Multicultural Education and Student Self-Worth
When I was in my doctoral program, one of my cohort mates (and one of my now dearest friends), proclaimed on one of our many late-night Friday Zoom meetups that “The core being of an educator is not just about academics, it’s about empathy.” Ali works at a “last chance” transfer school in New York City where she leads with empathy while teaching academics to students who have been kicked out of numerous schools, so many schools that her school is now the only one that will take them. She calls her students her “kids” and the gains she makes are not only on New York state’s Regency Exam, but also in the daily lives of her students.
While under any educational lens Ali’s impact on her students’ gains on the state exam are notable, it is the impact she makes on the self-worth and the self-efficacy of her students that is the most profound. Teacher belief is an instigator of how students self-perceive.[i] Research indicates that teachers’ beliefs about their students are transmissive, picked up either consciously or subconsciously by students and then internalized.[ii] This internalization is linked with students’ inherent need for connection.[iii] Regardless of age, the need for connection is universal and biological. But the role of connection in the life of a developing young person is of the highest consequence. Young people look to the adults in their lives for security and belonging. These protective factors happen, in part, through connection and contribute to a feeling of safety. When connection is not available from adults that young people look to with trust and respect, one potential outcome is that the young person internalizes the disconnect in the form of “there’s something wrong with me.”
Sometimes when Ali talks about her kids and the way the world views them, how even other educators view them, I am reminded of Fred Ebb’s final line in the song “If You Could See Her” from the musical Cabaret. Set in Germany during the rise of Nazism, the Emcee of the Kit Kat Club, a pre-war nightclub in Berlin, dances around stage with a gorilla, singing about the woman he loves despite how society “moans” when seeing them together. After evoking the tension between his love and the judgement of the outside world the Emcee concludes:
I understand your objection.
I grant the problem’s not small.
But if you could see her through my eyes
She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.
The animalization and objectification of the Emcee’s Jewish love is stark and points to the very workings of antisemitism, racism, sexism, classism, or any kind of marginalization and prejudice that occurs by those in power. I am reminded so frequently of this musical moment when Ali advocates for her kids because her voice strains as she tells everyone about how amazing they are. How smart and strong and funny and kind and capable they are—and if only they world could see them like she does, they wouldn’t look black and poor at all.
Self-worth—the individual belief in one’s inherent value—is impacted by a host of external factors. Children are surrounded by the beliefs of their caregivers, their peers, their teachers, their community, their society. While this cycle is challenging in any context, external factors and narratives surrounding immoveable qualifiers—such as race and the class into which one is born—are particularly problematic. Ali’s students come into her room with the internalized weight of too many years with too many adults reflecting the ugly beliefs that accompany our culture’s struggle to understand poverty, race, trauma, and a host of other experiences that are not easily reconciled. When a child moves through spaces and experiences, such as schooling, in which the adults’ beliefs about them are negative, they run the risk of internalizing these beliefs, often measuring their worthiness against these external factors and narratives rather than against their own inherent knowing of their own worth. As Eble and Hu argue: “Children’s beliefs about themselves and the world are influenced by their exposure to messages from society” (p. 1).[iv] What happens when the messages we hear about ourselves are consistently negative?
Through my research, I’ve come to regard self-worth as a super factor. It impacts learning, achievement, engagement, wellbeing, growth mindset, efficacy, regulation—the list goes on. Because of its consequences, consideration for how it develops is vital when considering educational approaches. This recognition is why, in part, schools must consider multicultural approaches when training teachers and selecting curriculum. Multicultural education aims to rebuild learning institutions so that students across diverse backgrounds benefit from educational equality[v]. Among the many benefits of equality is an environment in which messages regarding one’s worth can be presented through a positive frame. Educational institutions which do not engage in a multicultural approach run the risk of presenting narratives in which marginalized students are viewed as less than. While there are many contexts in which these narratives might be presented, an easy example is noted by multicultural researcher Paul Pederson: “ …representations of the outsiders implies both including those who are like us and excluding those who are not like us, in which there is an implied superiority-inferiority relationship” (p. 28).[vi] It is this implication of superiority-inferiority that contributes to internalized messages about self-worth. Even if there is no explicit statement of otherness or superiority, simply by excluding multicultural perspectives from content integration, pedagogy, the knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, and school culture, students from all backgrounds receive messaging about which stories and cultures are worthy of focus.
One of the most profound places in which students receive messages about their worth is through student-teacher relationships. Teachers wield incredible influence in shaping the self-concepts of their students. The positive teacher-student relationship is a powerful agent for aiding in students’ sense of worth, which, providing a feeling of safety, in turn, provides a productive framework for how students approach academic tasks. Conversely, a negative teacher-student relationship has wide-reaching consequences, often resulting in the student’s lack of confidence in approaching academic tasks. Looking to teachers as authority figures, students read cues from teachers’ verbal and nonverbal interactions as a marker of perceived worth. Hallinen[vii] notes that self-concept and student feelings about school directly link to student behaviors in school, such as persistence in academic tasks, and school attachment. When we talk about behavior in school and when we talk about learning gains, we miss an essential influencing factor when we fail to talk about self-worth and its connection to teacher belief and teacher-student relationship. This correlation requires intentional focus on marginalized students and the ways in which marginalization impact self-worth. Gershenson et al. [i] delineate consequences of teachers’ beliefs on students’ sense of self, highlighting the negative influence teacher stigmatization has on educational attainment for marginalized students: “…teachers’ stigmatization of information-poor racial minority students could create a feedback loop that functions like a self-fulfilling prophecy” (211). We spend a lot of time in education discussing learning gains. But when we fail to have deliberate conversations around belief, self-worth, relationships, and the steps needed to implement a multicultural approach for all students, we risk not only an educational system that contributes to the negative self-concept of marginalized students (a form of violence), but we limit our ability to make the learning gains we so vehemently focus on.
During the writing of this post, I sent Ali an early draft to make sure I had my details correct. I asked her if she felt the Cabaret analogy was a step too far. She replied: “I get why you might think it’s too far, it’s too far except its true, people do treat my kids like animals.” As we talked, she noted how her students verbalize that they’re treated like animals. She forwarded me pieces of interview transcripts from her research on her dissertation. The transcripts are raw and tough to read. One of her former students describes her perception of how her teachers viewed her in school: “She's the girl that…she's so angry. I don't know what she's angry about, but she's just that way… and she's just dangerous, like she’s some sort of animal, you can’t work with her…but it's – I'm a kid…and a lot of kids my age and at that age is just crying out, literally just for help. Like, that's literally all we want.”
At this moment in our American culture, there is a great deal of fuss and politicization about race in education. To what extent that fuss makes headlines, you cannot change what we know from research – learning is linked to our sense of self, to our sense of safety, to our sense of belonging. You cannot effectively teach children subject area skills without these conditions. Education is about academics and empathy. When our kids tell us we treat them like animals, that they are crying out for help, it is our duty to listen, do the work, and make active changes.
*Quotes from Ali’s former student published with permission
[i] Gershenson, S., Holt, S. B., & Papageorge, N. W. (2016). Who believes in me? The effect of student-teacher demographic match on teacher expectations. Economics of Education Review, 52, 209–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.03.002
[ii] Egloff, F., Souvignier, E. (2019). Effects of teacher belief adaptivity on students’ reading skills. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 35(4), 955-973. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-019-00448-2
[iii] Cushman, P., & Cowan, J. (2010) Enhancing student self‐worth in the primary school learning environment: teachers' views and students' views. Pastoral Care in Education, 28(2), 81 95. https://doi.org/10.1080/02643944.2010.481311
[iv] Eble, A., & Hu, F. (2020). Child beliefs, societal beliefs, and teacher-student identity match. Economics of Education Review, 77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2020.101994
[v] Banks, J. (2016). Cultural diversity and education: Foundations, curriculum, and teaching. Routledge.
[vi] Pedersen, P. (2000). The rules of multiculturalism. In A handbook for developing multicultural awareness (3rd ed., pp. 23-41). American Counseling Association.
[vii] Hallinan, M. T. (2008). Teacher influences on students’ attachment to school. Sociology of Education, 81(3), 271–283. https://doi.org/10.1177/003804070808100303
