Cultural Competency and Low Income Families

Peer Mentoring in a Low Income Community

Introduction

As a current intern at Cook Elementary in Auburn Gresham Illinois, I get to interact with you students who struggle with the basics—reading, writing and arithmetic. So far it has been a genuine pleasure to interact with these young minds as we work through the issues and overcome the obstacles to their learning. However, I would like to increase my cultural knowledge and skills in order to provide multi-culturally competent service provision. The population is poor and predominantly African American though there is a small percentage of Hispanic students as well. I am a peer mentor at the school through the Cities Project of DePaul University. The Cities Project (2020) is a non-profit, research-based mentorship program that aims to provide support for the Chicago Public School students and families. Working in a low income community provides one with a sense of the disadvantages and challenges that people from a low socio-economic community face on a daily basis. But to better serve this population, there is a need to more deeply understand the cultural aspects the community. Having this cultural competency and these skills also helps people to build bridges between such communities and the communities of privilege. By getting involved as a peer mentor at Cook Elementary, one can develop both empathy for the people of this community and confidence in one’s abilities to integrate, communicate and create an environment of inclusivity and respect. This paper will describe what it is like to work in a low income community and cultural competency and skills are needed.

Poverty and Education

The students at Cook Elementary come from poor neighborhoods and there appears to be a clear connection between poverty and education according to research on the matter (Comber & Woods, 2016). On a drive through the neighborhoods, one can conduct a windshield survey and see rows of homes in dilapidated array. The communities definitely struggle to maintain a sense of pride in their appearance, and the overall effect of working in this environment is disheartening at first—but over time one gets used to it and begins to see the life that still exists in the community in spite of the poverty. This life can be seen in the children at the school, in their parents and families, and in the teachers and principal of the school. There is a great deal of life in them all and they are all conscious of one another and share a sense of community that is really special to see and be a part of. The big problem, however, is that the school and the communities lack the resources needed to boost their education. They do not have tools like computers or Internet in many homes even though these things are common in middle class communities.

Rogers-Sirin and Sirin (2009) call for cultural competence in terms of interfacing teaching approaches that are culture-centric with counseling methods to help students from low income communities to process the educational material they are presented with in a more holistic way. Coggins and Campbell (2008) explain that cultural competence can be used to close the achievement gap in this manner. The achievement gap is a serious issue for low income communities because these underserved children are falling behind the academic accomplishments of more privileged communities. They cannot afford the best teachers, the best schools, the best resources or the best education and the problems mount from there. The Cities Project is a good example of a university giving back by way of getting interns and peer mentors involved in these communities. But as a peer mentor, one has to develop one’s cultural competence in order to reach these students and help them to connect with the learning material in a more fundamental way, as Rogers-Sirin and Sirin (2009) and Coggins and Campbell (2008) point out.

By being sensitive to the experiences and culture of these students, it will allow the mentor to bond with and relate to the student. This can facilitate communication and the development of trust. The more the student trusts the teacher, the better the exchange is likely to be—but for that to happen the teacher has to be able to understand the student and where the student is coming from Rogers-Sirin and Sirin (2009). To accomplish that task it is necessary to understand the world that the peer mentor has entered into by getting to know its cultural dimensions in the same way Hofstede (2001) recommends—understanding the power dimension, the way the culture views work, the way the culture views leisure, gender norms, and its long-term orientation.

Incorporating Cultural Knowledge and Skills into My Internship

In intend to incorporate this knowledge and these skills into my internship by communicating more with those involved in this community and the school. There are leaders here, like the principal, who can help in this process. The principal is very hands on and oriented towards supporting staff. The principal will provide them with whatever support he can, whether it is infrastructural, emotional, intellectual, or social. The principal lets them know that they can count on him to always have their back and he has worked with his teachers in difficult situations before when dealing with parents who feel something is not being done right in the classroom.

The principal always takes ultimate responsibility for the learning of all students in the school as it is well known that whenever there is an issue it will go all the way up to him to be settled if need be. He is like the president and the Supreme Court of the school. There is no getting around the fact that when it comes to who is accountable for what goes on the school, the principal is the one who will shoulder that responsibility every single day.

To make sure students’ educational needs are being met, he looks at the standards of the state and he looks at what the standards of colleges are and where the students’ performance is. He talks with teachers about how they are going to achieve the school’s academic goals for that year and discusses their plans with them. He knows what plans they want to see implemented and he is supportive but also critical when he has to be because he has a good idea of what works and what does not work, since he has been in this role for a while. He is also open to new ideas, however, and will accept innovative strategies to help get students on pace with where they should be. The important thing he notes is that people be trusting of the process and that they support one another and never enter into a new idea with preconceived notions or with negativity. Teachers have a very important role in the school and in the community, he points out, and they should be appreciated more for what they are doing because it is often a thankless job that goes unappreciated. He always wants his teachers to know that they are appreciated and that they can come to him with any issues they might be having. He lets parents know that as well. He wants to take pressure off teachers so that they can focus on getting their jobs done and if that means intercepting parents and dealing with their issues (which are not always student-related) then he has no problem doing that. He recognizes that there are many challenges in this community, from single-parent families to problems with getting support from families to keep students focused on schoolwork throughout the year to poverty and joblessness and so on.

The principal also organizes and supports closing the achievement gap for students by implementing projects like spending extra time on math or having tutors volunteer an hour before or after school to do one-on-one reading with students. This is where my role as a peer mentor comes into play and why I look to the principal for help in implementing cultural competence and skills into helping to develop these students. He has promoted the idea of making home visits to help bring the worlds of school and community closer and thus close the achievement gap this way. The more supportive, he believes, mentors can show themselves to be of families, the more support they will receive from families, which can help to motivate students and get them to focus on closing the gap.

What might be done to strengthen the leadership structure to close the achievement gap between students of low income communities like this one and students of privileged communities is to define roles more clearly so that everyone knows what is expected of them when it comes to the task of closing the achievement gap. Some mentors may not realize that they have a part to play, just like some parents do not realize they have to be more involved in the academic lives of the children if they want to see them succeed. Some parents think the school should take care of everything and they do not even realize that the children are only in the school for a short time. Thus, getting teachers and parents aligned and on the same page where they are working together for the same end is the biggest leadership structural challenge the school faces. As a mentor, I can help in this department by being culturally understanding and connecting with families in a real way through home visits as the principal advises and helping to show that the world of education and the world of family should be intimately connected if success is to be reached.