Chapter 21: The Footsteps Project for Cultural Identity: An Instructional Theory for Teaching About Student Diversity in Public Schools

This instructional theory is a tool for teacher educators to develop strategies for enabling teachers to better understand the lives of their students. These teachers will use this cultural understanding to inform their pedagogy in order to foster increased student interest, participation and achievement. Teachers come from cultures that are often different from those of their students, and need to develop an understanding of their students’ cultures’ in order to develop more appropriate pedagogical instruction.

The academic achievement of minority students continues to be a topic of immense interest in the research, policy and education communities. A consistent finding seems to be that European American and Asian Pacific students continue to perform at higher levels on mathematics, science and reading standardized tests compared with African American and Hispanic students (Perie, Grigg, & Dion, 2005). Historically, poor and minority students have experienced a significantly lower rate of academic achievement than their White middle-class peers (Gordon, 2006; Ratts, DeKrufy, & Chen-Hayes, 2007). This low achievement creates a cycle of failure for these students. When students fail in school, it is not because of their inabilities to learn, but because of failure of the school to provide the expertise to foster academic success (Hanley & Noblit, 2009; Ladson-Billings, 1994). Additionally poor students and those from culturally diverse backgrounds tend to encounter cultural discontinuity at school on a daily basis (Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1994). The disconnection between children’s home, street and school environment and the school can have a deleterious effect on their dispositions, behaviors, attitudes, achievement and participation in school (Boykin, 2001; Fraser-Abder, 2001, Jenks, Lee, & Kanpol, 2001). Banks and Banks (2007) argue that successful programs respond to the cultural and language experiences of poor and minority students and such programs create learning environments in which students and teachers interact with each other and that in such environments, student academic interest and achievement escalate.