Society, Family and Inclusive School Lesson 6

Society, Family and Inclusive School Course

• Course: 2024-2025
• Professor: Fatmanil Doner
• Lesson 6: Education and ethnic-cultural inequality

Expected Learning Outcomes

• LOS 1: Understand the relationship between school and society using sociological concepts, identifying fundamental types of social inequality (social class, gender, and ethnic culture). The school both confronts and perpetuates these inequalities.
• LOS 3: Understand how the relationship between school and society has evolved across history, and to analyze social inequalities from a social-reality perspective and its impact on education.

Basic Concepts: Race and Ethnicity

• Race is a social construct categorizing people based on perceived shared physical traits, maintaining sociopolitical hierarchy.
• Race is based on collective, hereditary, and unalterable physical and biological characteristics (skin color, hair, eyes, facial features). These traits are linked to a common origin.
• Physical features are assigned a value judgment (better/worse, good/bad), affecting perceptions of ability, intelligence, and degree of civilization.

Basic Concepts: Ethnicity

• Ethnicity is a characterization of people based on shared culture (language, food, music, dress, values, beliefs) associated with common ancestry and history.
• Ethnicity groups are defined by shared racial, linguistic, and cultural affinities.
• Cultural particularities serve to differentiate ethnic groups, such as language, religion, and customs.

Ethnic Diversity and Schooling

• Conditions: The migration process, origins, apprenticeship schemes, linguistic differences between native and immigrant communities, and diverse family structures (single parent, migrant families, transnational families). Non-uniform migrant family structures must also be considered.
• Other factors: Students' social origins (ethnic minority and social class) affect the impact of their cultural background. Lack of resources to compensate for disadvantage (after-school classes) and family pressure or lack of incentives to succeed.
• School segregation: Concentration in specific neighborhoods leading to school segregation, mostly in public schools. Educational outcomes of minority children are strongly influenced by unequal access to quality resources (teachers and curriculum) rather than race.
• Data points: Foreign student enrollment rose to 944,992 after a 37% increase over six years (2023). Data is presented in graphs showing enrollment numbers at various educational levels in public and private institutions in Spain from 1994-2023. Regional data maps are also included.

Immigration and Educational Achievement

• Onion Boado (2014): Analyzes the relationship between family/school and children's mathematics knowledge at the end of primary school. Research questions include:
• Is a worse position of immigrant children already detected in primary education in terms of their results in the most important curricular subjects?
• Factors influencing immigration: Many potential factors can explain immigrant students' disadvantaged position in schools (family home aspects and school factors. Financial resources can be key).
• Cultural capital is an important factor; the amount of books in the home.
• Ownership of schools, average socio-economic composition of the student body, and the age at which schooling begins are also relevant.
• Are immigrant children accumulating the same advantages as native children through early schooling? The gap widens even when immigrant children begin school earlier than native children.
• The access to preschool for immigrant children in comparison to native-born children also needs to be acknowledged.

Conclusions

• Students from immigrant backgrounds in Spain demonstrate clear disadvantages from an early age.
• The Spanish education system, historically considered equitable, now faces challenges in integrating immigrant children.
• Immigrant households often lack access to essential resources such as parental education, socioeconomic status, and cultural capital.
• The anticipated positive effects of early education are less positive for immigrant children in primary education than for native children.
• Surprisingly, school often has little impact on the achievement differences between immigrant and native backgrounds.

Assimilationism and Multiculturalism

• Assimilationism: The process by which minority groups adopt the characteristics of the dominant group. In education this can manifest in curricula that prioritize dominant culture while neglecting or marginalizing minority communities.
• Multiculturalism: Embraces multiple cultures coexisting. This approach may not involve interaction but simply coexistence, possibly including alienation and segregation within a community.
• Levels of assimilation: Cultural, structural, biological, and psychological aspects of adapting to the majority culture

Introduction to Multicultural Education

• Multicultural education focuses on transforming education based on equality, including content integration, prejudice reduction, and empowering school culture and social culture.
• Multicultural education addresses conflict resolution in today's world by empowering students to better manage life in a global marketplace.
• The school curriculum should address important issues such as racism, sexism, classism, ageism, heterosexism, religious intolerance, and xenophobia to better support students.

Role of Educators

• Educators with a social reconstructionist approach in multicultural education are instrumental in teaching students about oppression and discrimination.
• Teachers can use their roles as social change agents, fostering a more equitable society.

Teachers as Knowledge Constructers

• Knowledge construction emphasizes the socially-constructed nature of knowledge, acknowledging that it is created in the human mind (thus subject to change).
• Teachers must reconstruct their worldviews to effectively teach multiculturally.
• Equity pedagogy incorporates culturally relevant teaching methods to accommodate student differences and promote academic success.

Knowledge Construction and Prejudice Reduction

• Prejudice reduction aims to change students' attitudes towards different races and ethnicities, as well as including teaching tolerance in different aspects of life, such as religion, ability, and sexual preference.
• An empowering school culture is essential to support the other four dimensions.

Goals of Multicultural Education

• Multicultural education aims to provide a safe and accepting learning environment, increasing awareness of global issues, strengthening cultural and intercultural awareness, and teaching multiple historical perspectives, critical thinking, and prejudice reduction.

Interculturalism

• Interculturalism, a result of dissatisfaction with multicultural/assimilationist models in some European countries, emphasizes reciprocity and exchange in intercultural classrooms.
• Intercultural education encompasses food, language, history, country of origin, and daily community life to foster mutual understanding.

Conditions for Successful Intercultural Achievement

• A balanced approach to education encompassing qualifications, cultural, social, and personal development must be adopted.
• Providing opportunities for communication and cooperation in heterogeneous groups is important.
• Creating equal opportunities for participation in classroom interactions will improve participation.
• Curricula should reflect the multicultural society without being ethnocentric.
• Information should be presented from multiple perspectives to encourage critical thinking and awareness of diversity.

Cultural Clash

• A cultural clash is a conflict between cultures, arising from differences in beliefs, values, and practices.
• Behavior and perception of these differences impact conflict resolution.
• Tolerance and patience are key to resolving cultural clashes, while disrespect and superiority feelings often aggravate them.

Additional information from the video

• Watch the video at: [YouTube link]
• Focus on the concepts of multiculturalism, interculturalism, transculturalism, and cross-culturalism.
• Analyze the problems with office hours.
• Identify problems at the college level and possible solutions.

This quiz explores the relationship between education and ethnic-cultural inequality as part of the Society, Family and Inclusive School course. It emphasizes the sociological concepts of social class, gender, and ethnicity, and how these social inequalities impact education. Participants will analyze historical perspectives of these dynamics.