2023 Volume 90 Issue 1 Pages 13-24
The purpose of this paper is to identify the difficulties teachers have in listening to student voices in the context of pedagogy in multicultural education through a review of the descriptions of the educational practice of Gregory Michie, an American middle school teacher, and his subsequent research.
Two difficulties are identified in this study. The first is the difficulty surrounding the assumption of needs. While Michie and other white teachers found it difficult to assume the needs of children of color when involved in these children's education because of their limited knowledge of cultural differences, there were also occasions when they were able to listen to “student voices” in pedagogy in a more honest way. In contrast, it was found that teachers of color had an advantage in being able to assume children's expectations and needs, but that this sometimes made it difficult to listen to children's expressed needs and to ensure their intellectual freedom.
The second is the difficulty of listening to “student voices” while balancing academic achievement in pedagogy. Many of the educational practices that attempt to express “student voices” tend to be time-consuming, and multicultural educators of color, who are more concerned with academic achievement, can be caught in the time constraints of covering educational content. In addition to the pressures of neoliberal educational policies, the past experiences of teachers themselves suggest that academic achievement, such as standardized testing, cannot be taken lightly, and that despite their own intentions, they are often met with resistance from their students.
The relationship between these two difficulties can then be organized as follows. Due to cultural differences, traditional studies of multicultural education have considered it difficult for white teachers to hear the “voices” of students of color. Also, the difficulties of listening to students as others with obviously heterogeneous backgrounds have been often considered, as in the subaltern theory of postcolonialism. In this study, through analysis of Michie's descriptions of educational practice and subsequent research, it became clear that teachers of color are able to assume the needs of students in close proximity to them, which in turn makes it difficult for them to grasp the issue of the limits possible in assuming the needs of others. In other words, this study showed that even teachers whose backgrounds overlap with those of their students may have difficulty hearing the voices of their students because of this overlap.
At the same time, the study also revealed that, because of cultural differences, white teachers may be more able to listen to the voices of children of color more openly. However, the study also found that this context is limited in that it shelves the difficult issue of balancing academic achievement, which teachers of color face and value in the pedagogy of multicultural education.
