Diverse Cultures in the Classroom

If, as Greenfield argues, cultural history is a feature of cultural scripts (1994, p. 1), then the embodied enactment of that culture is to be expected as a feature of the developing child's experience in the classroom. What makes that a new insight in the scheme of current educational praxis is that, in the contemporary period, which has been distinguished in the wider culture by cultural and ethnic diversity, the scripts that the developing child brings to the classroom may not be the same ones as those of the teacher or the administrators. The last three decades of the 20th century saw unprecedented numbers of immigrants from countries and cultures vastly different from that of the ethnic Europeans who originally colonized the United States, and indigenous cultures of non-European origin became much more visible participants in the social mainstream. Inevitably, the mixture of cultures was to be reflected in the public-education classroom. What teachers might experience at one level as the different learning styles of various students may in fact owe much to t

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l instruction, for example in math, takes on marked complexity. It cannot be ignored that bilingual education is a controversial issue all on its own, part of the wider issue of multiculturalism in public education. Its origins and development are worth noting because of the implications for cultural sensitivity in contemporary classrooms. As originally envisioned, the 1968 Bilingual Education Act allocated $7.5 million in federal funds for bilingual education for poor immigrant children whose first language was not English. In the shape of schoolwide programs aimed accommodating students with limited English proficiency, there is a view that the expanded programs have not been helpful to either school systems that implemented them or to students enrolled in them. To see why, it is important to understand concepts that drove the 1968 Act and that continues to inform bilingual programs: In simplest terms, bilingual education is a special effort to help immigrant children learn English so that they can do regular schoolwork with their English-speaking classmates and receive an equal educational opportunity. . . . It was expected that the transition would take a child three years (Porter, 1998, pp. 28-9). The 1968 Act placed bilin
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2070
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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