Cultural Issues: Don't Accuse and Blame, Understand and Respond

On the political right, it's often popular to chalk up the inequalities of the world to poor people's “cultural factors” or “cultural reasons."  Culture of poverty, the culture in schools today, and so on.  The left runs from this sort of thing like Herman Cain from a Libya question ("just want to be sure, we're talking about ... culture here?").  But culture does affect folks in poverty, including adult learners, and that has to be kept in mind.

Toward the end of my first, six-month adult ESOL class an interesting phenomenon occurred.  Several students had managed to graduate from our English for Employment program without completing resumes.  They'd done all the career-awareness exercises in class, but when it came to meeting with my colleague caseworker to write resumes, no dice.  

What happened?  All of the students had made appointments with our caseworker, but had no-showed.  Some no-showed twice.  I hadn't tracked this, and had no idea until it was too late.  I was confused: my students could arrive bright and early every day for my morning class, but couldn’t get themselves to a single afternoon appointment with my colleague over the course of six months?  I had taken the time to sit down with the student, find a convenient time on my appointment software, seen her write the date and time in her calendar?  Given her a confirmation card?  And she’d gotten a reminder phone call from the receptionist?  And still, no-shows?

What's more, these were the best possible students from the 80 who had applied for the class.  They emerged from our screening process as the most reliable, most persistent, most able to succeed.  And they couldn’t come to a meeting they had no reason to forget, for a purpose—to help find a job—they all swore they cared about.  

If this had been just a couple no-shows--the occasional emergency with a student's kid cropping up--I wouldn't have been too worried.  But it was a consistent problem of no-showing.  Why?  Was it a different meaning to "signing up" for things in my students' native countries?  Was it the fact that most of my students were used to systems and institutions that don't expect much from them: the public-housing office, the welfare department, immigration?  Hard to say, but it seemed there were certain attitudes or approaches among students that deemphasized the caseworker meetings that were the lifeblood of our agency--and, for our clients, the ticket to completing a resume.

I'll admit to a flash of frustration that day as I reviewed all the missed appointments in our appointment log.  But most of the frustration was at myself, for (a) not anticipating this might be a problem, and (b) not having a system in place to check that our students were actually following through on their appointments.  Rather than point the finger at students and say, "It's a culture problem," I tried to understand and respond.  For our next cycle, we tied attendance of caseworker meetings to class attendance.  When I made an appointment for a student to see a colleague of mine, I emphasized that it was as important as showing up to class.  Every couple days, I checked the appointment log to make sure students were following through on seeing our caseworkers, and if there was a no-show, I checked in with the student to figure out what happened.  Every two weeks, I met with my career-services colleague to check on student progress--and we even created individual strategies for each student.

Culture matters.  People carry culture with them from their families, their communities, their home countries.  They develop cultural responses to the things they deal with every day.  As I learned, even if "culture" seems to a be a problem, as educators, rather than accuse or blame, we should understand and respond.