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October 28, 2010

Preparing students for a diverse world

Carlos Cortes

Carlos Cortés

The United States is rapidly on its way to becoming a pluralistic nation. Around the middle of the 21st century, the white majority will shrink and the nation will become a society in which no single racial or ethnic group represents a majority of the population.

“We’re all coming together, but we’re not sure what it all means,” said University of California-Riverside professor emeritus of history Carlos Cortés, in his School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Excellence Lecture, “The Changing Face of America.”

“What does it mean to be in a pluralistic population? What does leadership mean? What does being a professional mean in those situations?” asked Cortés, author of several books on multiculturalism and diversity.

“What does it mean when an 18-year-old is entering the University of Pittsburgh or any university in the United States and we’re saying ‘We want to prepare you for the future?’”

The question is an apt one for educators who are charged with preparing students for a world that will be dramatically different from the world today.

“Outguessing the future is a hellish thing. It’s not easy,” Cortés said. “When we’re structuring undergraduate education, in a sense we’re all implicit futurists — We’re preparing people for a world that we’re not quite sure about what it’s going to entail and what it’s going to mean.”

One thing is certain: “Diversity is going to be part of our future,” said Cortés.

“The framework on how to make diversity a meaningful part of the curriculum and the future-looking part of the curriculum is still awash with dissent and I don’t think we’re ever going to come up with ‘the’ answer. I don’t see this as a problem that problem-solving techniques are going to resolve,” he said.

“But I do see it as a place where recognition of these — not only of the changing realities of demographics, but the changing attitudes about those changing realities  — ought to be a part of a good undergraduate preparation for the future.”

Cortés, who has consulted on development of diversity requirements at colleges and universities, said such policies represent a step forward. But, he said, “I have never found a diversity requirement that I’ve liked.

“I have yet to see colleges and universities grappling with the kinds of essential issues of what it means to prepare young people for a future in which diversity will be a pre-eminent factor.”

The concept of cultural competency has come to the fore in recent years. “The question is how can we make cultural competency — since it’s the reigning term — something that is part of our perceptual and analytical framework on what we’re doing without becoming so reductive that we’re trying to metricize it into statistical measurements to prove whether you’re a good multiculturalist or not?” he said, cautioning, “I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that lends itself to metrics.”

Cortés offered the following thoughts on preparing undergraduates for a future in a diverse nation in an increasingly globalized world.

First, he said, students must understand diversity. Cortés noted that while many businesses or institutions have developed diversity statements, there’s no agreement on exactly what diversity means.

“I think that’s a danger because it simply becomes a code word without meaning anything,” Cortés argued.

What is diversity?

“To me, diversity does not mean difference. Nor does it mean variety. If diversity was only another word for variety or another word for difference, we wouldn’t need it,” he said. “Diversity refers not to individual differences; it refers to patterned differences based on the groups to which you belong: Race, gender, religion, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, ability,” he said. “If you believe every individual is just a freestanding human being unattached to anything … then in fact there’s no reason to ever study groupings of people.”

Once there is a recognition that the groups to which an individual belongs may have an influence, “then you’re on the road to saying diversity is real, it means something and therefore we’ve got to contend with it,” Cortés said.

“The first step is simply the admission that belonging to a group has meaning to your life, including belonging to groups over which you had no or little choice about whether you belong to them,” he said.

“Diversity is an outgrowth of the recognition that equity in America is partially group based,” Cortés said. “‘Partially’ because we’re not prisoners of groups, but we’re influenced by them.”

Understanding that groups make a difference leads to another question: What do we need to learn about those groups in order to understand their significance in individuals’ lives? “That’s where the issue of cultural competence comes in,” Cortés said.

The value of generalizing

Undergraduates need an opportunity to grapple with the concept of culture as well as the content of some of the cultural groups that make up the world around them, Cortés said.

More and more people are afraid of making generalizations for fear of stereotyping. “If we don’t generalize, we almost can’t say anything about anything,” Cortés said. “If we talk about a nation and its culture, you’re making generalizations. Talking about men or women … the fact that men or women may be different, you’re talking about cultural differences. Race, ethnicity and religion: Why study religions of the world or of our nation if those religions don’t have some meaning for individuals who are part of them?”

Cortés said, “I find just the ability to have healthy use of generalizations while avoiding stereotyping is a huge learned skill. If we don’t help students learn to be able to function with constructive generalizations — which all science is based on — and avoid stereotyping, then we haven’t equipped them with stuff they need to function in a diverse society.”

Students need to contemplate what it means when people of different backgrounds come together, he said. “They’re not just people, they’re people who come from groups. Those groups have meaning. What does it mean when Christians and Jews come together? Or Jews and Muslims? Or Muslims and Christians? Or black and white?

“It’s not just people with different skin colors or people wearing different kinds of icons around their neck or different kinds of clothing. … There’s human content behind it when you bring different sorts of folks together. That’s why the study of how cultures and groups come into contact becomes such an important part of analyzing the world around us.”

Self-understanding

“College is the ideal place for students to begin to really have a sense of their connection to a diverse world,” Cortés said. “What does it mean to be a man or a woman? What does it mean to be black or Latino or Asian or white? What’s it mean to be part of the different ethnic groups? What’s it mean to be gay or straight? How does this influence my life?

“What does it mean, what doors does it open, what things do I need to know about?” he said.

“And since in fact group-ness is part of me, then I also need to recognize it’s a part of you.”

History

In addition to understanding their own and others’ relationship to their culture, students need to develop a grasp of the historical processes that have formed today’s culture.

“We can’t just forget the past because institutions have grown up based on history and culture,” he said. “Rules have grown up — sometimes you don’t know why — and memories build up in people and in nations and in groups that have real ramifications,” he said, citing minority underrepresentation in medical research today as an example of collective memory that arose based on history, including the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

Understanding how institutions and groups have evolved is important, he said. Using the Constitution as an example, he noted the document was “born with asterisks” to the basic tenet that all people are created equal, citing restrictions on citizenship or on voting that excluded some groups.

Part of the understanding of history, he said, includes not only knowing what asterisks are in the founding documents, but also understanding the historical process that removed some of them, recognizing which asterisks remain and what new ones have been added, and considering which asterisks today’s society is struggling to remove.

“I think helping undergraduates grapple with these questions is part of their preparation for being citizens in a multicultural nation in a globalizing world,” he said.

“The issue of creating equity in a society is an ongoing struggle. If students don’t have a grasp on the nature of that struggle — what it has meant historically and what it means today — how are we going to be able to make our 21st-century multicultural society work?”

Dilemmas

Students also need to be prepared to grapple with dilemmas inherent in a diverse nation — issues for which the right answers aren’t easily found.

Cortés noted that many people cite the Golden Rule as the principle they use when dealing with people of different backgrounds. “On one level, that’s fine,” he said. However, on another level, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you “means I’m going to treat you like me,” he said. “What if not everyone wants to be treated as just like another you?”

Cortés asked, “Are there circumstances when in fact differential treatment of different groups is fairer?”

He cited the recognition by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s that women were underrepresented. Conducting tryouts behind a curtain so judges couldn’t see who was playing yielded an increase in women filling the orchestra chairs. “That was a case where treating everyone alike was the most equitable,” he said.

In contrast, he noted that his home state’s motor vehicle policy required that after he turned 70, he no longer could renew his driver’s license remotely, but had to be tested in person. “I was being discriminated against just because my birthday came along,” he said, adding that although 70 is an arbitrary number, he is in favor of keeping people his age from driving unless they prove they can, given that people tend to lose physical ability at about that age.

Professional implications

Students need to be trained to be culturally responsive professionals as they prepare for careers in a diverse culture, Cortés said.

In 2005 New Jersey became the first state to require cultural competency as part of physician licensures, in recognition that doctors must provide care to patients with diverse values who may have different cultural, social or linguistic needs, he said.

Lawyers today are dealing with issues of what happens when people of different cultural backgrounds come into the legal system. “What adjustments do we make in the legal system to integrate immigrants into our system?”

Cultural changes have impacted architectural fields with the recognition of feng shui as a principle in designing offices or homes, or the need for homebuilders to understand cultures where multiple generations of extended family live together in order to build homes that will meet potential buyers’ needs.

No one size fits all

Cortés said that many universities are trying to develop curricula to meet these cultural competency needs, but no one program is a model. “One size doesn’t fit all,” he said, suggesting that institutions draw from others’ work, but build their own curriculum from scratch. “Reinventing the wheel is important,” he said.

Cortés cited former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s famed analogy that life is like a game of cards: The hand that is dealt is determinism, but how it is played is free will. “I’ve laid out the determinism history, the determinism culture, the determinism of diversity — not in terms of diversity of the individual but in terms of the nature of diverse societies. And now we have the free will to say: Can we make our educational institutions more responsive so that we’re helping to prepare young people to become future leaders in a multicultural society?”

—Kimberly K. Barlow

Filed under: Feature,Volume 43 Issue 5

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