted,

I used to view teaching as a simple task with few issues until I began researching only to find how many issues and dilemmas teachers are faced with on a daily basis—from large scale issues such as time management within the classroom to smaller scale issues, which need to be dealt with in the moment like not knowing the correct answer to a question.

Students wrote that teaching is complex because teachers need to continually weigh the efficacy of different teacher moves, because teachers are dependent upon student work for learning outcomes, and because student differences significantly affect how and what students learn and understand. Students wrote that the in-the-moment work of teaching makes managing this work particularly complex: “when teaching, teachers need to be alert the whole time and they need to make decisions every minute.”

A subset of students—nearly a third—wrote that prior to their systematic study of the practices of teaching and learning, they had not seen teaching as complex:

I have come to appreciate the complexity and richness behind both the process of teaching and of learning. Before this, I viewed teaching as an easy task, and learning as a simple undertaking done in one way, with nothing from the past having an effect. However, I now realize how truly wrong I was in both of these views.

These students reported that they revised their views of teaching. They wrote that this unit helped them to perceive and appreciate aspects of the work of teaching that had been invisible when they were students themselves. As one student noted, “I honestly went in to the experience thinking that it would be easy because I have been attending class and watching how professors have taught throughout my entire life.” For this subset of students, their lengthy experience in schools as students led them to see teaching as relatively simple work that they were prepared to do.

In this way, students challenged the previously held views of teaching and learning. The invisible became visible, as one student wrote,

Simply sitting back and watching Professor Author teach Sean and even while she was teaching our own class the lesson, I was unable to fully grasp how much preparation teaching a lesson well, really takes, and this was until I had to begin to try to teach the lesson myself. I think that there is a lot of outside work that a teacher must do to make the lesson a success that the learner often does not see or may even overlook. Most importantly, though, I think that it is this preparation work that really makes a lesson a success or a failure.

Similarly, another student wrote, “after being a student for so many years, having the opportunity to teach allowed me to understand the difficulty that is teaching.” Thus, studying teaching in the TLHI disrupted students’ views of the cognitive and professional demands of teaching.

Limitations

The TLHI offers a promising beginning for how to prepare undergraduate students for a lifetime of engagement with public schooling. Recent reforms assume that individuals have the necessary knowledge to make choices about schooling simply because as Kaestle notes, “Everybody’s been to fourth grade” (Kaestle, 1992, p. 27). As research into everyday citizens’ “apprenticeship of observation” in schools suggests, simply experiencing teaching as students offers a shallow preparation for understanding the complexity of teaching and learning. The TLHI made this complexity more transparent for the TLHI students in this study. However, this study represents only one particular context. We need to know more about how other individuals in other contexts might take up such a “backstage” pass to teaching (Grossman, 1991). By inviting a larger and more diverse number of citizens to analyze the complex, iterative interactions that occur in teaching and learning, the value of initiating citizens into the complexity of teaching can be better understood.

Evidence from this study suggests that the TLHI offers something on which to build. Even over a short period, TLHI students demonstrated insight into teaching and learning that went beyond what one might conclude from everyday experience. The TLHI was designed to plant seeds—new insights and ways of thinking—that would continue to grow. Long-term study is needed to determine to what extent this type of engagement influences future thinking and decision making about education. Although it is clear that recent reform efforts overlook enhancing the knowledge of everyday citizens, further study is needed to determine the extent to which units such as the TLHI substantively address this need over the long term.

Implications

This study’s findings are important for efforts to enrich the practices and pedagogy of postsecondary education. As citizens who will make important decisions about schooling, all undergraduates need to understand the complex interactional work of teaching and learning, not just intending teachers. At the start of this article, we asked the following: What do the findings suggest about ways to prepare undergraduates to critically consider teaching in increasingly multicultural schools? In part, this study illuminates how practice-based opportunities can allow individuals to “see” the complexity of teaching and to challenge assumptions about teaching and learning. We assert that a fundamental means to do this is to position students to critically analyze teaching from multiple perspectives. Feiman-Nemser and Remillard wrote that “deeply rooted . . . views of teaching and learning are unlikely to change unless alternative experiences challenge their validity” (Feiman-Nemser & Remillard, 1995, p. 9). This unit provided students the opportunity to challenge existing views and “discover” for themselves the complexity of teaching. This discovery is important because as U.S. schooling shifts toward a system in which citizens are consumers, parents are increasingly required to make informed choices between possible school placements for their children. Postsecondary education needs to play a role in preparing citizens for this kind of civic engagement.

Our research shows that this firsthand investigation of teaching and learning enabled undergraduates to understand that teaching is a profoundly multifaceted practice. Students’ emerging understanding of teaching allowed them to better understand how it is that education plays out in a multicultural society. Enabling students to see that “we all learn differently” is important because it facilitates citizens’ abilities to understand the multiple and complex demands of teaching in an increasingly diverse society. It also highlights the benefits derived from working closely with others with diverse backgrounds and experiences. Schooling in a democratic, multicultural society necessitates a careful balancing between the individual and the group. Teaching can be challenging precisely because classrooms consist of a multiplicity of individuals, but it can be rewarding for teachers and students as well because both teachers and students learn from the insights of others.

Although the students in this study recognized that students bring differences to the classroom, which shape their understanding and necessitate a responsive teacher, the majority of TLHI students did not see these differences as arising from diverse experiences or perspectives shaped by racial, ethnic, economic, or cultural backgrounds. The course in which the TLHI took place focused on schooling as a socially shaped enterprise through which society negotiated tensions over social, economic, and cultural differences. The tensions charted in the course ranged from the earliest years of public schools (i.e., sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants over the reading of the Lord’s Prayer) up to more present-day concerns such as the struggle for bilingual resources in schools, powerfully dramatized by the student-led protests in Crystal City, Texas, in the early 1970s (Mondale & Patton, 2001). Yet, TLHI students, in their analysis of teaching and learning, did not attribute the unique perspectives of students that they saw as so pivotal to learning to the social, economic, and cultural differences that shape students’ experiences and perspectives. Instead, they made more general claims about the nature of each individual’s unique life experience and perspective.

Furthermore, the TLHI unit foregrounded the disparate perspectives of citizens who occupied different social positions with regard to Japanese internment, showing how the same event can be experienced and interpreted in vastly different ways by individuals in a diverse society. The varied interpretations of events were reflected not only in the documents provided for study but also in the TLHI students’ developing theories that derived from analysis of these documents. Despite this heavy emphasis on the ways that race, ethnicity, economic status, and cultural background inform and shape individuals’ opportunities for learning and experience of those opportunities, the TLHI unit made the role of social, economic, and cultural backgrounds in learning transparent for some, but not all the students in this study. This finding suggests that a single course is not sufficient to expand undergraduate students’ understanding of the role of diversity in social life. As detailed here, the demographics of the course under study reflect the lack of diversity in the teaching force, as 85% of the study sample identify as White.

We reflect again here on the demographics of the study, and the difficulty of changing minds around issues of diversity, and of the broad scholarship on White fragility (DiAngelo, 2011; Matias, 2016). More concentrated and ongoing efforts may be needed to make racial, ethnic, economic, and cultural differences salient to students, especially those who have attended largely homogeneous school contexts such as the students in this study. Indeed, this finding echoes calls for preparation for multicultural communities to not reside in single classes, but to permeate the curriculum in postsecondary settings (Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995a; Ladson-Billings, 1995b; Sharma, 2011; Zeichner et al., 1998); doing this, DiAngelo (2011) writes would break the modal experience, whereby “many white people have never been given direct or complex information about racism before, and often cannot explicitly see, feel or understand it” (p. 67).

The students in this study recognized a multiplicity of differences in the classroom, but were unable to see the patterned ways that students respond to particular content and learning arrangements. Consequently, the TLHI students imagined classrooms in which teachers were left to respond in the moment to unknown and unpredictable challenges. In this way, the TLHI unit enabled students to see the complex demands of teaching, but offered less access to the ways that experienced teachers learn to grapple with these challenges over time. The inability of students to see patterns in students’ responses suggests the need for complementary experiences that provide the opportunity for students to see common responses and perspectives as well as differences in the classroom.

Participation in the TLHI led students to write that they could “see” teaching and learning as they had not seen before. As we, as a nation, continue to invest substantial resources to improving schools, “seeing” the complexity of teaching practice is important for the construction and support of policies, which will support what researchers have called “ambitious” (Lampert, 2005; Lampert & Graziani, 2009), “adventurous” (Cohen, 1988), or “reform-minded” teaching—teaching that encourages students to ask, explain, and problem solve, and that positions all students as capable of learning sophisticated, challenging academic content (Feiman-Nemser, 2001). Such teaching is possible when it is understood, valued, and protected from calls to diminish intellectual engagement for a focus solely on basic skills. Recognizing that learning is a process of intellectual “discovery” is a seemingly simple insight, which supports teaching that positions students as capable, critical thinkers, rather than passive consumers of information. Preparing all undergraduate students to understand and appreciate the complexity of teaching in increasingly diverse schooling contexts offers an important way to protect and advance ambitious teaching, a core resource for democratic societies.