Educational Discrimination: How far have we come?
Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of
Education, The University of British Columbia
[permission granted to reproduce if
authorship acknowledged]
Social justice has been a
theme in UBC’s teacher education program for many years. The Faculty of
Education has had an Indigenous Teacher Education Program for almost fifty
years. The program was once called the Native Indian Teacher Education. Beginning
in the late 1980s, one of the courses required of all pre-service teachers
included a mandatory unit on what was referred to at the time as “Aboriginal
Education.”
Cognizant that there is no
simple correspondence between knowledge and behavior, one of my colleagues at
UBC and I were curious to find out whether pre-service students would make
discriminatory judgements about the performance of Aboriginal students. We
created an experiment.[i]
We asked 50 pre-service teachers to make placement decisions based on the records of
24 fictitious students. We constructed a record for each student that described
each student’s prior academic performance from grade four through grade seven
in language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, music and art.
On one set of eight records, we indicated
that the fictitious school board had received funding to provide Aboriginal
programming for the students in that set. On a second set of records, identical
to the first, we included information indicating that the school board had
received funding to provide services for ESL students. No such information was included on the third
identical set, leading the pre-service teachers to infer that the students were
neither of Aboriginal ancestry nor students for whom English was a second
language.
We randomized
the order of presentation of all the records on a secure website to which
pre-service teachers had access and invited them to volunteer for a study to
examine and review the student records. 50 pre-service teachers volunteered to
take part. The 50 students were enrolled in a course required of all teachers
during the final term in the teacher preparation program. The first term of
that program included a mandatory unit that addressed social and educational
situations of females, "Aboriginal" people, persons with disabilities and persons
for whom English was not a first language.
In our on-line
study the 50 pre-service teachers were told that they were taking part in a
task designed to explore the kinds of decisions that beginning teachers make
about the programs to which students should be assigned when they make the
transition from elementary to secondary school.
The volunteers were asked to (a) review the 24
randomized fictitious student records, (b) consider the criteria for three
program options (remedial, standard or advanced), and (c) use a scale from 1 to
10 [with one representing the remedial program (Supplementary Learning
Assistance), five representing the standard program (Regular Grade Eight
Program) and ten the advanced program (Rapid Advance Program)] to
indicate their recommendation regarding the program best suited to each
student. The volunteers were encouraged to
use the full range of numbers from one to ten to locate their recommendation
for each student as close to the program to which they thought the student best
suited. The volunteers were told to make their decision based on student marks,
ignoring any other information on the record card.
Of course, if the
pre-service teachers paid attention only to the prior achievement of students, students
with high prior achievement should have received higher ratings and students
whose achievement had been poor should have received lower ratings. However, when
we compared the volunteers’ recommendations for “Aboriginal students” and “non-Aboriginal’
students, we found significant differences between some volunteers’ rating of
supposedly Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students. Aboriginal students were assigned
lower recommendations than their non-Aboriginal counterparts even though the
fictional students in both groups had identical records of prior achievement. The
decisions of some of the teachers were clearly discriminatory. Enough so that
the differences in the scores assigned were significant.
We conducted our
study a bit more than a dozen years ago. Since then reconciliation,
de-colonization, and Indigenization have become prominent themes in education,
including teacher education. One would hope that a replication of that study
today would show a marked improvement in outcomes.
Reconciliation
is about creating understanding of the devastating impact of settler
colonialism on Indigenous people and eliminating its continuing influence. In
education, we can still see manifestations of the lingering effects of
colonialism in the graduation rate gap between Indigenous learners and their
non-Indigenous peers, the enrollment gap in academically challenging courses,
and in higher rates of early school leaving. Lower expectations on the part of
some educators and administrators can be an important contributing factor.
[i] Riley, T. & C. Ungerleider (2008) Preservice
Teachers’ Discriminatory Judgments. The Alberta Journal of Educational
Research. 54(4) 378-387.
