Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Disadvantage: The Environmental Case 85below). Efforts directed towards the widening of existing abilities andattitudes are predicated, above all, upon the realpolitik awareness that however enlightened educational policies might be the world outsidethe school gates remains considerably less so. While waiting for themillennium, then, children should be equipped with tools to help themmake their way in less-than-perfect societies.It is entirely reasonable, in other words, to reject the notions of culturaldeprivation and deficit while still admitting that differences mayconstitute social deficits. This can occur, for example, if teachers reactnegatively to disadvantaged children and expect less of them than ofothers. A ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ can be created when a child, sensitiveto differential treatment from the teacher, comes to fulfill loweredexpectation (see Alvidrez & Weinstein, 1999; Archer & Edwards, 1982;Rist, 1970; Wigfield et al., 1999). Classic demonstrations of this are foundin the ‘Pygmalion-in-the-classroom’ studies of Rosenthal and Jacobson(1968); see also Fuchs (1973) and Rist (1970). These soon led to others,including Cooper (1979), Cooper and Good (1983), an expandedtreatment by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1992) and, most recently, a criticaloverview by Jussim and Harber (2005). Two recent papers haveemphasized something I mentioned as particularly important, in theopening chapter here: thus, Terrill and Mark (2000) and Ladd andLinderholm (2008) deal with the influence of early labelling andexpectations among beginning and ‘pre-service’ teachers. The formerstudy focuses upon black children and second-language learners, whilethe latter demonstrated (again) just how easy it is to affect teachers’judgments in this case, by showing them a video of children who wereallegedly pupils in good, average or bad schools. The authors built uponan earlier investigation by Pichert and Anderson (1977), and were able toshow that the perceptions of teachers who believed that the children theyhad seen were from poor schools ‘selected and recalled more negativebehaviors compared to those participants who believed they wereviewing a ‘‘typical’’ school’ (p. 237).For the purposes of their study, it was important that the videoprepared by Ladd and Linderholm depicted actions that could bevariously or ambiguously interpreted. ‘Was the image of a child pattinganother on the back a form of encouragement or support’, they write(Ladd & Linderholm, 2008: 234), ‘or was it hitting or pushing?’ This isreminiscent of the classic study by Condry and Condry (1976) in whichjudges were shown a film of an infant confronting various stimulusobjects; half were told that the baby was a boy, the others that it was agirl. Allowing for some variation attributable to judges’ experience with