Challenges Experienced by Teachers With Students, Essay Example

What do you consider to be the major challenges experienced by teachers with students from diverse cultures in mainstream American education?

The diverse cultures of students in the schools are equally providing significant challenges.  The wave of migrants into the US Educational system has created a diverse bunch of people that are suffering from cultural bereavement i.e. being away from the environment, surroundings and system of their native lands. They are thrust into a new environment that places great demands upon them.  In particular the learning of English Language and understanding the requirements of American cultural values.  This has particularly hampered African Americans, Hispanics and Latino’s. The ability to adapt has proved extremely challenging for many, often because of the poverty trap and the inability to access the better quality educational systems in the US.  (Birman, 2007).

The failure to adequately integrate leads to what has been termed as ‘the cultural plunge’. Stuidents from the lower socioeconomic spectrum are seen to face the most severe and difficult challenges that arise from the poverty trap. Owing to the lack of parental education this often leads to the lack of parental care or invovement in the recognition of education as being important for the children. San Diego University has been experimenting on models dealing with students of very diverse backgrounds. This has examined the use of stereotyping by the media and how this impacts the self-esteem of students i.e. all blacks are gang members and drug dealers, hispanics are lazy, etc. Gay students are victimized in middle and high schools.  Each contributes to low self-esteem, lack of educational development and a degree of isolation from the mainstream. (Nieto, 2006).  It was Piaget who suggested that children enter the concrete operational stage of development at around 7 years of age. As such children enter a more substantive degree of logic and reasoning over objects and events. At age 11, they reach the fourth stage of cognitive development and a formal operational stage commences. He identified four key stages of learning: 1) Sensorimotor stage – birth to 2 years of age 2) Preoperational Stage – age 2-7  3) Concrete operations – age 7-11 and  4) Formal operations – age 11 to 15.  Piaget signified the importance of developing a curriculum to assist in the education of children and teachers need to be fully aware and take into consideration environmental factors in consideration of learning. Although his theory was criticised Piaget was one of the founding theorists in cognitive development and his contribution was considerable.  (Shaffer, D.R. 2010

Works Cited

Birman, D. (2007). Immigrant Youth in US Schools : Opportunities for prevention. The Prevention Researcher, 101-105.

Hamil, A. B. (2008). Problems Facing American Education. Starkville: Mississippi State University.

Mislevy, R. J. (2008). How cognitive science challenges the education management tradition. Baltimore: University of Maryland.

Nieto, J. (2006). The Cultural Plunge. Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter , 113-117.

Shaffer, D. R. (2009). Social and Personality Development. In D. R. Shaffer, Social and Personality Development (pp. 26-27). Belmont CA: Wadsworth.