Michael Johnson!

Essential Question S3b!

What is cultural proficiency and why is it important educators understand this?!
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Growing up, my father was someone less than tolerant of cultural differences. I believe

that my generation is one that has initiated real change as far as acceptance and promotion of
cultural difference. I will admit though that it is really hard to see, acknowledge and understand
the many cultures that face teachers today. Falling into the idea of cultural pre-competence
seems to be the trend within the school in which I work. I think as a whole we really want to
know and encourage, but it is a pretty steep learning curve and we dont like hurting feelings
when mistakes are made.!
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Cultural competence and its links to the essential elements of cultural proficiency seems

to be the direction for success as a future administrator. Valuing diversity, managing differences
has to be the initial steps to making the biggest change within a school. Can we reflect as
adults, look ourselves in the mirror and evaluate our cultural capacity? Developing and
understanding our place in the move toward proficiency will never get rolling if we cannot fully
understand our current situation as individuals and as an institution.!
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Does our school have a destructiveness, blindness approach to culture? One of

incapacity? If this is in fact the case, lots of work needs to be done. I am curious how schools
in regions of diverse culture deal with these situations compared with schools that fall into the
little to no cultural diversity category. My sons attend a school in which cultural diversity is not
very prevalent at all. I wonder how a staff member who has been teaching for many years in
this school would see moving to a school like I am in now. My point is this, maybe institutions
dont even know they lack cultural proficiency.!
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My experience in La Crosse has been one of great change. Today we are embracing

more cultural differences than ever before, sometimes multiple times within a year with the influx

of new students. Students are coming to us with more diverse backgrounds than ever before.
There have been training for these changes, but the work has to be done by the teacher and the
direction has to come from our administrator. I cant help but think of how the staff varies in their
understanding of diversity, but also how the variety of generational differences play a role in
decision making. Further more, how the administrator observes these differences differently
than I may because I am not around the school nearly as much. The question, what is our
staffs collective cultural proficiency and what are we going to do to move up the cultural
continuum? This question will be interesting to address from an administrative level.!
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Hope is one of those things that students and parents are looking to the school to

reinforce. The promise of a high quality education for everyone (colmdavis 2014) means that
when a student is sent off to school by parents, they hope and expect their child will be cared for
and supported throughout the day with the intention of improving both socially and academically.
That being said, Jim, you shared the story from Hamilton Elementary when the parent you
spoke with did not want their child to succeed in school because they may leave and be
successful somewhere else, thus, not caring for the parent. This seemed so far from the norm
for me that I spent some time just thinking how someone comes to that statement. Is it cultural
or selfishness, maybe just my cultural blindness thinking out loud? !
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When that ethnically diverse parent sends their student off to class for the day, I am sure

the thought of white privilege and the barriers that are created for their child because of this
phenomena would be incredibly frustrating. Until doing some reading on the subject, I was blind
to this concept. I knew about male privilege and the problems that creates for both ethnically
diverse individuals and women; the white privilege examples really opened my eyes. The store
clerk may look at their inventory and say, I am supplying what has the biggest demand, which
comes from the caucasian population. The African American consumer looks at the store as not
being diverse in their inventory and may feel animosity toward the clerk. What a challenge this

situation is for so many. What are out schools doing to encourage white privilege and what do
we do to change that? I think a closer look is needed.!
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One of the essential elements for cultural proficiency is the need for your curriculum

areas to include a cultural perspective. A couple of math series ago, Connected Math was
purchased by the school district of La Crosse and their attempt to include the cultural
perspective was so new to me. They would use pictures with ethnic diversity in them as well as
more culturally influenced names for the characters in their word problems. I totally understood
what they wanted to do, but the names were often distracting to my students that it often caused
them to lose focus on what the problem was asking. Now, I assume that was not the case in the
other middle schools, or even other schools around the country where diversity was at a higher
percentage than my school. Now that Longfellow is getting to be similar in our percentages of
ethnic groups, I wonder if we still had Connected Math, would that still be the case. !
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Like I said earlier, I believe my generation is so different from my fathers. I believe that

we have come to that pre competence phase, maybe approaching competence toward cultural
proficiency. I see the younger staff in my building, and their numbers have been increasing
lately, looking at culture through a different set of eyes. It seems to me that they are not as
judgmental as maybe some of their predecessors may have been in relation to culture.
However, they are still lacking the experience that only years of working with diverse groups can
teach you. I started my first job out of college in a school with a large hispanic population. That
was new for me, coming from a virtually all white high school and UW-La Crosse. It took me
some time to learn what makes that culture and the perspective towards education
understandable and improve the success those students were having in my class. !
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Years later, working with multiple ethnic groups daily, my learning continues and I believe

that it is critical for a principal to understand the culture of the students within the building and
generate an understanding of where your staff is at in relation to cultural proficiency. My guess

is, any school you walk into would have a staff all over the cultural continuum, hopefully
avoiding the destructive, incapacity, and blindness levels. If the administrator has a grasp on
the cultures within the school, then they have the responsibility to start moving their staff in the
right direction through professional development.!

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Davis, C. (2014). Infinite Hope, The National Equity Blog. National Equity Project.