Teachers take culture lessons

Arletha McSwain was shocked when her high school guidance counselor suggested that she enroll in trade school because her ACT score indicated that she was not college material.

Looking back, she said she realizes the counselor had not taken the time to understand her capabilities.

“Had my parents not been educators and believers in us doing what we wanted to, I may have listened to” the guidance counselor, said Ms. McSwain, who is now department chairwoman of early childhood and elementary education at Norfolk State University.

Such experiences are fuel for the Summer Institute for Urban Educators, a weeklong intensive training program that teaches educators how to bond with their students and their families so they can foster “cultural connectivity” and push the students to succeed, program officials said.

“We’re giving [the teachers] the ability to reach kids that are hard to reach. The ultimate goal is to make kids life-long learners,” said Rushern L. Baker III, executive director of the Community Teachers Institute (CTI), which hosted the program.

The program, held at the University of Maryland at College Park, concludes today. More than a dozen local educators are taking part in the program.

The program’s sessions focused on race, urban literacy and integration of hip-hop and language into the urban curriculum.

Some students, especially minorities in urban settings, are misunderstood because their teachers cannot identify with their ethnic or generational cultures. As a result, the students might lose interest in school or act out, program officials said.

The most effective teachers immerse themselves in their students’ cultures so they can become part of the children’s dynamic and get to know the students’ families on a personal level, said Ms. McSwain, who was one of the presenters.

One seminar stressed that one has to be comfortable with their own ethnicity in order to embrace that of others, she said.

“This is a specific, strategic process. It’s not just about liking everybody. It’s about knowing what works with this child, this ethnicity and this disability,” Ms. McSwain said. “When a teacher is culturally connected, there is nothing that a child won’t do for that teacher.”

More than half the students in urban schools do not graduate from high school, and they are three times more likely to be unemployed and 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than their counterparts in the suburbs, program officials said.

One seminar focused on creating successful literacy environments in school. The region’s urban literacy programs need much improvement, said Jennifer Turner, assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland.

“It’s really distressing in terms of low rates of literacy, particularly for African-American kids,” Miss Turner said. “So often the teaching conditions of urban schools in urban communities can make them feel they can’t make a difference.”

By the end, the seminars inspired local teachers to reach out and develop a bond with their students this fall.

“What I learned is that students want meaningful connections between the subject matter and the work,” said Carol Fraser, an 11th- and 12th-grade teacher at Northwestern High School in Prince George’s County. “They want it to connect to their lives. They want it to be realistic.”