Homework and Multicultural Students

¶ … Teachers Reality

Barriers to Providing Quality Homework in a Multicultural School Community

Teaching in a multicultural school community can be fraught with both barriers and opportunities. Diverse multicultural classrooms are becoming the norm as the world continues to globalize as well as the population becomes more unequal relative to income and resources. Many teachers have to deal with both aspects of diversity. Diverse student populations are defined in their departure from mainstream society by either language, cultural, or class differences as well as some combination of these factors. In these environments, homework can be an effective tool in many regards. Not only does it further the ability to learn materials outside the classroom, but it can also be used as a diagnostic tool as well to identify different students' needs. This analysis will conduct a brief literature review to identify some of the benefits of using homework to mitigate challenges found in a multicultural school community, as well as provide a brief discussion of the best practices relative to designing homework activities.

Benefits of Homework

There are many benefits of using homework as a prominent tool in a multicultural school environment. One benefit is that students can work at their own pace. In a multicultural environment, many of the students will have different challenges that they might face in the overall curriculum due to their educational background and individual learning needs. For example, there are some learning differences that can be based on culture and ethnicity. One study found that Arab and American have different learning preferences; Arab students preferred significantly more rigid structure and a preference for significantly more interaction with their instructors compared to American students while a negative correlation was found between self-efficacy and structure for the American group (Al-Harthi, 2010). It is reasonable to suspect that other learning preference can be found among different demographics and cultures among students.

Homework can also provide a diagnostic tool for teachers to establish a base line for student learning and track progress; some researchers have found that homework correction techniques can help teachers devise new intervention strategies, and orient their teaching towards students' real needs (Ignat, 2013). Furthermore, if homework is employed effectively, it also represents an opportunity for students to develop self-learning strategies, as students can become aware of their own failings and their learning styles. Homework in some classroom cultures has shifted from the teachers' perception of it as a necessary evil, to the cornerstone of a curriculum -- students can work at their own pace and focus on their individual needs through mediums that are appropriate for their learning preferences.

However, to employee a customized homework regime that can help students progress more efficiently and effectively through classroom materials, it takes a level of teacher flexibility and control of the educational process, as well as significant amounts of parent involvement. With the passing of the No Child Left Behind legislation in 2002, an environment with a lack of opportunities for culturally responsive teaching in popular school reforms serving diverse student populations has emerged in many regards (Durden, 2008). The efforts to standardize the core curriculum often limits a teacher's ability to customize their teaching objectives to embrace diversity. While few argue that the performances that many low-performing schools across the country needs to improve, not all agree that standardization is the best path.

Some have also argued that classrooms with diverse student bodies that differentiate among socio-economic lines can have dynamics that exclude students among dimensions of immigration status and ethnicity; for example, one group of white, economically privileged students have received more attention than immigrant, and diverse in ethnicity, race, and immigrant status due to the parents of the former group of children enjoy active involvement in the school and trusting relationships with teachers (Levine-Rasky, 2009). Therefore, parent involvement can be a critical component of leveraging homework effectively, and it is necessary to make parent involvement a multicultural issue as well and ensure that no parents are excluded or feel uncomfortable in participation in the homework process.