Miseducating teachers about the poor: A critical analysis of Ruby Payne's claims about poverty (original) (raw)

I Fight Poverty. I Work!" Examining Discourses of Poverty and Their Impact on Pre-Service Teachers

2006

This paper examines some of the dominant discourses related to poverty and education such as those offered by the prominent political ideologies, those presented by educators who write about poverty, those embedded in popular culture, and those surrounding current teacher education curricula. Furthermore, this study evaluates the impact these discourses have on teacher education students, and ultimately on the students they engage. The results of a 15-item survey, distributed to teacher education students at a Midwest university, reveal their perceptions on poverty and offer many potential departure points for educators to consider. Additionally, this paper analyzes the implications of the data for teacher education curricula. The results of the study revealed that teacher education students employ conventional discourses and idioms in their understanding of poverty. The study makes clear that to adequately deal with issues of poverty in their classrooms, teacher education students ...

Our Impoverished View of Teacher Education

2014

analysis of educational audit culture, the author concludes that in the context of corporate reform discourses, teacher educators must reflect on the role of teacher education programs in the face of mounting threats to public education. Teacher education programs should serve as sites through which seemingly common sense discourses about education must be problematized. Further, both teacher educators and their students must critically reflect on their own assumptions and positionalities in order to clarify their values, which may not coincide with the values expressed in hegemonic education discourses.

Unexamined Beliefs: Understanding Teachers' Reasoning About Poverty

Proceedings of the 2021 AERA Annual Meeting

Teachers' racial, ethnic, and gender biases have been shown to impact their classroom practices and expectations of students, but little research has examined how teachers' povertyrelated biases affect their students' educational experiences. This study focused on elementary school teachers' social class bias as it intersected with race, ethnicity, and gender by examining teachers' reasoning about poverty and its relation to their assessment of student work. Data were collected from fifth grade teachers (N = 302) throughout California. Participants were asked to use a provided rubric to assess a single personal narrative and were told that it was written by a fifth grade student, although it was actually written by researchers for the purpose of this study. Before assessing this piece of writing, participants viewed (but did not assess) what they were told was another piece of the same student's writing. The student demographics included in this first piece of writing (i.e., student's social class background, race/ethnicity, iii gender) varied and represented one of twelve possible student profiles. This piece of writing was meant to prime the participants as to the demographics of the student whose work they were going to assess. To assess explicit beliefs about poverty, teachers completed a survey a week after assessing the student writing that asked about their own demographics, values, ideologies, and about their beliefs about the traits of poor and middle class people and causal attributions for poverty. Overall, participants endorsed more positive and fewer negative traits for both the poor and middle class and believed that poverty is more likely to be caused by reasons outside of an individual's direct control than by causes within one's control. Political ideology and the endorsement of System Justification and the Protestant Work Ethic were related to beliefs about poverty. Results from the assessment of students' writing should be interpreted with caution, but suggest a significant interaction between the effects of students' race/ethnicity and social class on the grades teachers' assigned the writing. Implications and next steps are discussed. iv The dissertation of Lindsey Nenadal is approved.

The War on Poverty Must Be Won: Educators Can Make a Difference

International Journal of Educational Leadership and Management, 2014

According to reports, almost one billion children worldwide live in poverty, many of whom find it difficult to attend school on a regular basis. Moreover, when they are able to attend, they too often find themselves unable to succeed, falling farther and farther behind their more affluent peers. By attending to a number of relevant research findings, educators can reverse this situation. First, it is important to understand and address both generational and situational poverty by challenging and eliminating deficit thinking. We must understand the difference between a child's prior opportunity to learn and his or her ability to learn; hold high expectations of every child and provide them with a rich and engaging learning environment. To accomplish this, transformative leadership offers a way forward. It is also important to ensure our curricula, our pedagogies, and our policies are inclusive, that they acknowledge the lived realities of every child, and that they openly address the social and societal inequities that marginalize some and privilege others. Educators must become advocates, when necessary, for those who desperately need the advice and encouragement of a caring adult. Only then can we change despair into hope.

Elementary Teachers’ Perceptions of Children Living in Conditions of Poverty

2018

This study analyzed elementary teachers' perceptions of their challenges working with children who live in conditions of poverty. This study found that teachers often work with children from very difficult situations, including exposure to alcohol, drugs, violence, and abandonment. This study found that no matter the challenges teachers encounter daily, they remain motivated, dedicated and determined to take the necessary steps to meet the needs of their students. One way they do this is by using Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, which attempts to include various aspects of their students' daily lives and interests in the curriculum. The teachers in this study were concerned about the number and frequency of mandated tests, which can take away from instructional time. However, this study also found that teachers valued formative assessments to help them meet their students where they are academically. All the teachers reported that establishing partnerships with stakeholders was important to obtain community support for their schools. Although children from a background of poverty will always present challenges, the teachers in this study remained committed to working with their students Definition of Terms The following terms and their operant definitions will be used in this study: Academic achievement: A student, teacher, or institution has achieved its educational goals (Hernandez Sheets, 2005). Assessments (aka Tests): Tests designed to measure a person's knowledge, skills, understanding and so forth in a given field taught in school (Good, 1973). Attribution Theory: the theory that explains how people link actions and emotions to particular causes, both internal and external (Fiske & Taylor, 1991) Capitalism: A system under which the ownership of land and wealth is for the most part in the hands of private individuals (Lipman, 2011). Constructivism: Constructivism is a theory about knowledge and learning; it describes both what "knowing" is and how "one comes to know" (Fosnot, 1996). Cooperative learning: A strategy for classroom instruction in which small groups of students work interdependently on academic tasks. The tasks range from work on mathematics problems with one right answer to open-ended discussions to long-term investigations to creative problem solving. Students learn how to take responsibility for their own learning and to manage interpersonal relations (Grant & Ladson-Billings, 1997). Critical pedagogy: Includes relationships between teaching and learning (Sandlin & McLaren, 2009).

Investigating the Pedagogy of Poverty in Inner-City Middle Level Schools

Research in Middle Level Education, 1995

While there have been several criticisms of the instructional approaches used in middle level classrooms, there have been ven; few empirical studies examining classroom instruction in inner-city middle level schools. In this study systematic classroom observations were conducted of 90 middle level teachers and 356 six-and eighth-grade students from 16 inner-city middle level schools. Data from these observations indicate that students are typically involved in whole-class instruction and not interacting with either their teacher or other students. Students rarely selected their own instructional activities, and they were generally very passive in the classroom, often just watching or listening to the teacher, even though they were found to be on task about 94% of the time. Teachers typically focused on the content of the task or assignment, responded to students' signals, communicated the task's procedures, and checked students' work. Teachers were observed spending very little time interacting with students regarding personal issues, encouraging students to succeed, showing personal regard for students, and showing interest in students' work. These results are discussed in the context of conceptual and theoretical work on effective classroom instruction for young adolescents.

Five Myths about the Education of Children in Poverty: Addressing Family Issues (1) (2) (3) (4

The article describes misconceptions concerning the education of children and families living in poverty. The myths include: (a) parents of children in poverty do not care about their children's education; (b) these children have limited experiences as evidenced by standardized tests; (c) their inadequate experiences result in less intelligence or knowledge; (d) children in poverty have the same access to high quality education; and (e) families in poverty are responsible for their economic situation. The discussion includes examples of each misconception using real-world vignettes. The article offers a beginning dialogue about the challenges in counteracting these myths. Keywords: children in poverty, families in poverty, urban education, poverty issues