Developing Cross-Cultural Competence: A Guide for Working With Children and Their Families (2nd ed.): Families with Native American Roots [Chapter 5]
Eleanor W. Lynch, Marci J. Hanson
This book draws on the insights of authors from a variety of racial, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds to provide practical advice for working with children and families from similarly diverse backgrounds. Part 1 introduces the issues at the heart of such work, and includes the chapters "Ethnic, Cultural, and Language Diversity in Intervention Settings" (Marci J. Hanson), "Conceptual Framework: From Cultural Shock to Cultural Learning" (Eleanor W. Lynch) and "Developing Cross-Cultural Competence" (Eleanor W. Lynch). Part 2 introduces culture-specific information about the history, values, and beliefs common to a number of subgroups within the United States population, focusing on issues related to family, child rearing, health, and disability. Cultures thus addressed include: Anglo-European (Marci J. Hanson), Native American (Jennie R. Joe and Randi Suzanne Malach), African American (Winnie Willis), Latino (Maria E. Zuniga), Asian (Sam Chan), Philipino (Sam Chan), Native Hawaiian and Samoan (Noreen Mokuau and Pemerika Tauili'ili), and Middle Eastern (Virginia-Shirin Sharifzadeh). A separate chapter by Eleanor W. Lynch and Marci J. Hanson addresses the increasing numbers of multicultural/multiracial families. Lynch and Hanson also provide a final chapter synthesizing the accumulated information presented and discussing implications for interventionists and their service delivery systems
Eleanor W. Lynch, Marci J. Hanson. Developing Cross-Cultural Competence: A Guide for Working With Children and Their Families (2nd ed.): Families with Native American Roots [Chapter 5] (1998). Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.: Baltimore, MD.
(570 pages).
Language: English
Reading Level: Difficult
Formats Available: Printed Material
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Intended User Audience:
This book was developed primarily for service providers who work directly with young children and their families. Administrators, faculty/trainers, and
policy-makers will also find this book useful. Beginners and individuals with advanced level of experience will find this book useful.
This book was developed for a universal population for whom English is the first language or who are proficient in English.
This book was developed for use throughout the United States and its territories.
Product Development:
Contributing authors for each of the chapters in this book represent various cultural and linguistic groups. Information regarding each individual author is
available in the book.
Product Evaluation:
For the first edition of the book, Paul H. Brookes Publishing Company conducted a blind review of each chapter prior to publication. Reviewers included
individuals with expertise in cultural and linguistic issues
Product Dissemination:
Over 10,000 copies of the first edition were sold in the United States and its territories. From May to July 1998, over 2,000 copies of the second edition have
been sold.
Review #1
About the reviewer:
The reviewer is a doctoral student in early childhood education,
studying multicultural literature. Her research focuses on
representations of Native Americans in children's literature. She is
Pueblo Indian and grew up on a reservation in northern New Mexico.
The majority of her teaching experience is with Native American
children in off-reservation boarding schools. At the university she
currently teaches children's literature and has previously taught in
the early childhood teacher preparation program.
Audience:
The preface of Developing Cross-Cultural Competence states that this book is for a full range of professionals who provide "educational, health care, and social services (e.g., educators, nurses, speech-language pathologists, audiologists, occupational and physical therapists, physicians, social workers, psychologists) to families of children who have, or are at risk for, disabilities." Part II of the text offers basic information and cultural perspectives on the following groups: European American, Native American, African American, Latino, Asian, Pilipino, Native Hawaiian, Middle Eastern. It also includes a chapter on children of mixed-race marriages.
Clearly, the audience for this book is professionals with little or no background in working with culturally diverse children with disabilities. Given the basic information provided about the various cultural groups, it can be used as a college text or used in vocational programs designed to provide education and training for professionals, paraprofessionals, and students in the range of fields indicated above.
Strengths of the Material:
The authors have done a fine job of organizing material and selecting authors to write the chapters on cultural perspectives.
Part I includes three chapters starting with a chapter discussing ethnic, cultural, and language diversity in intervention settings. Emphasized in these three chapters is the fact that no culture is static or rigid and that an interventionist working with a family from a given cultural group may find a broad range of behaviors and practices that may or may not reflect the family's culture of origin. Also emphasized is the fact that professionals who take time to develop knowledge about their client's background enter the intervention better prepared to help the child. Especially helpful is Appendix A, "A Cultural Journey" which poses a series of questions that professionals can reflect on their own biases and perspectives. Much of the literature in multicultural education stresses the need for all people to develop an awareness of these biases in preparation for their work with culturally diverse populations, as it will provide insights into how and why differences exist.
Part II includes nine different chapters each containing information on a specific ethnic or cultural group. Each chapter follows the same basic format covering background, religious origins, contemporary life, values, and beliefs. Each chapter ends with a summary followed by a set of appendices that address values, cultural courtesies, and holidays.
Worth noting is the inclusion of a chapter on European American people. Scholars of multicultural education and diversity argue that all people will be on an even-playing field only when each is "exoticized" to the same extent. Currently, most of the material written on diversity views people of color as "other" and considers "white Americans" to be the norm. The authors of this text have attempted to "exoticize" all cultures, including white America. All groups receive equal attention in this book.
The authors of the Native American chapter provide historical background that is necessary for understanding the state of Native Americans today. For example, in the early assimilation years, children were taken from the homes of their parents and sent away to off-reservation boarding schools. In these schools, children were prohibited from speaking their native tongue, and it was impossible to participate in spiritual ceremonies. This governmental policy contributed to a loss of language and knowledge of cultural practices and resulted in a greater level of acculturation into American society than had been present prior to these forced removals. However, within most tribes, there are individuals who continue to speak the native language and elders continue to practice traditional ceremonies and pass this information on to younger people within the tribe. In this chapter, this is referred to as "a continuum of acculturation" and examples are provided to help understand the concept.
This reviewer looked closely at the chapter on Native American culture and found it to be respectful in tone and format. For example, religion was not addressed in a single subheading, but combined with the subheading on values. This reflects the culture of most Native American tribes in which religion is not a separate part of their lives but is present in values that guide everyday activities. Much of Native religion and spirituality is closely guarded, but the authors of this chapter presented enough information about sensitive issues (e.g. death and dying) without exposing material tribal elders and spiritual leaders would find objectionable.
Demographics of contemporary Native Americans are included with reminders throughout the chapter that there are over 500 different tribal groups each with distinct cultural practices. Finally, the appendices at the end of the Native American chapter are particularly useful.
Limitations of the Material:
The only limitation is that the text is densely packed with information. While the writing is clear, the content of the chapters may require a slow and careful reading and re-reading particularly for a reader who is new to the ideas presented in the book.
Adaptations:
No adaptations to the book itself are necessary. However, the book is densely informative; and emphasizing the key points in each section, a workshop leader, professor, or instructor using the book with a class of students can guide the students through the text.
Although the authors are careful to note that there is diversity within any cultural group, it will be useful to continually revisit that theme when reading and discussing the chapters.
Generalizability:
Although the text is primarily written for intervention professionals who will work with families and at-risk children in culturally diverse populations, the chapters on cultural perspectives of specific groups are well done. As such, the text is useful for all teacher education programs as well as in-service workshops for teachers and school staff currently teaching and working with children. This is especially true, given that in today's classrooms, inclusion of special needs children is the rule, not the exception.
Recommendations:
I recommend this book. I find the inclusion of a chapter on European American cultural perspectives particularly noteworthy. This makes the book inviting because no culture is being established as the norm by which all others should be compared.
Producer's Response:
This review provides readers with an essay on larger issues that were triggered by reading several chapters from Developing Cross-Cultural Competence, especially the one titled "Families with Native American Roots." Each of the issues raised by the reviewer is intriguing and worthy of consideration and discussion within the fields of Early Childhood and Early Childhood Special Education. The extent to which the issues can be directly applied to evaluating the usefulness of the book is more obscure. The reviewer's primary concern is that this material, which discusses cultural competence and calls for self-reflection, is presented in an academic book thus limiting its access to those who are not likely to use books as a primary source of information or those who speak languages other than English. This concern is unquestionably true. A primary goal of this book, as stated in the preface, was to increase our knowledge, the knowledge of our university students, and the knowledge of professionals who provide early intervention services. That goal, like any other, created the limitations suggested by the reviewer. There is however, a resolution to his concern. One of the most exciting aspects of the CLAS Institute is the ability to reach out to people and programs throughout the nation to find materials that are appropriate for a variety of audiences and goals. As the reviewer suggests, this book may not be the material of choice for everyone; but through access to CLAS, they may find other materials that meet their specific needs.
Eleanor Lynch
Review #2
About the reviewer:
This reviewer's work experience has taken the form of special projects
performed through grants and contracts developed from successful
proposals. In the decade of the 1970s, he traveled extensively
throughout the United States as an applied anthropologist adapting
ethnographic research methods to three large-scale national
evaluations: Head Start, Follow Through, and Teacher Corps.
Since 1981 he has lived in his hometown in the Southwest, where
his work has focused on developing effective adult learning
strategies, including print and video materials, for use in
Native American early childhood settings. He has a BA and MA from
the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has served as an
administrator, teacher, and grants specialist in a community college
serving large numbers of Native Americans. Furthermore, he has
extensive experience as a private consultant in education.
Audience:
Respect for cultural and linguistic diversity. This is a review of one chapter in a long textbook with many authors from different cultural backgrounds. The chapter reviewed here is entitled "Families with Native American Roots." I was also asked to scan the introductory and concluding Chapters 1,2,3 and 12 (by the editors) to help set a context for reviewing Chapter 5 here.
"When interventionists show respect, all other shortcomings, such as not knowing the culture or language of the family, become secondary." As a reviewer who grew up in Indian country and has a professional career of more than 30 years in Indian education, this comment strikes me as a wise and succinct summary of what we need to know. The question then becomes the following: How do we move into the realm of respect? For example, what does it look like to behave with respect? What does it feel like to receive respect? What is really going on in the mind, in the heart, in the body, in the world when "respect" is "what's happening"?
Recommended practice. Books can assemble words printed on paper that somehow deal with "respect," and the book reviewed here accomplishes this task with a brand of academic competence. It also seems important to this reviewer to point out that words in a college textbook embody a huge array of culturally defined premises, many sketched in this book in the chapter, "Families with Anglo-European Roots". [Ed. Note: Lynch and Hanson write, "Because many of the terms were selected to reflect what is accepted within the United States, readers in various sections of the country may use, prefer, or be familiar with another term (e.g. Hispanic or Chicano versus Latino). The terms used to refer to Anglo-European Americans who make up the dominant culture in the United States vary throughout Part II. This inconsistency of terms was preserved because it exemplifies the differing cultural perspectives and points of view. Language is a powerful tool in any interaction, and the way it is used is full of lessons. The primary lessons related to terminology in this edition are that terms change, and the ones chosen should describe groups of individuals based on their preferences."]
This book asks us as readers to be self-reflective about our own culturally defined experiences. However, it does not seem to me to honestly engage the reader in a searching exploration of the systematic biases imposed on all of us by the format of an academic social science textbook intended for use in traditional European American college classrooms. In this short review I would like to raise some preliminary questions about how respect resonates with recommended practice in the arena of personnel preparation and how college teaching with textbooks such as this one can undermine the pursuit of respect.
As I see it, this is a problem, not just for the single book under review, but for our whole profession of early childhood intervention and education. My first reaction upon scanning this book is that this is an excellent academic account of the issues around cultural and linguistic diversity that have come to my attention as an active participant in Indian education and early intervention. An example is summarized so eloquently in the quote about respect that guides this whole review.
In the spirit of promoting constructive dialogue among those of us interested in cultural diversity, I would like to suggest further consideration of questions like these: What can words on paper teach us about complex human qualities like respect? What could other kinds of adult learning experiences teach us about respect? What kinds of value systems concerning respect do textbooks endorse and what value systems are debased by the "hidden curriculum" embedded in playing the classic academic game? What does it really mean to act with respect when one reads or when one writes or when one does the work of early intervention with culturally and linguistically diverse families?
This review focuses on Chapter 5 in this textbook, which has the intention to show a highly literate reader how to work effectively as an early interventionist with Native American families who have their roots in ancient non-literate traditions. I sense that there are some important issues embedded in the line of questioning introduced in this review, and it is appropriate put forth these questions in the context of a review of personnel preparation materials for an organization named Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS).
And I must say, having raised these issues, I am uncertain about what comes next. I have the feeling that this set of issues is somehow like the metaphor used in family therapy: an elephant that everyone in the family has learned to subconsciously walk around is in the living room, but no one openly acknowledges its enormous presence.
Congruence between recommended practice and cultural and linguistic practice. Perhaps our profession is in need of a therapeutic intervention to deal with the elephant in our living room, or perhaps the queen denial will see us through another day, another week, another year, another millennium. Perhaps we ask for congruence where all we have is a gentle irony: we use books as a primary method for teaching professionals about respect, while in culturally diverse contexts literacy is not always and everywhere a primary value. It is after all, only a minute segment of planetary time in which the written word has been so honored.
The poet Robinson Jeffers, taking the long view, put these words on paper: "After all, after all we have endured. Who has grown wise?" It might be worth noting that he was not writing a textbook. Perhaps there is something about the whole machinery surrounding the producing, marketing and using of academic textbooks that makes it hard for this reviewer to see how respect can be learned primarily through books. Maybe the poets and the novelists can better put words on paper that touch the heart. And this is important, for Native Americans have demonstrated in their actions and their words, including those in this textbook, that respect is somehow connected to the heart more than the mind.
Strengths of the Material:
Strengths and limits seem all bound together in this textbook. Developing Cross-Cultural Competence is a well-organized, clearly written textbook. Its intended audience of college students and early interventionists with college degrees will be well served by it, if the audience can accept the enormous bias embedded in its traditional academic approach to the intellectual and emotionally challenging subject of human diversity.
This book, judging from Chapter 5 on Native Americans and the introductory and concluding chapters, is a thoughtful presentation of complex intellectual information that is too often just barely mentioned in other human service delivery textbooks, and for this the editors and authors should be commended. It has the earmarks of a serious academic endeavor, including extensive citations from technical literature that can be broadly classed as social sciences. There is a detailed author index and subject index and many appendices. There is a tight, predictable outline with effective headings, subheadings, case examples, and summaries. The many authors of the chapters have direct experience with the many cultural groups. It is an extensive and focused treatment of cultural competence as a specific training outcome.
Limitations of the Material:
However, this textbook's weaknesses reveal the weaknesses of the genre - classic academic textbooks like this one simply do not embody with much sophistication the art of teaching adult learners how to behave with respect in diverse human communities. There is brief language exhorting the reader to attend to the importance of treating each person as an individual -- sitting right next to extensive discussions of social science generalizations that cannot help but come awfully close to that politically incorrect phenomenon named stereotyping. Looking at a book like this one, it might seem that social science generalizations are just a fancy way to construct stereotypes.
The fact that the information is so academically presented is disquieting also because this textbook aims to fit into a category of training materials for early interventionists who work with culturally diverse families. In our teaching of adults in the 1990s, many of us, judging from the continued success of textbooks like this one, are long on preaching and short on showing and doing. This practice continues despite the fact that at the beginning of this century people like Piaget, Dewey, and Montessori were articulating insights about children's learning that turn this age-old formula on its head. There has been an equally long time frame in which the parallels between child learning and adult learning have been recognized in the technical literature.
Adults are different from children in many respects, including their capacity to sit still and endure (and sometimes even enjoy) a lecture. However, a textbook like this one that is basically an extended series of lectures communicating a large body of current intellectual information, somehow does not seem to be fully congruent with the rhetoric of individualization and self- exploration it espouses. There are a few suggested exercises of self-exploration. The "cultural journey" mentioned in the chapter invites the reader to reflect on a thought-provoking series of questions like this: "Imagine that for a week out of this year you will become a member of another cultural or ethnic group. Which group would you choose to be a part of for that week? Why?"
But this kind of interesting question is thrust to the margins, placed in what the editors call an appendix, and there is no sustained support in the text itself for the individual reader who might set out to seriously explore this kind of question. This is in contrast to the textbook by Elizabeth Jones titled Teaching Adults: An Active Learning Approach, published in 1986 and still in print from NAEYC. In this book Jones demonstrates what it looks like to put questions like this at the center of the adult learning experience rather than at the margins, and her textbook is a very different reading experience from the one under review. Interestingly Jones is not cited in the author index of Developing Cultural Competence, even though her extensive body of work is aimed at basically the same audience and grows out of a similar intellectual heritage.
Another contemporary textbook that takes self-exploration seriously comes from a related field, interpersonal communication. It is titled Looking Out -- Looking In, by Ronald Adler and Neil Towne, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1975 and has been updated every three years or so. As part of its presentation strategy, this book uses extensive excerpts from a wide variety of printed works such as novels, self-help books, and cartoon strips, as well as drawings, charts, and photographs of high quality. Again this work is not cited in the author index.
For all its virtues, and they are many, Developing Cultural Competence is fundamentally a textbook relentlessly centered in mind games. The two other textbooks cited from related fields show that this focus is not a requirement of the category named "textbook," even though it is a common feature.
There obviously are individuals among us who have developed considerable cross-cultural competence, even with the limitations of the traditional texts we surround ourselves with in academia. I would venture a guess that all the authors and editors of this textbook are among them. I would also guess that most of what we do as competent cross-cultural practitioners did not come into our behavior through the route of reading traditional textbooks. This reviewer suggests it is worthwhile for those of us deeply involved in diversity issues to meditate on this assertion as we set out to identify useful materials for personnel development for early childhood education and early intervention.
For example, looked at from the point of view of a facilitator of adult learning, how do you assess the performance of adult learners who use this textbook as a primary route to developing competence in cross-cultural settings? Do you give timed tests about who said what in the vast technical literature cited? Academics are often tempted to "test to the text," and what is valued most is typically revealed by what is attended to in the evaluation process.
To note additional strengths we must return to the margins. It should be celebrated that at the end of this book, in a short section called "Suggested Readings and Resources", there is a wonderfully eclectic list of novels, plays, and films, many of which have touched this reviewer's heart in ways that influence profoundly my behavior. It may be worth meditating on this as well. A recent film that I would add to the list of contemporary Native American works is Smoke Signals.
At the beginning of each chapter are a few words from books other than textbooks, such as these that begin Chapter 1 written by Andre Malraux: "Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved." We might indeed answer the question "Who has grown wise when words such as these are put up front?" Yet we see that this kind of language is in fact pushed to the margins when the book is viewed as a whole.
There are 570 pages of words in this textbook providing much useful if prosaic detail about cultural diversity, and yet there are not many pages with the power of the beginning words: art, love, thought, centuries, enabled, enslaved. Think about it and feel it: wisdom can be made of words, as the Native American poet, novelist, and visual artist Scott Momaday suggests in his work with the monumental title: "Man Made of Words."
The first paragraphs of the textbook likewise develop a beautiful metaphor showing how garden plants and human individuals form interdependent communities. This is worth celebrating: a book about human service delivery that does not leap immediately into the human without first paying homage to the natural world which forms the matrix within which all of us operate.
To begin with acknowledgment of the natural world is familiar to this reviewer from experiences in Native American communities. "All my relations" say the Lakota, meaning the stars, rocks, waters, plants, animals. "Mother earth and father sky," say the Dine. "All of it and everything are what we are chasing," says the Armenian-American playwright William Saroyan.
But again the beginning promises were not fulfilled in the bulk of the book. By the second page we are in the all too familiar human-centered territory of the Western-oriented academic or bureaucrat. Even the chapter on Native Americans, though an inspiring and competent assemblage of fact and perspective very useful for early intervention work, is presented with little sense of the centrality of the natural world to human affairs.
Again the Celtic American poet Robinson Jeffers: "It is only a little planet. But how beautiful it is. Water that owns the north and west and south. And is all colors and never is all quiet, And the fogs are its breath...All the free companies of windy grasses...pure naked rock...A lonely clearing; a little field of corn by the streamside; a roof under spared trees. Love that, not man apart from that..." (from Not Man Apart: Photographs of the Big Sur Coast; David Brower, editor; Sierra Club, publisher; 1965.)
Adaptations:
Suggestions for adaptations are bound up with strengths and limits. Perhaps the approach to words used by poets and novelists points us in a direction that can yield more congruence between college teaching methods and practice in the field, yielding more unity of mind and heart than the traditional academic textbook format has encouraged. It may be a matter of balancing fewer prosaic, mind-centered words with more poetic, heart-centered words. It may require paying homage to the peer-supported work of self-constructed learning that Elizabeth Jones models for us. Perhaps this is a direction for individual facilitators to use in adapting the existing second edition of Developing Cross-Cultural Competence; and perhaps this is an approach the authors themselves could explore in preparing a third edition of this book.
Generalizability:
Not available for this review.
Recommendations:
Recommended. Developing Cross-Cultural Competence is an impressive accumulation of academic knowledge. For many users this is a virtue that counts heavily, and this reviewer is among those. I stand in awe of what has been accomplished by these authors in the chapter on working as an early interventionist with Native American children and their families and in the introductory and concluding chapters.
This is good and useful information that is not easy to do well. Our profession is enlightened by this work. This reviewer recommends that this textbook be promoted and used by those who are adept with college level English. It is like a fine series of encyclopedia articles on the specific topics that stand at the exact center of the CLAS mission. It is a splendid addition to a reference shelf.
And at the same time there is something disturbing about this display of technical academic mastery. The call for self-reflection that is so prominent in this textbook seems to have not much disturbed the elephant in the living room mentioned earlier. The authors give little attention to the fact that a high degree of literacy is a precondition for use of this textbook with families who are culturally diverse and who are often not themselves literate.
For example, are we to suppose from the example set by this textbook that people who may not quite command English as a second language, but who are native members of culturally diverse communities, should not be prepared for serious work as early interventionists because they are not now fluent in college level academic reading and writing? What does this kind of textbook say to that kind of person? Are we teasing out some characteristics of the hidden curriculum in academic- centered teaching and licensing when we explore this kind of question?
What does it take beyond literacy skills to build bridges between culturally diverse communities who have members who may not much value literacy and communities of academically adept people, who obviously value literacy highly? What would it look like to show respect across such bridges? Are we who are adept at academia assuming that a high level of literacy is a defining characteristic of those who can develop cross-cultural competence? What other kinds of training materials are out there, beyond those that rely on such a high degree of literacy?
This reviewer is struggling with questions such as these in my own work as a facilitator, scholar, and writer. I am holding the mirror up to myself here, and I don't see easy answers for any of us. But it does seem that these kinds of issues should be made part of the process of selecting exemplar materials for personnel development that reflect cultural and linguistic diversity in early care, education, and intervention. There is resonance among strong words like literacy, respect, science, poetry, mind, heart, and our profession has not yet brought it into full focus.
Producer's Response:
The reviewer's positive comments about Developing Cross-Cultural Competence, particularly the chapter on "Families with Native American Roots" affirm the value of a material that provides information without stereotyping, emphasizes the considerable diversity that exists within groups, and highlights the dynamic nature of culture and language. Ensuring that each chapter was respectful and that sensitive issues were handled with sensitivity was an important goal for the editors and the contributing authors alike. The reviewer's comments suggest that this was accomplished in the chapter on "Families with Native American Roots." Striking the appropriate balance between sharing information that is helpful to interventionists but does not stereotype, intrude upon, or inappropriately disclose the values, beliefs, and traditions being discussed is not easy. Having contributing authors with life experience in the issues was essential and gave each of the "Roots" chapters a unique voice; however, we recognize that no single individual can adequately speak for all. The reviewer's comments on the value of including a chapter on Anglo European Americans are also appreciated. Including this chapter was important to us for two reasons. First, as she states, we did not want the Anglo European American culture to be viewed as normative - simply one among many. Second, we wanted those of Anglo European American ancestry to recognize that they, too, have a robust culture with its own beliefs, values, and traditions.
We concur that the chapters are "densely packed with information" and, despite the clear and interesting writing of the contributing authors, may require more than one reading. Perhaps with each re-reading the reader will re-focus, find new information, make additional connections, and re-evaluate his or her own perspectives in a new light.
Eleanor Lynch
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