deepSEE Consulting

“Minnesota's lowest-performing schools are plagued by uneven teaching quality, fuzzy academic goals and minimal parent support, the Minnesota Department of Education says it has found.”

This opening paragraph from a recent Minneapolis Star Tribune article jumps right into what has almost become a national sport: trying desperately to figure out what’s wrong with the nation’s schools. All too often, however, we spend way too much time looking at the symptoms instead of the cause of the academic malaise.

I mean, don’t get me wrong—I think the school system is messed up, and I should know—I was a high school English teacher for five years, both in the inner city and the suburbs. I know what challenges both teachers and students face each day. But the beginnings of a solution are shown in what’s behind the problems mentioned above: lack of cultural proficiency.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t mean your grandma’s cultural proficiency—taco days and passing mention of Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and Hannukah; I mean serious, look-yourself-in-the-cultural-mirror proficiency. We can’t begin to really understand someone else’s point of view until we understand our own, and many of us, especially those of us who’ve grown up in the comforting arms of the dominant culture, aren’t really used to thinking about our own cultural norms, cultural comforts and discomforts, cultural assumptions. And until we do, we can’t really understand the potential impact of those assumptions on those who don’t share them.

Now, again, please don’t misunderstand—I’m not talking about taking white folks to task for being white folks. Frankly, I find that approach next to useless and potentially damaging to all involved. Everyone needs to understand their cultural starting point if they’re going to build proficiency in communicating comfortably and effectively across cultural differences.

Last week I attended the first annual Intercultural Development Inventory Educational Summit, sponsored by Dr. Mitch Hammer. It was attended by a wide variety of intercultural practitioners, teachers, and administrators from around the state. There was a lot of exciting discussion and planning, and the end result was to begin working out real, useful cultural proficiency standards for anyone involved in education.

Not a moment too soon.