Running Head: SCHOOLING IN THE UNITED STATES INQUIRY PROJECT

Schooling in the United States Inquiry Project

Kelsey Hatley
Colorado State University

In order to find out more about schooling in the United States today, it is necessary to
examine the system. In observing and interviewing a classroom teacher and interviewing a
community member, many things can be learning about schooling. There were two interviewees
for this project: Natalie Dudley and Jesse Cardenas. Natalie Dudley is a sixth grade Language
Arts teacher at Preston Middle School in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is in her late thirties and is
a Caucasian woman from a Midwest background. She has a Masters degree in English
Education from CSU. Dudley is piloting a new type of classroom with another teacher in her
department, Joy Decker. Dudley and Decker teach their English classes together so students get
the chance to collaborate with another class and benefit from the instruction of two teachers.
Jesse Cardenas is a Technology Specialist at the Loveland Boys and Girls Club in Loveland,
Colorado. Jesse is a Mexican American in his mid-thirties. He has lived in many regions all over
the U.S. and has his Bachelors degree in Mathematics. The two individuals have differing views
on the purposes of schooling, though there hopes and concerns for the future of education are

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similar. Dudley feels that the purpose of schooling should be to create educated, democratic
citizens and Cardenas believes that school should help students prepare to pursue successful jobs.
The two individuals had very different views about what schools in the U.S. should be
doing for students. Dudley was earnest in her belief that schools should educated students to
become informed, democratic citizens who can communicate effectively and find the resources
that they need (personal communication, April 6, 2015). This kind of belief reflects one that is
held by scholars in the field of education, such as Fernndez-Balboa & Marshall (1994) talk
about in their article. The authors discuss how to create these democratic, participatory citizens
by focusing on creating a classroom with more dialogue and less teacher-centered lecturing
(Fernndez-Balboa & Marshall, 1994). By teaching from a model where the students have
classroom based on the importance of dialogue, teachers can accomplish this kind of purpose
(Fernndez-Balboa & Marshall, 1994). It is easy to see that Dudley follows this kind of model in
her classroom. Dudley spent the majority of her time focusing on relationship building activities
and encouraging dialogue with and among her students (see Figure 1). Dudley and her coteacher, Decker, focused on having the students build discourse skills and critical thinking skills
in the majority of the activities they asked their students to do. It was clear that the activities
were geared towards pushing the students thinking to really consider questions like How?,
Why?, and So what?, which pushed students to think deeply and critically. Dudley and
Decker also focused on only doing short, mini-lectures so they were not seen as the primary
source of knowledge in the room. Dudleys goals for helping students to communicate
effectively were seen in the classroom in a very concrete way because one of the learning targets
for the classes was to build discourse skills with their peers (see Observation Log, p. 5). Students
in Dudleys and Deckers class were generally very engaged and focused on big picture goals.
While Dudley clearly believed in idea that schooling should foster educated citizens for a

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democratic society, Cardenas beliefs about the purpose of schooling were centered more on
tangible, economically-centered goals (personal communication, April 1, 2015). Cardenas
believes that schools should focus on helping students to be able to pursue jobs with higher
paying salaries (personal communication, April 1, 2015). He spoke about how schools needed to
help students gain the skills necessary to be successful in the work force, whether that was to be
able to go to college to get a good job or to go straight into a career from high school (personal
communication, April 1, 2015). While the two had differencing views about the purpose of
schooling, they still both believed in the idea that schooling should be student-centered (J.
Cardenas, personal communication, April 1, 2015; N. Dudley, personal communication, April 6,
2015). The differences between the two individuals appeared again, however, when it came to
their experiences in the classroom and their views about the effectiveness of schooling.
Cardenas and Dudley both had different experiences in regards to how well schools are
working and meeting the needs of their students. Cardenas had a personally positive
experience with his schooling, but felt that the school system itself did not work well for him
(personal communication, April 1, 2015). His family moved around when he was growing up, so
he got to experience all kinds of schools in different settings from urban schools to rural schools
(personal communication, April 1, 2015). He felt that this gave him a unique experience and
viewpoint on how the different kinds of schools worked. However, he often felt that the
schooling system did not work well for him because he felt stuck in his bilingual classes
(personal communication, April 1, 2015). Having grown up in a Mexican American household,
Cardenas was more comfortable using Spanish for the early part of his life (personal
communication, April 1, 2015). Once this became clear to the schools, he was placed in bilingual
classes. However, he felt as though this held him back because they pulled him out of his regular

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classes and he often missed important content as a result, which left him feeling lost when he
reentered the mainstream classroom (personal communication, April 1, 2015). Cardenas said that
this problem was eliminated when he got into college, and school became much more intuitive
and fluid for him, but his experience in public schooling was difficult. This seems to reflect the
reality that Nieto & Bode (2012) write about in their work. According to Nieto & Bode (2012),
Rather, it is the schools perception of students language, culture, and class as inadequate and
negative, and thus the devalued status of these characteristics in the academic environment, that
help explain school failure (p. 258). When schools fail to take into account that diversity (like
linguistic diversity) is a good thing that enriches education for all students, they end up creating
programs (like Cardenas bilingual classes) that can hinder students. Though often programs like
that are meant to help students, they are based on the idea that students with different learning
styles or languages need to be fixed in some waymainstreamed before they can truly
succeed. This suggests that there is something wrong with them and those kinds of implicit
messages are picked up and internalized by students. It seems as though this harsh reality is not
the same at every school, however, as Dudley has had different experiences with schools meeting
the needs of students.
Dudley believes thatin her experience at least, and she was careful to phrase it that way
schools are doing much better in meeting the needs of all diverse learners (personal
communication, April 6, 2015). She believes that there are an abundance of resources and that
she has been lucky in having supportive and innovative administrators who are willing to make
sure that she has the resources and training she needs as a teacher to meet the needs of her
students (personal communication, April 6, 2015). It is clear in her teaching that she works to
teach to Gardners (1983) multiple intelligences. During the observation hours she targeted

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kinesthetic, intra personal, interpersonal, visual/spatial, musical/auditory, linguistic, and

logical/mathematical (Gardner, 1983). Dudley also works to include multiple representations of
non-dominate cultures in her classroom, which Nieto & Bode (2012) suggest is incredibly
beneficial: A complete education needs to include both the norms and canon of the dominant
culture and those of the dominated cultures because including culturally relevant curriculum is a
valuable way to challenge a monocultural canon (p. 260). Notably, Dudley and Decker are
currently teaching a unit on activism and they focused on Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani activist
for education rights for women (see Observation Log). This shows that they worked to include a
role model from a non-dominate culture. Malala was not the only activist from another culture
students could research and write about, there were countless others. At Preston Middle School,
ELL students, like Cardenas, are often in the same coursesnot in special classes that pull them
away from their regular classes. Teachers work to accommodate for those students so that they
do not miss out on regular class time (personal communication, April 6, 2015). It also seemed
like Dudley and Decker were aware of gender issues in the classroom. Chapman (2005) writes
that the American Association of University Women published a report in 1992 indicating that
females receive less attention from teachers and the attention that female students do receive is
often more negative than attention received by boys. (Bailey, 1992) In fact, examination of the
socialization of gender within schools and evidence of a gender biased hidden curriculum
demonstrates that girls are shortchanged in the classroom (p. 1). This is still often the reality
that many girls face in classrooms in the U.S. However, during the observation there were
actually slightly more girls acknowledged/ called on during discussions than boys (see Figure 2).
However, boys did tend to raise their hands more, ask more questions, and were more likely to
call out their answers. Dudley and Decker seemed aware of this and seemed to work to call on

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both girls and boys equally, trying to minimize the times that boys tried to speak over girls
talking. So it seems that in the classroom observed at least, there is an awareness of issues of
gender and culture in the classroom and an effort to create an equitable learning environment.
While they differed on other issues and both had different cultural backgrounds and
education, Dudley and Cardenas shared similar hopes and concerns for the future of education.
Both interviews expressed similar concerns about standardized testing (J. Cardenas, personal
communication, April 1, 2015; N. Dudley, personal communication, April 6, 2015). Cardenas
wished for it to be eliminated completely because he believes that it does not prove anything
about a students worth or intelligence and it is harming students because it is so high stakes
(personal communication, April 1, 2015). Dudley does not want to get rid of testing completely,
but she does not want it to be as prevalent as it is now (personal communication, April 6, 2015).
She worries about the implicit messages it give to kids and about the ways in which the results
are usedespecially since she does not really have a lot of faith in their applicability (personal
communication, April 6, 2015). Both Dudley and Cardenas want the future of education to be
more student-driven, though they approached that issue in different ways (J. Cardenas, personal
communication, April 1, 2015; N. Dudley, personal communication, April 6, 2015). Cardenas
wishes for better programs to help students of every culture and to close the inequality gap in the
education system today (personal communication, April 1, 2015). Cardenas hope calls to mind
the reality that many students face, according to Nieto & Bode (2012): We are dealing, it
would seem, not so much with culturally deprived children as with culturally depriving schools.
And the task to be accomplished is not to revise, amend, and repair deficient children, but to alter
and transform the atmosphere and operations of the schools to which we commit these children
(William Ryan, qtd. p. 258). In order to fix some of the inequalities and to work towards a more

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inclusive and affirming future, teachers need to work to have multicultural education in their
classrooms. DiAngelo and Sensory (2010) argue that part of working toward a multicultural
education is working to Understand how the experiences of people of Color and other
marginalized groups has been obscured in mainstream curricula, giving us an incomplete picture
of our nations histories. Read research and scholarship on multicultural education and ethnic
group histories in continuation of your education (p. 100). These kinds of strategies may help
teachers to work toward a more inclusive classroom. Cardenas also wishes for a better bilingual
system and one that does not work from a deficit model (personal communication, April 1,
2015). Dudley also wants the classroom to be more student-centered, though she focused on the
classroom being a place where students are challenged to grow and focus less on what is right or
wrong and more on the process of learning (personal communication, April 6, 2015). While these
goals seem slightly different on the surface, the argument can be made that they are the same at
their core. Both Dudley and Cardenas hope for a future that looks more inclusive and
intellectually challenging for students, instead of personally or culturally challenging. They
believe in affirming all students and all cultures and in the power of education to really change
students futures for the better, which is inspiring to see and hopefully with hopeful visionaries
like these two, schooling in the U.S. can improve and transform.
This project shows that there are many differing opinions about the purpose of schooling,
and varied experiences with schooling, but that there is hope for our education system. The
interview with J. Cardenas showed that the education system, while attempting to become more
inclusive, has had its faltering. While programs like bilingual education were meant to help
students, they were not based on the best model of education. However, based on the interview
with N. Dudley, there seem to be schools out there now that are working towards a better, more

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inclusive system for diverse learners. This new direction seems to be influenced by a wider
variety of resources and more innovative and supportive administration, which bodes well for the
future. Both interviewees had the same hopes for the future of education, which were inspiring,
yet reveal the same problems with our current schooling system (deficit models, standardized
testing, etc.). However, if people like Dudley and Cardenas are willing to speak up to policy
makersusing their knowledge and experienceperhaps schooling in the United States can
become a system that helps learners of all kinds and works towards actually creating equitable
opportunities for all.

References
Chapman A., (2005). Gender Bias in Education. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from Research
Room Edchange Multicultural Pavillion:
http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/genderbias.html
DiAngelo, R., & Sensoy, O. (2010). Ok, I Get It! Now Tell Me How to Do It!: Why We Cant
Just Tell You How to Do Critical Multicultural Education. Multicultural Perspectives,
12(2), 97-102.
Fernndez-Balboa, J., & Marshall, J.P. (1994). Dialogical Pedagogy in Teacher Education:
Toward and Education for Democracy. Journal of Teacher Education, 45(3), 24-34.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic
Books.
Nieto, S., & Bode, P. (2012). Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural
Education. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

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Percentage of Time Spent in Activities

60
50.4

50

Management

40
30

Relationship Building
Instruction

28.5
20.7

20
10
0
1

Figure 1

Gender Acknowledgement
32
31

31
Females

30

Males
29
28

28

27
26
1

Figure 2
Observation Logs

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10

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11

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12

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13