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Conclusions iron many studies on classroom Interaction with minority
children in the U.S.A. may Ъе summarized In the following points:
- culturally inappropriate learning contexts lead to poor performance;
,a context is inappropriate for a certain group of children if its
construction violates their cultural norms' (Au,1981:92);
- successful educational strategy at sch∞l is connected to discourse
modes prevalent in the children's community;
- it is necessary to identify the characteristics of learning contexts
children have experience of, in order to create culturally appropriate
learning situations at school.
The series of studies related to K.E.E.P. (Kamehameha Early Education
Program) in Hawaii is particularly important because they document how
the introduction of 'culturally appropriate' classroom practices actually
resulted in Improved reading performances. Drawing from an extensive
ethnographic literature, classroom interaction was structured as close as
possible to the community's 'speech economy': rules governing speaking and
turn-taking, adult Intervention, asking and replying to questions in the
community were studied, discussed with the teachers and used at school;
the structure of the 'talk story', a major speech event in Hawaiian
culture, was taken as the model for teacher-children interaction
(Au,1981; Boggs,1972 and 1985).
Community and family ethnography provides essential background
for understanding what goes on in classrooms and is a source of
hypotheses for designing and adjusting classroom practice
(Jordan,1985:11).
A similar successful intervention is documented with Iatlve American
children (Iohatt and Erickson,1981). These efforts represent a research
direction that moves away from the search for individual characteristics
of either the child or the teacher that would account for school failure;
it also goes beyond the sociological explanation in terms of 'mismatch'
(see 4.5.1) between the middle class values of the school and those of
minority children, in that teachers are not seen as necessarily belonging
to or having accepted the values of the class supposed to promote the
hidden curriculum. This may be an explanatory model for Western