Teachers’ Cultural Learning Challenges Follow Students across K-16 Educational Contexts
K-12 teachers and college faculty face parallel challenges working across racial and cultural mismatches between themselves and their students from LIMCCs. Moving forward, I rely on three important implications for faculty cultural learning in minority serving institutions (MSIs) from the literature reviewed on K-12 urban teacher thinking to support this argument as the premise for exploring how faculty working in a high-performing MSI think and act in response to their students’ cultural difficulties through empirical inquiries across Chapters 9 through 13.
The first is that the same racial mismatch between teachers and students in the K-12 sector exists in higher education. In Fall 2021, of the 1.5 million faculty teaching in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, 73 percent were white, 12 percent were Asian, 6 percent were Black, 6 percent were Hispanic, 1 percent were two or more races, and less than a half of 1 percent each were American Indian/Alaska Native or Pacific Islander (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). To this point we have reviewed in detail the ways in which teachers’ personal characteristics impact their work with students from LIMCCs, and made clear that teacher education preparation programs are failing urban teachers with one-size-fits-all approaches to multiculturalism that limit their opportunities for critical reflection on their own cultural lenses (Eisenman et al., Reference Eisenman, Edwards and Cushman2015; Martin, Reference Martin2004; Tatto, Reference Tatto1996). This strand of research has also argued that effective classroom management in multicultural classrooms requires that teachers learn to reflect on their personal backgrounds and regulate their emotions in response to student–teacher cultural differences at work (Davis et al., Reference Davis, Summers and Miller2012; Elias and Schwab, Reference Elias, Schwab, Emmer and Sabornie2014; Jones et al., Reference Jones, Jones and Vermette2013; Lee et al., Reference Lee, Pekrun, Taxer, Schutz, Vogl and Xie2016; Sutton et al., Reference Sutton, Mudrey-Camino and Knight2009; Warren, Reference Warren2014; Wubbels et al., Reference Wubbels, Brekelmans, Den Brok, Wijsman, Mainhard, Van Tartwijk, Emmer and Sabornie2014). Considering the dearth of research on culturally responsive teaching and classroom management in higher education, educators working in that sector could benefit from considering how similar psychosocial consequences of the racial mismatch impact their thinking and action in response to cultural differences between themselves and their students from LIMCCs.
A second implication extended here is that college faculty work with many competing demands on their time, and that these working conditions are similar to those that have long been identified in the K-12 literature as inhibitive to teachers’ development of the cultural competencies needed to enact culturally responsive teaching and classroom management strategies in practice. In the research on K-12 teaching, teacher challenges managing student behavior in diverse classrooms is attributed to their teacher education and preparation programs – specifically the lack of explicit training teachers receive on how to adapt their classroom management strategies to students’ culturally specific needs in multicultural contexts (Brown, Reference Brown2004; Reference Brown2005; Clement, Reference Clement2010; Emmer and Stough, Reference Emmer and Stough2001; Evertson and Weinstein, Reference Evertson and Weinstein2006; Freeman et al., Reference Freeman, Simonsen, Briere and MacSuga-Gage2014; Kwok, Reference Kwok2019; Long et al., Reference Long, Miller and Upright2019; Milner et al., Reference Milner, Cunningham, Delale-O’Connor and Kestenberg2018; Soodak and McCarthy, Reference Soodak, McCarthy, Evertson and Weinstein2006; van Tartwijk and Hammerness, Reference van Tartwijk and Hammerness2011). When urban teachers experience challenges helping themselves through challenging student behaviors and student–teacher interactions, they experience stress, burnout, and a higher propensity to quit (Friedman, Reference Friedman, Evertson and Weinstein2006; Raczynski and Horne, Reference Raczynski, Horne, Emmer and Sabornie2015). Like their peers in K-12 schooling contexts, college faculty also struggle without professional learning opportunities to develop the cultural competencies required to effectively manage student behavior in diverse classrooms (Burnell and Schnackenberg, Reference Burnell and Schnackenberg2015).
A third implication from the K-12 literature bridging the argument here is that – like their K-12 peers – college faculty are often left to address implications of the student–teacher racial mismatch for their everyday work with few organizational supports and little to no formal training on how to do so on their own. Research on student–teacher racial mismatch in higher education demonstrates that it has negative effects on the relational dynamics faculty and instructional staff share with their students in diverse college classrooms (Holland, Reference Holland2015; Hurtado et al., Reference Hurtado, Milem, Clayton-Pedersen and Allen1999; Meyers et al., Reference Meyers, Rowell, Wells and Smith2019). Furthermore, by the time students from LIMCCs get to college there is a shift in the higher education literature on teacher attitudes toward students’ cultural differences away from a caring and supportive orientation resolved to meet students’ culturally specific needs. K-16 students from LIMCCs face similar challenges acclimating to dominant cultural norms in the high school to college transition (Fryberg and Markus, Reference Fryberg and Markus2007; McKay and Devlin, Reference McKay and Devlin2016; Schademan and Thompson, Reference Schademan and Thompson2016; Stephens et al., Reference Stephens, Townsend, Markus and Phillips2012; Tyler et al., Reference Tyler, Boykin and Walton2006). However, much of the extant literature on issues related to classroom management in higher education inverts the lens on this topic such that students are expected to assimilate the dominant cultural norms embedded in academic cultures into their own worldviews or risk facing negative consequences. This is evident by the language used to describe challenging student behaviors in diverse college classrooms, such as classroom conflict and student incivility (Burke et al., Reference Burke, Karl, Peluchette and Evans2014; Holdcroft, Reference Holdcroft2014; Knepp, Reference Knepp2012; McKinne and Martin, Reference McKinne and Martin2010; Nordstrom et al., Reference Nordstrom, Bartels and Bucy2009; Rehling and Bjorklund, Reference Rehling and Bjorklund2010; Seeman, Reference Seeman2009). I discuss this phenomenon at length in Chapter 11.
In his 2009 book on preventing disruptive student behaviors in college classrooms, Seeman argued that faculty hiring processes typically do not include assessment of competencies for preventing disruptive student behaviors in college classrooms – resulting in college classroom environments whose intergroup dynamics resemble those of an urban K-12 school context:
The kinds of disruptive behavior in college classes are sometimes similar to those found in high schools. But, more often, these college disruptive behaviors are more sophisticated, more manipulative, and often involve more clever “alibis.” They are often behaviors that attempt to get through, or get by, “the cracks” in the teacher’s methods, syllabus, or personality.
The tone of this excerpt represents the aforementioned shift in the literature on teacher thinking in diverse classrooms that occurs as students from LIMCCs make the transition from high school to college: the same cultural differences considered cause for providing additional supports to K-12 students having trouble adjusting to dominant cultural norms in urban schools become cause to label them as disruptive or unprepared by the time they make it to college-level classrooms. This despite the research which has shown that maintaining ties to their cultural communities is necessary for students from LIMCCs to persist and succeed in college over time (Barbatis, Reference Barbatis2010; Dennis et al., Reference Dennis, Phinney and Chuateco2005; Guiffrida, Reference Guiffrida2006; Phinney et al., Reference Phinney, Dennis and Osorio2006; Terenzini et al., Reference Terenzini, Rendon, Lee Upcraft, Millar, Allison, Gregg and Jalomo1994).
Over the next five chapters I explore how college instructors’ learning-oriented values influence their actions in response to situations that highlight some common and culturally specific challenges students from LIMCCs experience in college, as well as their propensities for using traditional and culturally responsive classroom management strategies. The purpose of these empirical inquiries was to understand more about how psychological consequences of the cultural mismatch for faculty and instructional staff in a high-performing MSI impact their engagement in single- and double-loop learning about their students’ cultural differences at work.
Materials and Methods
Context: The City University of New York
Conducting research at the City University of New York (CUNY) offered a unique opportunity to explore teachers’ theories of action and action strategies for supporting the academic success of college students from LIMCCs. CUNY is the largest urban university in the country, serving students from a wide variety of ethnoracial and socioeconomic backgrounds across twenty-five campuses in New York City. In Fall 2023, 28.2 percent of students were Hispanic, 26 percent were Black, 22.9 percent were white, 22.5 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander, and 0.3 percent were American Indian or Native Alaskan (CUNY Office of Applied Research, Evaluation, and Data Analytics, 2024). CUNY students also represent a more diverse student body than usual, as is clear by some distinguishing features that speak to the presence of subgroups even within racial groups of students. For example (CUNY OAREDA, 2023; 2024; Lander, Reference Lander2024):
60 percent are first-generation college students, and 57 percent of students are Pell Grant recipients;
53 percent are working to pay for tuition, and 74 percent are working to cover their housing expenses;
61 percent are working to support their household and family members, while just 44 percent say they are able to work jobs that enable them to gain experience and build a career;
42 percent said they spent at least between six and twenty hours a week caring for other people, including parents and spouses, and 13 percent were parents of dependent children;
39 percent agreed or strongly agreed that if they could not find a job soon, they would not be able to continue on in college, and 38 percent said that working for pay had a negative effect on their academic performance;
34 percent were born outside the contiguous United States.
Another unique feature across CUNY campuses is that its faculty demographics features higher percentages of instructors from diverse racial backgrounds than the national averages. In Fall 2023, of the 30,960 full- and part-time instructional staff across its campuses: 17.3 percent identified as Black or African American, 3.2 percent were Puerto Rican, 12.8 percent were Hispanic or Latinx, 14.4 percent were Asian, 0.2 percent were American Indian or Alaskan Native, 1.5 percent were two or more races, 4.3 percent were Italian American, and 46.1 percent were white (CUNY Human Resources, 2023). In the CUNY student experience survey cited above, 67 percent of students surveyed said that they were either very satisfied or satisfied with the diversity of faculty. CUNY’s unique institutional characteristics and history make it an ideal context for examining how college faculty learn to integrate cultural knowledge about their students into their thinking and action strategies at work.
Since an initial surge of immigrant students matriculated to the university during the 1950s and 1960s, CUNY has maintained a longstanding record of targeted institutional efforts to recruit and retain students from LIMCCs (Lavin and Silberstein, Reference Lavin and Silberstein1976; Lavin et al. Reference Lavin, Alba and Silberstein1979; Reuben, Reference Reuben and Johanek2001; Richardson, Reference Richardson2005). In recent years, CUNY has garnered national attention as an exceptionally successful engine of upward socioeconomic mobility for students from LIMCCs (Chetty et al., Reference Chetty, Friedman, Saez, Turner and Yagan2017). CUNY’s unique student and faculty demographics, the external recognition it has consistently received for producing valued student outcomes for students from LIMCCs, and my experiential knowledge of the teaching culture across two of its campuses gained over five years spent teaching at CUNY prior to beginning the study informed my choice of study site and context.
My experience working as a participant observer during data collection also strongly informed both methodological and analytical choices throughout the research. An important methodological choice that was informed by my experiential knowledge of this context, for example, was the decision not to ask participants to self-identify their racial backgrounds. In the years I spent at CUNY, I spoke often with colleagues on both campuses about challenging the misconception that one could tell by looking at a faculty colleague whether they were better equipped to manage and respond to students’ culturally specific needs in or outside the classroom. I took away from my experience an understanding that it is safer not to assume a colleague’s job attitudes or work orientation could be determined solely by their perceived racial identities. From my perspective as an organizational researcher, the choice not to ask about race enabled me to feel sure that if race and class came up they would do so in participants’ own words; I would avoid imposing any implicit assumptions of my own about how their personal identities were shaping their responses.
The obvious drawback of this approach is that it was not possible to explore racialized differences in teachers’ use of espoused values associated with Model I and Model II thinking, or in their use of traditional and classroom management strategies. However, the guiding motivation in designing this study was not to assume race as a viable determinant of participants’ values and actions, but rather to reduce any opportunity for “filling in the gaps” – or making meaning of the participants’ responses in any way that was unsupported by the key action science frameworks guiding the data analytic processes. This choice also aligns with the intended use of constant comparative analysis (Glaser, Reference Glaser1965); literature on this method explains that its purpose is to develop grounded theory that can be tested with further research across various contexts and dimensions. Future research might directly examine relationships between college faculty’s racial and class backgrounds across the organizational, psychological, and social variables examined over the next five chapters.
Methods and Materials
Data were collected remotely in June and July 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic by Zoom video conferencing and telephone. Given the unprecedented nature of this time, one way I sought to create an equitable space for participants to contribute was to conduct the Zoom interviews without video (all others were conducted by phone). This choice was also informed by my experience teaching remotely during the early months of the pandemic, when it became quickly apparent that requiring students to keep their video camera on might inadvertently disadvantage those who felt their home set-ups were not adequate for videoconferencing. During the interviews, I found that this “double-blind” interviewing approach facilitated easier flowing conversation between myself and the participants. We were able to focus on how teaching looked in more normal times rather than strategies developed specifically for teaching during the pandemic. I excluded excerpts from the transcripts in instances in which participants began talking about teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Interviews followed a semi-structured, open-ended protocol format through which participants were asked to think aloud through their reasoning for action in response to six situations that represent common challenges CUNY students might encounter managing multiple responsibilities throughout their college experience. These were frequently recurring situations that I had observed and discussed with my colleagues over the years teaching at CUNY. The six situations presented to participants were the following (they appear in full in Appendix A):
(1) Funeral situation: Right as the semester starts, a student requests two weeks away from class to attend a family member’s funeral in another country. By the time the student plans to return, they will have missed four chapters worth of content and have just one week to prepare for the upcoming exam.
(2) Disruptive situation: A student is regularly disruptive in class and appears to be copying their homework answers directly from the textbook. When the student is approached about the plagiarism, they blame the instructor for not being good at their job.
(3) Single dad situation: A student parent has recently transferred from a community college and is working full time. He has had to bring his son with him to class on days he cannot find childcare and has barely passed the exams despite an earnest effort. He approaches the instructor and asks for help “thinking through his potential options.”
(4) Late without explanation situation: A student regularly arrives late to class with no explanation, but participates actively and aces the midterm. By the end of the semester, however, she stops coming to class altogether and does not hand in the final paper.
(5) Grade explanation situation: One student from last semester frequently arrived late to class with no explanation, nearly failed both exams, and did not participate in class at all. She only once contacted the instructor during the semester, to ask about having left behind a personal item in the classroom. Now, at the start of the new semester, she has emailed to ask for an explanation of her grade and why she was unable to pass the course.
(6) Absent after course enrollment verification: A student misses class for two weeks right after the instructor has submitted a form the registrar requires to confirm which students are actively enrolled in the course for that semester. The student returns and explains that she has been experiencing financial hardship and needs to work during the time class normally meets. She is absent again a few weeks later after promising she would be present more regularly.
These six situations represent common challenges CUNY students face as student-parents, student-workers, and transfer students; each of these student subgroups has a unique set of adjustments to make in working to acclimate to campus cultures designed to meet the needs of more “traditional” college students. These situations highlight how students from LIMCCs are not a monolithic group, but often represent multiple subcultures with distinct needs that cannot be addressed with one-size-fits-all policies. Thus, these critical incidents are projective instruments that help to identify themes in how teachers vary in their thinking and action in response to student challenges managing competing responsibilities across the multiple roles they occupy across their academic, personal, and professional lives.
Following each situation, participants were asked the same five questions to elicit their thinking about potential action strategies available for their use in response to these situations:
(1) From your perspective, what’s causing this situation and why?
(2) What would you do?
(3) What information did you hear in the situation that caught your attention?
(4) Do you think other instructors would agree about what information matters most here as you have described it?
(5) Can you tell me about your own experiences with a situation that this reminds you of? If you can, was there any difference in how you handled that situation than the one we are discussing now?
This interview protocol combined elements of two methods, one of which – situation sampling – is frequently used in the cultural psychology research. Situation sampling enables a researcher to explore participants’ thoughts and behaviors in response to a variety of real-life circumstances and conditions, increasing the likelihood that thoughts and behaviors observed are not situation-specific (Heine, Reference Heine2015; Kitayama, Reference Kitayama2002). The second method I draw from here is the critical incident technique, which is used in the organizations literature to directly observe participants’ responses to observable human activity, specifically their inferences and predictions about the person performing an act (Byrne, Reference Byrne2001; Hughes et al., Reference Hughes, Williamson and Lloyd2007). This technique enabled me to collect “direct observations of human behavior in such a way as to facilitate their potential usefulness in solving practical problems and developing broad psychological principles” (Flanagan, Reference Flanagan1954, p. 327; also Butterfield et al., Reference Butterfield, Borgen, Amundson and Maglio2005). Pairing the hybrid critical incident and situation sampling data-collection technique with a constant comparative approach (Glaser, Reference Glaser1965) to data analysis made it possible to inductively assess patterns in how teachers thought about and acted in response to the six situations across several rounds of iterative coding. I describe in more detail how this approach was applied to two separate inquiries made of the same data set in Chapters 9 and 11.
Participants
I identified potential participants for this research by referencing the course calendar for one of the two campuses I was teaching on during the Spring 2020 semester – the other was not selected because it had been the subject of prior research I had conducted on that campus. All Spring 2020 instructors on the second campus with publicly available email addresses received an email invitation to participate in the study. In the email, the study was described as research on how instructors make sense of, navigate, and strategize in response to the culturally complex dilemmas CUNY students commonly encounter in their everyday lives that impact their classroom behavior and performance. All participants received an electronic gift card worth $25 to a vendor of their choice for their participation, and all participant data were deidentified and anonymized prior to data analysis.
Of the sixty-two respondents, thirty-eight (61.2 percent) of them were adjunct faculty and twenty-four (38.7 percent) were tenure-track faculty. They represented sixteen academic departments across campus, including Accounting, American Studies, Chemistry, History, Political Science, and Sociology. Other demographic variables I collected from participants were: (1) number of years in the teaching profession, and (2) the number of CUNY campuses each participant had taught classes on (see Tables 8.1 and 8.2). I used these variables as proxy representations of: (a) instructor experience teaching at the college level and (b) their experience teaching students from low-income and other minoritized cultural communities at the college level specifically.
Table 8.1 Participants by number of years in the teaching profession
| Number of Years Teaching | Number (and Percentage) of Participants |
|---|---|
| 0–5 years | 38 (61.2%) |
| 6–10 years | 10 (16.1%) |
| 11–15 years | 6 (9.6%) |
| 16–20 years | 4 (6.4%) |
| 20+ years | 4 (6.4%) |
Table 8.2 Participants by number of CUNY campuses taught on
| Number of CUNY Campuses Taught on | Number (and Percentage) of Participants |
|---|---|
| 1 | 40 (64.5%) |
| 2 | 18 (29%) |
| 3 | 3 (4.8%) |
| 4 or more | 1 (1.6%) |
The primary focus was on analyzing gaps between instructors’ intentions and actions with regards to how cultural differences between themselves and their students are managed through complex student challenges – not racialized commentary on those cultural differences. Even so, commentary on how instructors experience the broader social, economic, and political contexts surrounding their institution and the extent to which they perceive that students’ cultural knowledge is valid information worth integrating into their own thinking and did provide insight to their cultural worldviews throughout data analysis.
Limitations
This was a single-site case study on one campus of a university system composed of twenty-five campuses, including both community colleges and four-year (senior) campuses. It is far from representative of the entire faculty community at CUNY, though a sample I found suitably sized for in-depth qualitative data analysis. A second limitation was that there was an uneven number of participants by years of experience, which I reconciled by focusing on qualitative analysis of the extent to which instructors’ learning orientations influenced their propensities for single- or double-loop learning in responses to student challenges – regardless of their career stages or any other demographic factors. Of course, it is quite likely these personal characteristics matter strongly for instructor propensities to engage in cultural learning about their students at work. I chose to focus on the content of teacher values and action strategies rather than speculate about their origins, which was beyond the scope of this research.
Finally, as previously mentioned, the interviews took place during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was clearly an unprecedented time. Though I sought to create neutral environments for all participants using the strategies described earlier, interviews conducted remotely do not include helpful cues from a participant’s body language that might have helped me better assess fluctuations in participants’ comfort levels throughout the interviews. However, all were informed upfront that they could withdraw from the study at any point and still receive full compensation for their time.
In Chapters 9 and 10 I explore how these instructors varied in their use and enactment of governing values associated with Model I and Model II learning orientations, and the implications those value expressions have for their inclinations to engage in single- or double-loop learning about their students’ cultures at work. In Chapters 11 and 12 I explore how instructors varied in their use of traditional and culturally responsive classroom management strategies, and the consequences of using these strategies – which I link to analogous action strategies associated with Model I and Model II thinking in the action science literature – for instructors’ behavioral worlds both in and outside the classroom. In Chapter 13 I summarize trends across the data in the previous four chapters in terms of evidence they provide that CUNY instructors in this study experience elements of both Model O-I and Model-II learning systems in this organizational environment.
