Adolescence is a time of turmoil and change for every young adult, especially for students of color and other minorities. As our world becomes increasingly global, there is a disconnect between our students and academics.
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- Do some students do better in Math or English because of race?
- What are your perceptions and experiences around the world? How do you define yourself?
- Does your self-identity change based on your interactions with a particular group or race? How does it impact your sense of self-worth? Did you have multiple personalities (i.e. one for school, one for home, and one for your friends)?
- How did doing well in school, participating in class discussions or participating in school activities and clubs impact your identity?
- As a parent, have you asked "What is going on with my son or daughter? What is behind this sudden change in behavior?" If so, what did you determine? In answering these questions, please let us know how you resolved these conflicts and emotions?
- As an educator or policy planner, what have you done to ensure the success of all students in your classroom? Have you asked your students if it is working?
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Instead of answering this post personally I will tell you about a female teacher from Odense in Denmark who came to one of the teacher courses I attended last fall. She told us about what they have learned about running a multicultural school at her high school. Where I live there is not many foreigners and most of them do not choose to go to high school so I have never taught foreign students. This is why I choose to tell you about this lady from Odense. Interesting enough Odense is the town where the Danish fairytale teller Hans Christian Andersen was born. He wrote a fairytale about a swan duckling that was mocked by all the other ducklings at the farm because he was bigger than them and had a different color. The poor swan duckling had a miserable childhood and miserable adolescent but when he became a grown up he turned into a beautiful white swan and all the other ducks admired him. This fairytale is about what is most important inheritance or environment. I am not sure that I agree with Hans Christian Andersen because history has shown that it is very difficult to turn into a proud swan if you have been mocked all your child hood for being different but history has also shown that sometimes it happens, just look at your president he is half white and half African. So why do some swan ducklings turn into swans while others stay big and ugly all their life? A lot of research within this field has shown that the important thing for children in a difficult situations is that they meet grown ups who believe in them and encourage them to do the most of what has been given to them. This is why our role as a teacher is so important and why we are able to make a difference every day. Our most important task is to make the students believe in them selves no matter what color religion, culture, of sexuality they have. No matter whether they are poor or rich whether they have loving parents or live at an orphanage. It is a difficult task because some student meet so many problems in their lives that our actions may not be enough to help them but this should not keep us from trying. I now want to tell you the interesting stories, that this lady from Odense told us new teachers.
ReplyDeleteShe started to describe the situation at her high school. Her high School is called “Mulernes legatskole” and is situated in a neighborhood where many foreigners live. Most foreigners began to move to Denmark in the 60’ties because there was a lack of workers in DK so many people from Yugoslavia and Turkey moved to DK to get well paid jobs. Later on this was not possible because the crisis in the start of the 70’ties reversed the situation. Many people were out of jobs and it was very difficult to get a job. In the 70’ties and 80’ties we accepted refugees from Chile, Lebanon, Palestine Iran and Iraq and Vietnam and the former communist counties in east especially from Poland. Later on we also received a lot of refugees from Afghanistan and Somalia. These refugees come from different part of the world have very different cultures and come to Denmark with very different experiences and have very different academic back grounds. The reason why so many of the foreigners live in the same place is that there is a great complex of rental apartments in this area, which was build in the 60’ties out of the best intensions but they were to crowded and to expensive to live in so Danish people who could afford it preferred to buy their own house. Therefore you could always get a place to live in if you chose to live in this complex of apartments called Vollsmose. If there were no place else to live you could always find an apartment here and for this reason a lot of refugees ended up living in Vollsmose. This made a lot of the Danes in Vollsmose to move away from Vollsmose because they did not want their children to go to the same school as the refugees children. The reason for this was that a lot of these children were quite bad at speaking Danish making it difficult for the teachers to deal with all these different languages. Maybe the Danes also moved their children for racist reasons. Danes are no angels and many foreigners including white Americans find it quite difficult to be well integrated in the Danish Society. Ask Bonnie, I think it was not always easy to be American in Denmark even though she likes Denmark I know she also have her critical opinions One of my Jamaican friends has moved to London because he could not get a job as a dentist in Copen hagen even though he had very good grades. In London they are used to Jamaican people and he is very popular as a dental surgeon and earns millions of pounds. To bad DK did not want him, he is not the only one who has experienced something like that and has moved away from DK.
ReplyDeleteAnyway the result was that today many foreigners live in Vollsmose and only very few Danes live there. For that reason some of the foreigners end up at Mulernes Legatskole. This is why Mulernes Legatskole has the highest quotient of foreign students compared to all the other Danish High schools. Almost all Danish High schools are public and free of charge. This is also true for the ground school, but the last 20 years more and more Danes choose to let their children go to private schools because they do not want their children to go to the same school as the foreigners . This has worsened the problems in the public schools because how are you supposed to learn Danish when your parents does not speak the language and your school mates doesn’t speak it either. This means that even though Mulernes Legatskole has the highest quotient of foreigners in Denmark the quotient does not reflect the quotient of foreigners in the surroundings because many of the foreign children have difficulties to get in to the high school. Their marks are to low. The foreigners know that the only way to succeed in the Danish society is to get a high school degree because to get a well paid job you have to have a high school degree and later on further education. Therefore a lot of those who are not accepted in the first place goes to a special examination hoping that they will do well enough to get into the high school even though their marks were not good enough in the first place. Then what do these students then experience? They find out that most of the other students at this exam have a skin color different from white. This impression is the first impression these children get and of course they must think that the school is being racist because why are there so few Danish Children at this exam? The reason is of course that Danish children can also have difficulties learning to read and write Danish well enough to get into high school but of course it is not so difficult for Danish children who speak and hear Danish at home as it is for those children who only speak Danish in the classroom as many of them prefer to speak their own language during the breaks and do not speak Danish at home. We have a saying in DK that French children are very clever because they speak French. Danish people find it much more difficult learning French than English. The saying is ironic so this saying explains that of course the French children are not more clever than Danish children it is just much easier to learn French if you have French parents who speaks French to you. The same is true for foreign children’s ability to learn Danish. But this is not in the mind of these children and their families when they come to the exam. These chikdren just notice that there are no Danish children at this exam and this must mean that the school is being discriminating. Many of the foreign students start their high school carrier believing that the Danish teachers are discriminating, which some of them might be but it is not true for all Danish teachers.
ReplyDeleteThe teacher from Odense told us that the school has chosen to deal with this problem by talking to the students about this problem and trying to make them realize that sometimes there is more behind a scenario than is perceivable at first glance.
Talking about the problems and trying to solve them is the solution that the school has chosen to use in all situations. I will try to tell you about some of the other issues at the school but since English is not my mother tongue I have the same difficulties writing about these complex problems as the foreign student have doing their homework which often demands from the student a larger vocabulary than they have. Even math can be difficult because many math problems have a Danish text the students have to be able to understand to solve the problem.
One of the problems the female teacher told us about is the cultural difference between many Danish and Muslim families. In some Muslim families the boys are brought up to believe that they are better than girls which makes it very difficult for these Muslim boys to accept a female teacher as a authority which is crucial for the teaching to succeed. The solution here is for the female teachers to tell the boys over and over again that they will not accept that these boys talk rude to them or to the female students and tell the students over and over again that being a part of the Danish Democracy is to accept that we all have the same value even though we have different color or gender and that we will not accept rude behavior from anybody towards anyone and this means also that the teacher will not accept that the Danish students are rude to the foreign students. The female teacher underlined that this was not easy but the only solution is to keep insisting that everyone should behave nicely to everyone and that after ½ a year most foreign boys accept to talk nicely to their female teachers and to the female students but sometimes they need a reminder if they forget.
ReplyDeleteThis presentation might sound like I make racial stereotypes and I do. I tell you exactly what this teacher told us. Actually it is pretty much impossible to talk about race or color without talking about stereotypes because if there were no stereotypes there were no need for talking about race or color. You just have to remember that I do not write all Muslim boys and when I write the story like I do it is not because Danish boys cannot be rude to Danish girls indeed they can, it is just not so common because the feministic movement has a long history in DK.
Another problem is that the quotient of foreigners at the school does not reflect the quotient in the surroundings. It is much lower at the school. As long as there exist differences between the level of education between foreigners and Danes there will also be a social difference and for that reason also social conflicts between Danes and foreigners. Nobody wants that because these social conflicts can be very expensive for society. The educational reforms in the 60’ties were made to make it possible for everyone to get a good education. Not only the children of the well educated parents but also children from workers should be able to get a academic carrier. The purpose of the reforms from the 60’ties was to uneven social differences. Today it is almost opposite everybody is able to get an education but not everybody gets an academic education or some other further education. For that reason social differences appears between those who are well educated and those who arenot and to fight the problems that this situation makes decision makers want more children to get a high school degree because it is the way out of unemployment. So how do Mulernes Legatskole get the foreighn children to choose to go to high school in stead of choosing unemployment?
The answer is again information and information. The school tries in many ways to communicate with the parents of the foreign children. This communication is not easy because some of these parents do not speak Danish very well and many of them are not able to read or write Danish. The solution is to write flyers in other languages and to have different arrangement that makes the parents realize that the school exist.
Now I will return to the problem about talking about these problems without using stereotypes because un till now I have more or less only talked about foreigners and Danes. In this long comment I started to point out that foreigners in DK and in Vollsmose are not alike. They come from many different parts of the world and even though the majorities of the foreigners are Muslims they are not all Muslims and the different Muslim groups differ very much from each other. Actually sometimes the only thing to foreigners have in common is that they both are born out side of Denmark.
When the school had the first information meeting or gathering they had had a lot of thoughts about how this meeting best could be arranged and they decided that it would be best to meet on neutral ground so the meeting was arranged at the library near by.
ReplyDeleteAfterwards the school realized that this solution fitted one group of the foreigners very well while another group would have preferred to meet at the school to see the buildings, the classrooms, sport facilities and so on. But a third group would have preferred to be the hosts at their part of the apartment complex.
This just shows that you can have the best intensions with what you do and even though someone else consider your actions discriminating they do not have to be meant discriminating. Of course the school acted on this and the next year they arranged more than one meeting because if you want to get in contact with other people you have to meet them where they are.
I think the lesson from this story is that it is almost impossible not to make stereotypes what is important is to try and correct your behavior when you find out that they hurt other people or make some other harm.
Some Danes would say that this is not OK people who come to Denmark must adjust forget their habits, forget their religion, and do exactly like the Danes but then again what group of Danes should they then mimic? Danes are also very different depending on which part of the country they come from. Believe it or not even though Denmark is such a small country because the country consists of many small Islands many different dialects have arisen and people from one part of Denmark might have difficulties understanding people from another part of the country.
Because so many of the foreign students have problems with Danish. The school has decided to have about two hours tutoring every afternoon and everyone can show up. Tutors are both teachers and students with good grades. At the tutoring the students are able to get some healthy bread to eat because many of them have a very long day and may not get enough to eat. This is of course not cheep so who pays? The school has talked to the local sport associations. Many of the children play soccer near bay or participate in some other kind of sport. The sport clubs would very much like to have the young students to come and do sports but they know that this might be in conflict with the young students ability to do their homework so the sport associations sponsor the tutoring and the food. This makes the sportassociation able to welcome the young studnets at training with a good conscience because they know that the students have had the possibility to do their homework at school and they have had something healthy to eat. I just think this is wonderful and I hope that I am able to convince my school that we should do something similar.
Another problem at the school has been to get the children to join the trips that Danish high school classes use to take to a foreign country mostly in Europe. This is part of the students education but the foreign parents do not like the idea of their children away from their control in a whole week. They fear that they will get bad influence from the Danish students. Especially the girls have trouble to get permission to come along with their class but also boys can get in this trouble. Again the only way to solve this problem is dialogue with the parents trying to get the parents to tell the school about their concerns then the school can tell the parents how they will deal with these concerns and often the foreign students are allowed to go but as the teacher said we cannot do magic and sometimes we fail but we do our best.
In a comment to one of the other posts I have been writing about the problems with the ethnic clothes that mostly some girls have to wear so I will not speak of it again but I will mention a similar problem which both sexes of the foreign students share. This might sound odd to you but Danish school children have always been taking a shower in a common room. One room for the boys and one room for the girls and everybody has to have a shower and it is not possible to hide from the others so many of the foreign students do not want to take a shower after sports because their culture forbids them to shower naked while others look even though it is only students of the same sex that shower together. This has been solved in different ways in different Danish schools. At some schools they make room for a separate shower where you can shower without having others watching you naked. If that is not possible special kind of suits have been designed so that you can shower without being completely naked. At Mulernes Legatskole they have a special arrangement with the local swimming center so that the foreign students can go there and shower because they have special shower rooms where they can have a private shower.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very long comment and I have to end it because my school work is calling but I just need to say that I have never been to the school that I have told you about and I have only heard the story from the female teachers point of view. Maybe if one of the foreign male students told me about the school the story would sound completely different.
To end the story like a real fairytale the teacher told us that they now welcome former students back after they have graduated at University and now they welcome them back as teachers. But remember there is a lot of discrimination problems in DK but this is an example of that it is possible to solve some of the problems by continuing an open dialogue. I would like to stress this because in this years Denmark is mostly known for drawing cartoons that makes fun of Muslims in a way that makes Muslims all around the world to burn the Danish flag but not all Danish people are discriminating and a lot of us want dialogue and want to solve the problems in the interest of everyone.