User talk:Bren ocampo/sandbox

Another factor that could contribute to one’s willingness to assimilate can be based on their education. Finding methods to develop, incorporate and or implement cross-cultural awareness into core curriculum is a great start to ease assimilation on new immigrant students. In the study “Preparing teachers for Hispanic immigrant children: a service learning approach” by Gail G. Bollin (2017), it was reported that soon to be teachers who attempted to understand their student’s culture and found a way to integrate both the student’s culture and the dominant culture had the ability to make a connection and form a relationship with their student’s, which they did not believe they could do prior to being a part of the Multicultural Tutoring Project. One future teacher stated “I would have to say this experience allowed me to get a better idea how children of different cultures survive their education. Before this class, I never thought about how I would teach children of various cultures and how I would solve the problems many of them have” (p.182). Another stated, “the greatest thing I learned from this experience is that not all of the children in a classroom can be taught the same”(p.184) and “I also learned that students may not have the resources that I expect they would as a result of my own experience” (p.184). These future teachers were asked to keep student journals throughout the semester while they were a part of the project which required them to tutor in the homes of a Hispanic child from a school in the local community who were found to be having a hard time academically. Even though it was not the intent of this study to keep up with the children tutored and their academic progress, two faculty members from the school were able to inform the authors that the children tutored were found “staying in school longer ” (p.186) and fewer children were found to be retained. In another study by Jay R. Dee and Alan B. Henkin (2002) that aimed to measure teachers attitudes regarding cultural diversity before actually teaching multicultural courses through surveys, it was found that the teachers completely agreed in instigating diversity issues in their teachings and heavily agreed on equity and the value of diversity. These teachers also agreed that assimilation itself was not going to lead to student academic success.

Furthermore, in a study conducted by Nellie Tran and Dina Birman (2019), that focused on teacher expectations for Somali Bantu refugees, five categories were found in which teachers placed expectations; general acculturative expectations around language and knowledge, behaviors, internal attributes, classroom behaviors, and family/home which resulted in red flags for assimilation towards oppressed groups. Many of the teachers placed expectations with the mentality that the more time the Somali Bantu refugees and their parents were in the U.S. the sooner they would adapt and attempt to meet their expectations. However, this was not necessarily the case in reality since the teacher's expectations were based on their own culture and did not consider the Somali Bantu culture. Throughout the academic year, teachers found themselves changing their expectations as they began to learn more about the students for them to meet the expectations that were placed. This study was able to suggest that learning more about your students can help teachers place appropriate cultural expectations that can be met.