Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for African Immigrant Children in U.S. P-12 Schools

Abstract

This article sheds light on the challenges African immigrant children face in navigating through a relatively different and unfamiliar system of education in the United States. It also provides pre-emigration background information to the systems of education prevalent in Africa as well as the culturally responsive teaching strategies that support and enhance learning for the African immigrant students. Teachers of African immigrant children around the world will find this article particularly resourceful because there is limited scholarship about this segment of the public school population in the United States and in other developed countries.

Keywords

African immigrant parental involvement multicultural education culturally responsive pedagogy education system Cameroon

Introduction

Ethnographic studies about non-White students accelerated in the early 1950s during the civil rights strife and have continued to grow exponentially (Gibson & Ogbu, 1991). Until the early 1990s, empirical research on the achievement gap had tended to focus mostly on generic Black and White students. However, there is another segment of the Black student population—recent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean—that is expanding rapidly. We refer to them in this study as African immigrant students. By African immigrant students, we mean first- and second-generation students whose families immigrated voluntarily or involuntarily (as refugees) into the United States either to extricate themselves from political, civil, and/or economic turmoil or to pursue further studies (Arthur, 2000; McHugh & Sugarman, 2015). Although the U.S. Census Bureau (2010, 2014) data have consistently ranked African immigrants as the most educated immigrant group, their children in U.S. schools continue to suffer from discontinuity in academic culture, communication, and power relations (Adair, 2015; Dryden-Peterson, 2015; McHugh & Sugarman, 2015; Ogbu, 1991). According to a report published by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2014, 41% of foreign-born Africans were holders of a bachelor’s degree or higher compared with 28% of the total foreign-born American residents or citizens with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Given the increasing number of Africans escaping from dictatorial regimes, wars, and poverty in their home countries, many of their citizens are seeking residence in Western countries, including the United States. Although they are often received in different cities across the United States with open arms (Takyi, 2002), their children often encounter many challenges related to culture, language, and academics in public schools. This article focuses on the cross-cultural hurdles that African immigrant children have to surmount to excel in school. Although many teachers are interested in working with immigrant children, they are often culturally and pedagogically ill-equipped to meet the needs of many immigrant children (Suarez-Orosco & Suarez-Orosco, 2001). This article calls for a more culturally responsive teaching (CRT) approach for African immigrant students.

Many school districts embrace multicultural education in their schools, but sometimes multicultural education itself is not inclusive enough because teachers are short of balanced information about the minority cultures represented in their schools. The lack of exposure to accurate and balanced information about Africa has often led to overgeneralizations, stereotypes, and misinformation about the continent and its people. In the absence of authentic knowledge about Africa, educators become influenced by the societal curriculum. Cortes (1979) defines societal curriculum as “that massive, ongoing, informal, curriculum of family, peer groups, neighborhoods, mass media, and other socializing forces that educate us throughout our lives” (p. 476). Misrepresentations which emerge from societal curriculum can result in lower teacher expectations of these students; misunderstandings between teachers, students, and their parents; and even discrimination,¹ among other consequences. Numerous constructs could help U.S. teachers to revisit their instructional strategies that could facilitate the integration of African immigrant students into the American public school system and better prepare them for U.S. education and life.

Immigrant and refugee students face daunting educational challenges even once they resettle. Some of those challenges could include coping in and adapting to a new environment with an entirely different educational system, disproportionate and variable proficiencies in English, and varying parental conceptions of their contributions to their children’s schooling, among others. Although every student brings a host of experiences and cultural values to the classroom that should be explored and acknowledged by competent, caring teachers, the diversity of African immigrant students’ experiences requires more culturally responsive pedagogues to infuse the frames of reference and lived experiences of these immigrant children into the school curricula. As Howard (2006) argues, “We can’t teach what we don’t know.” Thus, in order to teach what we know, we have to learn it. School-home connection involves teachers’ visits to the immigrant family homes and in turn, parents’ volunteering in their children’s classrooms to familiarize themselves with the host country’s instructional culture (Dantas & Manyak, 2010).

During the past two decades—from 1990 to 2009—the number of “foreign-born Blacks” in the United States has dramatically risen from 1.4 million to 3.3 million (Capps & Fix, 2012, p. 1). This is a nonnegligible figure of the immigrant population from Africa and the Caribbean. In 2010 in New York City, “the nation’s largest school district,” 13,000 of the 70,000 foreign-born students in elementary and middle schools were Black and were performing poorly on standardized tests (Doucet, Schwartz, & Debraggio, 2012, p. 300). For the growing numbers of African immigrants in the United States, appropriate curricular and pedagogical practices are necessary to transition the school-aged population of this ethnicity into the American educational system. Little attention has been given to these students as far as multicultural education is concerned. Many educators who purport to be culturally inclusive in fact adopt “tourist-multicultural” (Derman-Sparks, 1992) and stereotypic curriculum, but a multicultural approach that truly addresses the needs of all learners, while tackling the challenges of standards and testing, is needed.

Theoretical Framework

This article draws from the theory of CRT of Geneva Gay (2001) as the theoretical framework for teaching ethnically and linguistically diverse student population. CRT is defined by Gay as follows:

Using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively. It is based on the assumption that when academic knowledge and skills are situated within the lived experiences and frames of reference of students, they are more personally meaningful, have higher interest appeal and learn more easily . . . As a result, the academic achievement of ethnically diverse students will improve when they are taught through their own cultural and experiential filters. (p. 106)

CRT encompasses several important instructional elements expected of teachers of ethnically diverse students. These elements include teachers’ content knowledge about students’ cultures, attitudes, pedagogy of care which entails understanding students’ well-being both in class and at home, relevant cross-cultural communication skills, and infusing a cultural lens in instructional delivery. For American educators to be more effective in teaching African immigrant children, they need to apply the concepts of CRT by amassing pre-immigration information about the immigrant families so as to understand why they may initially speak, read, write, learn, and engage differently—and not deficiently—from other students. Teachers need to learn how to harness those great attributes that immigrant children bring to their classrooms to improve teaching and classroom management. As African immigrant children learn from their new classmates and teachers, so too do the latter learn from them. Most African immigrant children come from two-parent households (Anderson, 2015) and have very high respect for teachers and elders in general. They can contribute to a more stabilized classroom atmosphere where the lack of respect is the problem.

In consonance with CRT, we also approach the article from the prism of Emily Style’s (1988) window and mirror curriculum theory in which she postulates that,

[for] a curriculum to function both as Window and as Mirror, . . . education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected. Knowledge of both types of framing is basic to a balanced education which is committed to affirming the essential dialogue between the self and the world. (p. 1)

In other words, employing CRT in the classroom with African immigrant children paves the way for these immigrant students to “see” their realities also reflected in a curriculum that tends to be predominantly window frames and sparingly mirror frames. It also enables mainstream students to experience window frames and not only mirror frames in the curriculum, as it is often the case.

Authentic Knowledge as a Tool Against Stereotypes

To practice culturally responsive pedagogy, teachers have to grow their knowledge base with authentic information about their students’ cultures and educational backgrounds, without which, there is a high probability of subconsciously indulging in stereotypical information to inform instruction and decisions that affect ethnically different students. The subsequent paragraphs embody factors that can make or break the education of African immigrant students in the United States as well as provide instructional and curricular guidance for teachers to acquire vital knowledge for CRT. These factors include stereotypes, differences in language and education systems, reading development, parental involvement, and finally, African immigrants as assets in the mainstream classrooms.

Stereotypes From the Media and the Movie Industries

Misconceptions about the continent of Africa by many Americans are common due to negative stereotypes propagated by some Hollywood movies and TV channels like Discovery Channel, Amistad, Roots, Animal Planet, and National Geographic (Traore, 2004). These movies and TV shows present Africans as exotic and often primitive “Others” to titillate the American public with the foreign and barbaric. The reality is that Africa is made up of 53 independent countries with a plethora of ethnic groups, political, and economic disparities; native and European languages, and a multitude of religious beliefs, cultures, races, and education systems. Since independence in the early 1960s, Cameroon, for example, has continued with the French and the British education systems as they had been instituted in the colonial era. In one system, the medium of instruction is French and in another, it is English. Both have different curricula and end-of-cycle exams. This means Cameroonian immigrants from both education systems would experience education differently in the United States dependent on their prior medium of instruction and the kind of tracking system their education system practiced. Besides the number of European languages used as official languages on the continent, African languages are estimated at about 2,000 (Childs, 2003). In New York City schools alone, “Black immigrants from non-Caribbean countries speak 79 different languages” (Doucet et al., 2012, p. 313).

Based on the multiple levels of diversity, it should be crystal clear that the experiences of two African immigrant students from two different countries will most likely differ considerably especially if, for instance, prior to emigration from their home countries, one lived in an urban area while the other student lived in a rural area. Therefore, any attempt by teachers to lump these students into one monolithic culture is erroneous and misleading. The only way to circumvent such generalization is for teachers to familiarize themselves with, at least, the macro-history and macro-culture of Africa.

Differences in Language and Education Systems

The education systems in Africa abound in both similarities and contrasts among each other and with the U.S. education system. More than 70% of the countries in Africa use either French or English as a medium of instruction in their school systems. Other countries use Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, and other African languages to a lesser degree. Most school-aged African children speak at least one European language plus one or more national language. A culturally responsive instructional practice must entail an understanding of this linguistic diversity which is part of the culture in Africa. The mere fact that a good number of them are either bilingual or multilingual should allay any concern about their academic potentials. Other native and European languages have had profound influence on the way English is spoken in all the English-speaking countries. This influence is highly noticeable at the level of vocabulary, syntax, semantics, and accent. Hence, with this backdrop of diverse linguistic backgrounds, the African immigrant students’ English language proficiency will vary depending on which language the students were interacting with in their home country and currently use with their parents at home. These learners need a range of linguistic supports, depending upon their linguistic backgrounds—for instance, ELL support for those who have not learned English previously, but instruction in academic American English as an additional language for those who have learned another English dialect. Even learners who appear to speak and understand everyday English fluently may struggle with academic English and require more time to learn it as Cummins (2005) postulates in his theory of second language acquisition. He differentiates between Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS), which takes learners 1 to 2 years to learn, and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), which can take 5 to 7 years to learn.

Reading Development

Furthermore, the expectations and pace of children’s reading development in U.S. schools can be overwhelming to new African immigrants who generally approach reading in depth in their home countries only at the later grade levels and not from kindergarten as it is the case in the United States. Besides, in most African countries, there is limited emphasis on children’s literature and leisure reading. Reading tends to be designed for academic purposes and only sparingly for leisure. Little or no emphasis is placed on fast reading, so terminologies such as reading recovery, literacy station, and reading below or above grade level are infrequent in school settings. Although children’s literature exists, students are not often required to read it or write summaries as they often do in the United States. Parents do not often read books to their children—A home literacy practice that prepares children for in-school reading practices in the United States (Heath, 1983). They may help their children in schoolwork and instill a climate of high academic expectations in their homes, but they do not do leisure reading with them. Despite all these contrasts in African versus U.S. expectations of reading, African immigrant children still end up reading well and thoughtfully. However, in the U.S. school, a good number of them initially need remedial lessons to read as fluently as their average American counterparts.

Parental Involvement

Parental involvement in the education of their children can improve the quality of education a child receives (Comer & Haynes, 1991). Like some of their Chinese counterparts in Canada who contested their roles in the education of their kids (Li, 2006), many African immigrant parents who have not studied in the United States do not expect their involvement in their children’s education to extend beyond the home into the schoolhouse either because they are not aware of such expectations or because the school schedule overlaps with their work schedule. Nonetheless, they tend to have very high expectations for their children, and those with stable jobs participate more frequently in parent-teacher conferences as well as in open house events typically held at the beginning of the academic year. Unfortunately, many American educators expect more than open house participation from these parents. They want them to volunteer in their classrooms, in fund-raising, fieldtrips, and other school-related events. Inasmuch as some of these immigrant parents see these teachers’ expectations of parental roles as being too demanding, others who might be willing to get involved in their children’s learning process might simply not yield to teachers’ request as a result of a language barrier. Some parents may be undocumented immigrants and avoid appearing in public places for fear of arrest and eminent deportation (Capps et al., 2005).

African Immigrant Students as Assets in the Mainstream Classroom

It is critical that teachers move beyond seeing their African immigrant students from a deficit lens to understanding their intellects and the rich frames of cultural and linguistic reference they bring to the classroom, which can enrich learning for all if properly exploited. There are two main culturally responsive ways to acculturate students and their parents to the education system in the United States which encompass newcomer orientation and parental involvement in the learning process of their children.

Parents’ Involvement in the Academic Process of Their Children

Another key to supporting African immigrant students academically is consistent and persistent communication and interaction with their parents. Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix (2000) posit that when it comes to participating in the education of their children, most immigrant parents do not become involved to the same extent as American parents because of a combination of factors such as language barrier and lack of knowledge about the American system of education. In fact, a more structured participation of parents in the educational process of their children can add to the technical know-how of teachers (Comer & Haynes, 1991). The immigrant children may lack the wisdom to provide quality information to their teachers, which can be used to inform CRT, but their parents could provide this information. Unlike their children, immigrant parents can furnish teachers invaluable information about their children’s present and past academic history which is critical in helping students transition from teacher-centered learning to a student-centered one. The more teachers know of their individual students’ cultural backgrounds, the more they can tailor their pedagogic strategies to meet the diverse students’ academic needs and interests. For example, unlike in the United States where K-6 students sometimes sit on the carpeted floor for a specific activity such as reading aloud, in many parts of Africa, students do not sit on the floor to learn when there are benches and chairs in the room, given that their floors are either typically cemented and cold or too dusty for students to sit on. Being aware that in a student’s home country, it was not in their class culture to sit on the floor with their legs crossed, is important; otherwise, the teacher might unjustly penalize an immigrant student who is restless and consistently stretches his or her legs when seated on the carpet. A culturally responsive teacher would easily notice the discomfort and rather than label the student as disruptive, he or she would either assign the student a seat next to his or her peers sitting on the floor, or he or she would ask the student to sit on the front row so that his or her stretched legs would not touch someone.

Furthermore, paying visits to immigrant children’s homes is a vital element of culturally responsive pedagogy. Besides amassing a wealth of knowledge about a student’s culture and funds of knowledge to inform classroom practices (Moll, Amanti, & Gonzalez, 2005), parents can learn a great deal of information about how to read to their children at home as they observe a teacher work with their children in front of them. Most African immigrant parents who voluntarily immigrated into the United States are high school graduates (Takyi, 2002). Thus, they have different patterns of reading and solving math problems with their children. These patterns of teaching or tutoring reflect educating children in the context of limited learning resources. For instance, recently arrived immigrants may not have been exposed to the U.S. currency before and may not immediately know the values of nickel, dime, and a quarter and let alone recognizing the coins from the drawing or picture on the back and coloring them correctly. Teachers could help parents take the cue from them on how to help their children with schoolwork in ways that do not contradict what teachers are doing in class. Also, behavior issues are less likely to occur when students know their teachers know their parents and can contact them any time. As one Detroit teacher stated about home visits,

When you have a kid walk into class, you just see the kid. But after a home visit, when that student walks into class you see his aunt, his uncle, the drawing pad that he brought to share with you—it’s a whole picture. I get immeasurable data about what inspires them and motivates them. (Flannery, 2014, p. 1)

The foregoing quote exemplifies the educational benefit of teachers’ home visits especially when they do not share similar cultural backgrounds with their students.

Newcomer Orientation

According to Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix (2000), orientation to the U.S. school system is necessary for immigrant students and their parents because they are not often familiar with course requirements, types of assessments, and the school program in general. Many of them do not know the reading levels and the tracks of their children because of the differences in the education systems of their home countries and the United States. Standardized tests and authentic assessments used in the United States differ from the academic assessments of the immigrants’ home countries. For this reason, GRE (Graduate Record Examinations), SAT, and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores do not accurately measure the academic knowledge of African immigrants. Government immigrant services and some nonprofit organizations may provide some forms of orientations to refugees and individuals on academic and cultural exchange programs (such as Fulbright fellowship); however, such orientations are rarely provided for those seeking legal permanent residence. Whether someone is seeking immigrant or nonimmigrant visa, there is generally almost little or no newcomer orientation for immigrant parents and their children about the education system that their children will attend in the United States. Considering that most African education systems are based on the different European models, specialization and tracking begin very early. Some education systems begin academic tracking at the end of the elementary education cycle, paving ways for students to take the vocational, general, and technical track as early as seventh grade. In general education, students must specialize by the time they are enrolled in high school or earlier. Hence, U.S. teachers may find newly arrived African immigrant children enrolled in high school classes either far more advanced than their American counterparts in the subjects of their specialization or lagging considerably behind in the subjects that were not part of their specialties in their home countries, but are path of the core courses in the United States. Many African students from the former British colonies who passed the General Certificate Examination (GCE) Advanced Level in the science subjects are often eligible for credit transfer in U.S. colleges because their high school courses have been evaluated to be equivalent to Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses. Unlike higher education institutions, many public schools are not versed with education systems around the world and as a result, they tend to finally identify the student’s appropriate academic level after a series of academic misdiagnoses and misinformed referrals to special needs and ESL programs.

Furthermore, timing in the different examinations varies from course to course, subject to subject, examination to examination, and education system to education system, depending on the targeted goal. For example, it takes 3 to 4 weeks to take the Cameroon GCE Ordinary and Advanced levels examination. Students are given 45 minutes per essay question as early as in the ninth grade. Thus, it often takes about half a day to take a GCE exam in just one section of a history course. Similarly, on the Cameroon Baccalaureate examination, one essay question in French literature is 4 hours long and one third of the students do not complete that one essay within the timeframe because critical thinking skills are required in answering the questions. The whole notion of multiple-choice exams is only beginning to gain traction in some African countries. The students, like their parents, have been used to essay questions and not multiple-choice questions. Thus, it often takes teachers several weeks in the summer to grade public end-of-cycle exams like the GCE and the Baccalaureate given the lengthy nature of essays and mathematical steps that students produce. The examination time culture in Africa influences the way African immigrant children approach test-taking in U.S. schools. These students fare better on essay questions than on multiple-choice questions, partly because of limited time allocated for those exams and partly because of limited knowledge about test-taking strategies on multiple-choice test questions. If no careful attention is taken to study the immigrants’ prior systems of education, teachers can easily conclude that these students have learning disabilities. Transitioning from different African systems of education that have limited didactic resources (Bipoupout, 2007), where neither breakfast nor lunch is served in schools, where the repetition rates are very high (Cameroon Ministry of Education, 1995), and where there is no school bus system, the African immigrant children easily thrive in American public schools when given an effective newcomer orientation that is culturally responsive.

In fact, immigrant parents, especially those who have children in high school, need to be advised on college admission criteria which unbeknown to them, tend to encompass not only ACT or SAT test scores and Grade Point Average (GPA) but also volunteering service hours, essays, and the number of Advanced Placement courses taken in high school.

Conclusion

CRT is an indispensable instructional tool in not only smoothing the educational and cultural transition of African immigrant students in U.S. P-12 schools, but also in expanding the knowledge base of teachers and students about unfamiliar cultures. It also serves as an instrument in explicitly and implicitly negating ethnic and racial stereotypes. Stereotypes in such cases are often negative and tend to diminish not only teachers’ expectations of their students, but also nonimmigrant students’ expectations of the academic abilities of newly arrived immigrant students. A thorough vetting and critical analyses of ethnic contents propagated in mass media is vital prior to dissemination in the school context given that the unintended misrepresentation of people and their culture could even be more damaging than doing nothing.

Depending on their academic levels and their countries of origin, African immigrant students bring into their classrooms a plethora of diverse experiences that were hitherto valued in their home countries until their immigration into the host country. These experiences must not be easily discarded upon entering a new classroom; instead, they can be used as a scaffold to attain new knowledge (Johannessen, 2004). To use those experiences as learning scaffolds, teachers need to know what they are in the first place. Just as linguists like Andrew (2007) and Cummins (2005) have hailed the advantage of first language acquisition in the learning of another language, so too does previous knowledge aid in learning new knowledge.

The rationale to teach about diversity is predicated on the premise that students are growing up in an environment that is becoming increasingly more diverse. There is a need to raise awareness of diversity in the society in order to help tailor their attitudes and beliefs about this reality in a more positive way. A collective engagement in multicultural education for both immigrants and mainstream students would speed up English acquisition for African immigrant students who are not already fluent in English or specifically in American English. As Derman-Sparks (1992) intimated, “[W]hile we give them the skills needed to participate in the dominant culture, we must also make their home culture, including their language, an integral part of the curriculum” (p. 21). The target here is to approach teaching for immigrants from a constructivist standpoint which in the long run benefits both immigrant and nonimmigrants as it expands their horizons and frames of reference as expounded by Emily Style (1988) in her theory of window and mirror curriculum.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Michael Takafor Ndemanu (PhD) is a scholar of multicultural education, social foundations, comparative education, and curriculum theory in the Department of Educational Studies at Ball State University.

Sheri Jordan (PhD) is a writing instructor at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, and her research interests have included applied linguistics research in English as a Second Language classrooms; inter-ethnic conflict based on linguistic and sociolinguistic difference (in the Los Angeles area); social justice and multicultural education; and the identities, literacy practices and educational challenges of transmigrants in the U.S.

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