DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 354 804 HE 026 223

AUTHOR Sawchuk, Mariette T., Ed.TITLE The Role of Faculty Development in Multicultural

Education. Celebrating Cultural Diversity in HigherEducation Series.

INSTITUTION Mount St. Mary's Coll., Los Angeles, CA. DohenyCampus.

PUB DATE [92]

NOTE 43p.; For a related document, see HE 026 224.AVAILABLE FROM Prism Publishing of Mount St. Mary's College, 12001

Chalon Road, Los Angeles, CA 90049 ($16).PUB TYPE Guides Non-Classroom Use (055) Reports

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EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS College Faculty; Cultural Differences; *Cultural

Pluralism; *Faculty Development; Grants; HigherEducation; Liberal Arts; *Multicultural Education;Program Descriptions; Staff Development; TeacherRole; Workshops

IDENTIFIERS *Mount Saint Marys College CA

ABSTRACTThis monograph examines the process of initiating a

faculty and staff development program in multicultural education atMount St. Mary's College (MSMC) in Los Angeles, California betweenthe year 1985 and 1988. As the population of Los Angeles changedduring the 1970s and 1980s, issues of ethnical diversity at MSMCitself became increasingly pressing. In 1986, MSMC received a grantfrom the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education(with matching funds from the Times-Mirror Foundation) designed tomake the entire faculty and staff of the college more effective indealing with cultural differences among students through all-collegeprograms and workshops. This report provides brief summaries of thelectures and workshops that were presented to the college communityand discusses the selection of the guest speakers. It is noted thatsome of the invited speakers provided faculty members with resourceson literature, art, music, and history that they could share withtheir students, while other speakers and workshops dealt withteaching methodologies that have been shown to be successful in amulticultural classroom. In addition, the guide describes the way inwhich mini-grants were awarded and administered to faculty forintellectual exploration concerning culture and its role ineducation. it also provides excerpts from six of the funded researchprojects. Finally, the guide presents brief excerpts from anannotated bibliography of African-American, Asian-American,Native-American, and Hispanic-American authors that was created toprovide a resource of multicultural literature for use by the facultyat Mount St. Mary's College. (GLR)

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Mount St. Mary's CollegeLos Angeles, California

Celebrating Cultural Diversity in HigherEducation

The Role of Faculty Developmentin Multicultural Education

Mariette T. Sawchuk, Editor

Prism Publishing of

Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles, California

Table of Contents

Foreword 3

I. Introduction 6

II. Lectures and Workshops 9

III. Mini-grants 15

Awards 16

IV. Summaries of Mini-grant Projects 18

Multicultural Literature: An Annotated Bibliography 19

Connections: The Relationship of Art from Different Cultures 23

Cross-cultural Communication: A Course Module 25

Health Care and Native American Medicine:A Journey of Discovery 28

Lexicon of Religious Terms 31

Different Voices: Multicultural Dimensions of Leadership 34

V. Moving Forward: Beyond the Faculty/Staff Development Program 38

2 4

Foreword

Celebrating Cultural Diversity inHigher Education

Educating a multi-ethnic student population forlife in a multicultural world is one of the greatestchallenges facing institutions of higher learning inthe !990s. The task is complex and, in somerespects, controversial. All facets of college life areinvolvedadmissions, curricula, facultydevelopment, financial aid, fund raising, libraryholdings and student development. Mount St.Mary's College in Los Angeles (MSMC) has beenengaged in the process of implementingmulticultural education on its two campuses forover 10 years. Grappling with the issues raised bymulticultural education has been by turnsexciting, difficult, frustrating, and surprising.Through the experience, faculty. administrators,and students have been immeasurably enriched.Cultural diversity on campus, acknowledged andutilized as a catalyst for learning, can be atremendous source of strength for highereducation in the United States. Mount St. Mary'sCollege is publishing this series of monographs,Celebrating Cultural Diversity in Higher Education,to help other institutions exploring the potential ofmulticultural education.

The MSMC experience has shown that culturaldiversity becomes a positive force on campuswhen faculty and staff see that, diversity as anopportunity for learning rather than an obstacle.Therefore, faculty and staff development on thesubject of culture and learning is crucial toeffective multicultural education. This monographdescribes the way in which MSMC went aboutsuch a faculty development program during theyears from 1985 to 1988. In addition to outliningthe process, the monograph includes a summaryof one representative workshop and excerpts fromsome of the faculty and staff research projects.

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Mount St. Mary's College,Los Angeles

Founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondeletin 1925, Mount St. Mary's is an independent,Catholic college with a special concern for theeducation of women. The college offers acurriculum in which career preparation at everylevel is firmly based on the liberal arts andsciences. The college also emphasizes the study ofethics and encourages multicultural awarenessthrough academic and co-curricular activities.

For undergraduates, the college offers both two-year associate in arts degrees on the downtownDoheny campus and four-year baccalaureatedegrees on the Chalon campus in west LosAngeles. The evening/v, eekend division enablesworking students to earn associate orbaccalaureate degrees in selected majors orcertification in paraprofessional programs.Graduate programs are available ineducation, psychology, physical therapy, andreligious studies.

Although small, Mount St. Mary's student body isremarkably diverse: 1,200 students self-reportingtheir places of birth listed more than 42 states and43 foreign countries. The ethnic diversity of theundergraduate student body closely parallels thatof Southern California: 12% African-, 37% Anglo-.15% Asian-, and 36% Hispanic-American.Approximately 60% are Catholic. About half of thestudents reside on campus and half commute.

Every aspect of a MSMC education ischaracterized by concern for the individualstudenther goals, her talents, her development.This concern for the individual student led to theevolution of the College's dual campuses andprograms, features which are among MSMC'sgreatest strengths. Unified by one administrationand one faculty, the college specializes on eachcampus. The Doheny campus offers bothassociate in arts degrees leading to immediate

employment and an alternative access programadmitting students who show a potential forsuccess in college despite weak academic records.Alternative access students have average GPA's of2.50 on a 4.00 scale and average composite SATscores of 660. They are often the first in theirfamilies to attend college and must struggle withpoverty, inadequate high school backgrounds. andpressing family obligations. For many students.English is a second language. The alternativeaccess program. a direct response to their needs.has been dramatically effective in enabling thesestudents to succeed. Approximately 68% of thosewho come as freshmen earn their associate in artsdegree in two years or transfer to a baccalaureateprogram. Seventy-five to 80 percent of those whopersist go on to baccalaureate study in Mount St.Mary's four-year program (50%) or at otherinstitutions (25-30%). Significantly. studentstransferring from MSMC's alternative accessprogram do well in the four-year program, meetingthe challenge of demanding academic standards.Some continue their studies further, earninggraduate degrees. Research has been none on thealternative access program at MSMC's Dohenycampus and a model program developed, which isdescribed in this series' first monograph. "Accessand Persistence: An Educational Program Model."

The baccalaureate program on the Chalon campusfocuses on students who have demonstrated theirability to succeed academically. Baccalaureatefreshmen have average SAT or ACT scores placingthem in the top quartile of college-bound studentsnationwide. Minorities make up a largepercentage of these talented students. About halfof the candidates for MSMC's prestigious, merit-based President's Scholarships are African-,Asian- or Hispanic-American. The baccalaureateprogram has been recognized for its excellence byindependent organizations such as U.S. News andWorld Report and Changing Times magazines.Special opportunities centered here include the

4

honors program, the Women's Leadershipprogram, the Model United Nations delegation,and the Minority Biomedical Research program.

Multicultural EducationAs the population of Los Angeles changed duringthe 70s and '80s, the student body at Mount St.Mary's College gradually became more ethnicallydiverse with the change initially more apparent onthe Doheny campus. The college's ownrecruitment efforts at inner city high schoolscontributed to this change. Faculty working withstudents from diverse cultures became aware thatstudents experienced academic difficulty whentheir cultural assumptions were different fromthose of the college. Respect for authority, forexample. is a strong value for Asian-Americanstudents. Consequently, they often avoid askingquestions in class even when they are confusedabout the subject matter. These studentsinterpret the act of questioning as a challenge tothe teacher implying incompetent instruction.Most faculty members, on the other hand,interpret student questions as a sign of interestand involvement in the class. Some faculty mayeven lower a student's grade for failure toparticipate. In order to avoid thesemisunderstandings and others like them.interested faculty and administrators began toexplore ways to teach students and their parentsabout college assumptions and to learn about theworld views of various ethnic cultures. Englishteachers began to look for novels. poetry and playsby authors from a variety of ethnic groups in orderto stimulate student interest. Faculty came to"brown-bag" lunch meetings to exchange ideasand teaching methodologies that helped studentssucceed. Mount St. Mary's College began toexplore the implications of multicultural educationnot only on a theoretical level. but also on apedagogical one.

In 1986, Mount St. Mary's received a grant fromthe Consortium for the Advancement of PrivateHigher Education (CAPHE) to increase faculty andstaff awareness of the link between culture andlearning, a project this monograph describes indetail. Matching funds for this project weresupplied by the Times-Mirror Foundation. Thefirst objective of the grant, as stated in theproposal, was "to make every member of thefaculty and staff more effective in dealing withcultural differences among the college's students"through all-college programs and workshops. Thesecond was to provide funds for individual facultyand staff to research particular, practical topicsrelated to culture and learning.

This grant was a resounding success. It fundedspeakers for 15 all-college events

coursenumerous

departmental workshops. In the 'course of thegrant, 30 research projects were undertaken.Twenty departments and administrative officeswere involved in these projects, and over 40members of the faculty and staff contributed tothem. Many of the monographs in this series area result of these CAPHE-funded research projects.Another important result of this faculty and staffdevelopment grant was a gathering momentum forfurther institutional change. The education

department received a second grant fromCAPHE/NYNEX matched by the ARCOFoundation to infuse multicultural content intothe subject matter courses (such as English andhistory) required for an elementary teachingcredential. Funding from the AT&T, Ford, andTeagle foundations has made it possible for thecollege to research the alternative access programand share the results with other colleges anduniversities through publications, workshops, andpresentations at conferences. Grants from theKnight and Ford foundations, the Pew CharitableTrust, and the Clowes Fund, Inc., have enabledthe college to undertake a revision of the corecurricula with the goal of making multiculturalawareness a central component of a Mount St.Mary's education. MSMC is still very much in theprocess of incorporating multicultural dimensionsinto every aspect of college life. The experience isa challenging and invigorating one.

Costs associated with introducing this CelebratingCultural Diversity in Higher Education series havebeen underwritten by the CBS Foundation. Agrant from the Clowes Fund, Inc., has helped todefray the cost of this monograph, "The Role ofFaculty Development in Multicultural Education."

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Introduction

As I took ro/ifor my American literature class in theFall of 1985. I thought. 'This is the United Nations:Alfonso, Challappa, Brady. Evans, Gonzalez, Lee,Marti, Otani. Ramirez, Wong!' I wondered if wehad anything in common. Perhaps by studying theliterature of America together, we could create ashared experience from which we could all learn.

MSMC English Instructor

The situation confronting this English professorwas a common one at Mount St. Mary's College inthe 1980s. A faculty and staff, which was, for themost part. Anglo-American, undertook theeducation of a student population growing moreculturally diverse with each passing year. Facultyand administrators began to consider how toeducate a multicultural student body moreeffectively. One response was stepped-up effortsto hire faculty and staff from minoritiestraditionally underrepresented in highereducation, who could serve as role models forstudents. During the '80s, unfortunately, thenumber of doctorates awarded to African- andHispanic-Americans was declining sharply.Competition for these graduates was, andcontinues to be, keen. The decreasing pool ofminority doctorates, budgetary constraints, andthe number of tenured faculty made it inevitablethat the majority of the faculty at MSMC (as atmost other American colleges and universities)would continue to be Anglo-American throughthe 1990s.

Until the college was able to have a moreethnically diverse faculty and staff, facultydevelopment provided a way to improve theeducation of a multicultural student body. Whenthe Consortium for the Advancement of PrivateHigher Education (CAPHE) invited MSMC tosubmit a grant proposal, the administration saw away to undertake faculty/staff development inmulticultural education on a broad scale. The

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college submitted a proposal with two basicobjectives: the first was to help every member ofthe faculty and staff become more effective indealing with cultural differences among studentsthrough lectures, workshops, and programs opento all. The second was to provide faculty memberswith mini-grants for research on specific topicsrelated to culture and learning. The proposal wasfunded in January of 1986, and the first mini-grant applications were filed in June of that year."Unity through Diversity" became the theme of the1986-87 academic year. A keynote lecture at thefaculty convocation in September 1986 launched astudy on the relationship between culture andlearning, the impact of which is still being felt.

AssumptionsThere are probably as many definitions of cultureas there are of love. This monograph will notattempt to offer a conclusive one, but instead usesas a working definition that given by the notedanthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor when heintroduced the term into anthropology in his bookPrimitive Culture: "Culture is that complex wholewhich includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,custom and any other capabilities and habitsacquired by man as a member of society." Cultureincludes many elements of which human beingsare conscious, such as the murals of Diego Riveraor the Buddhist wedding ceremony, and alsomany things of which they are usually unaware,such as rules governing interruptions inconversation. Culture underlies every aspect oflife and behavior, including common sense beliefsabout the world, time, space, relationships,courtesy and values. Misunderstandings oftenoccur when people of different cultures interact,particularly if one or both are unaware of theirculturally determined expectations.

When the college began its faculty/staffdevelopment program on culture and learning, the

president, academic deans and grant coordinatorshared certain assumptions. The first and mostobvious was that everyonestudents, faculty,staff, and even administratorshas a culture.One goal of the program was to help members ofthe college community become more aware of theirown cultural expectations as well as to help themunderstand the cultures of students from variousethnic backgrounds.

The second assumption underlying the programwas that culture affects learning. Cross-culturalstudies over the last quarter century havedemonstrated that differing cultural contextspromote different kinds of development in reading,writing, mathematical and analytical abilities. Themethods by which faculty members teach, theirexpectations of student behaviors, and theirstandards for evaluation are all products ofculture. Student success or failure may be relatedto how compatible the cultures of the student andinstructor are or how well one or both adapt tothe other.

What happens outside the classroom can alsohave a profound effect on the quality of a student'scollege experience. Making friends, living with aroommate, and balancing study with co-curricularactivities and leisure are typical studentexperiences that have important culturalcomponents. For students from a culturalminority background. these non-academic areasmay present particular problems becausedifferences in underlying beliefs may permeatetheir experiences yet are especially hard toidentify. Issues of relationship and daily routine,moreover, are likely to be emotionally charged.MSMC made a vigorous effort to involveadministrators and staff working in residence, co-curricular activities, and student services in theprograms on multicultural awareness.

A third and final assumption is that each collegeand university has its own subculture, some ofwhich is written down in the college catalog and

student handbook while other aspects are learnedinformally. Mount St. Mary's College, for example,has a tradition of emphasizing community service,an aspect of the college subculture that has beenarticulated and written down in the missionstatement of the college. One of the collegetraditions passed on informally is the custom ofgreeting everyone on campus, even strangers.One goal of studying the relationship betweenculture and learning is to investigate andarticulate aspects of MSMC's own subculture.

Goals

As the College prepared to initiate the facultydevelopment program in 1986, the hopes of theadministration and coordinators were relativelymodest. The aim was not to make the collegeculturally neutral. As a Catholic, liberal artscollege, Mount St. Mary's stands solidly rooted inWestern culture. Its structure, expectations,goals, and curricula, like that of most Americancolleges and universities, have evolved from andreflect the values and assumptions of Westernculture. The very emphasis on truth, theappreciation of diversity, and the exploration ofnon-majority cultures that gave impetus to theproject is in the best tradition of Western andAmerican culture.

Neither did college administrators expect animmediate revision of the curricula or even ageneral consensus about the nature ofmulticultural education. The goal was rather togive faculty, administrators and staff additionaltools for meeting the educational and personalneeds of ethnically diverse students. The collegecommunity was invited to hear artists,anthropologists, educators, psychologists,sociologists, and writers discuss aspects of manyethnic cultures, providing faculty members withresources on literature, art, Llasic and historythat they could share with their students. Other

7

speakers and workshops dealt with teachingmethodologies demonstrated to be successful in amulticultural classroom. With lectures andconferences as catalysts, individual members ofthe faculty and staff turned to mini-grants tofund research into topics on multiculturaleducation which offered promise of improvingtheir effectiveness with the students theyencountered daily.

In retrospect, the faculty/staff developmentprogram in multicultural education wassuccessful because members of the collegecommunity were invited to participate. They couldbe as much or as little involved as they chose. Attimes, faculty convocations that all were expectedto attend became the forum for a guest speaker.In general. however, organizers of the programaroused interest by inviting noted scholars andartists, who happened to be members of minoritygroups. Faculty and staff attended because theywere interested in the ideas under discussion.They were not asked to debate the merits ofmulticultural education in committee meetings orfaculty senate; they were not plunged intocurricula revision or exhorted to overhaul theircourses. Free to explore new ideas from their ownpoints of view, faculty members and staff seizedthe opportunity, transforming the college in theprocess. The results were not always neat ororderly. Some faculty and staff encounteredobstacles in the execution of their research andhad to change direction. Some efforts overlappedor duplicated one another.

Despite. or perhaps because of, this open-endedprocess. the faculty and staff development projectsgenerated an awareness of cultural diversity thatpermeates the campus today. When a student isin academic difficulty, her professor or advisor will

8

frequently investigate to see if a culturalmisunderstanding is part of the problem.Resident advisors in the dormitories and staff inthe student development office are more aware ofcultural issues when planning activities,mediating conflicts, and offering counsel. Facultymembers draw on materials and examples frommany different cultures when planning theircourses. Student have formed organizationscelebrating the heritage of African, Asian, andHispanic cultures. A revision of the core curriculais now underway with the goal of integratingmulticultural education into its structure andcontent. More and more, faculty and staff see theethnic diversity of MSMC's students as a resource,and teach these students to see theirmulticultural campus and multicultural city asproviding opportunities for learning, growthfriendship and understanding.

This process of faculty and staff development inmulticultural education is replicable by othercolleges and universities or schools ordepartments within a larger educationalinstitution. To help other interested educators inbeginning the process, the next chapter discussesthe selection of guest speakers and presents asummary of a major symposium presented duringMSMC's faculty and staff development program.Subsequent chapters describe the way in whichmini-grants were awarded and administeredand provide excerpts from six of the fundedresearch projects.

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IILectures and Workshops

A faculty is multicultural not only because it hasmembers of various cultural groups, but because itthinks about culture and its importance in itseveryday discourse. The idea of culture is part ofthe mental. life of the faculty.

Thomas Weisner

During the 1986-87 and 1987-88 academic years,Mount St. Mary's College invited a variety ofscholars, writers, artists and educators to speak tothe faculty, administration, and staff on variousaspects of culture and education. The nature andimportance of culture is a complex and oftencontroversial subject as is the topic of education,its goals and methods. By bringing in expertsfrom many different fields to share their researchand experience on culture and education, thecollege administration opened a dialogue amongmembers of the faculty and staff with a commonvocabulary and knowledge-base provided by thepresenters. The goal was not to achieveconsensus on the nature of multiculturaleducationeven the experts don't agreebutrather to stimulate interest, exploration, anddebate. The resulting colloquy, still going ontoday, has led to research, planning, and revisionin all areas of the college.

In selecting speakers, primary consideration wasgiven to diversity. Coordinators of the programsought to bring to campus scholars from a varietyof disciplines with different approaches to andopinions about multicultural education. Speakerswere ethnically diverse and differed greatly in theirstyle of presentation from the warm, all-embracing, poetic affirmations of Maya Angelou tothe challenging, even abrasive, exhortations ofHalford Fairchild, to the scholarly discourse ofDouglass Price-Williams. Because of theimpressive educational resources of SouthernCalifornia and its rich ethnic diversity, mostlecturers came from the greater Los Angeles area.

Faculty and staff response to guest speakers andsymposia varied with the topic and timing of theprogram and the credentials of the presenter.The personalities of speakers and of individualfaculty/staff members also played a part. HalfordFairchild, who spoke at the faculty convocationlaunching the program, raised hackles byvigorously decrying the "ethnocentrism" and"inertia" of American higher education. Whilesome institutions may wish to choose a lesscontroversial speaker for the opening event, it isessential that they not eschew controversy.The subject of multicultural education is not onlyintellectually complex, but also emotionallycharged. At Mount St. Mary's, we found thatsome conflict, resistance to new ideas, and evenanger, were unavoidable parts of the process offaculty development, and the resulting dialoguewas well worth the sparks generated alongthe way.

Space does not permit a description of all thelectures, workshops and presentations givenunder the auspices of this faculty/staffdevelopment program. (For a complete list, see thefirst monograph, "Access and Persistence: AnEducational Program Model." pp. 42-43.) Instead,this section will focus on a major symposiumgiven by cultural anthropologists, psychologistsand educators in order to share with the readersome of the substance as well as the process ofthe faculty/staff development program.

Issues in Culture and EducationCoordinator: Thomas Weisner, Professor ofAnthropology and Psychology, UCLA

For this workshop, Thomas Weisner broughttogether six scholars doing research related toculture and education. Some focused on anaspect of culture, others on the culture of aparticular minority group, on cognition, on

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education, and on women's health. Theydiscussed culture and education from differentpoints of view, at times disagreeing vigorously withone another, particularly about the importance ofcultural understanding in the classroom. Briefsketches of each presentation are provided belowto give the reader something of the flavor ofthe symposium.

Thomas WeisnerProfessor of Anthropology and Psychology. UCLAResearch interests: family and culture, humandevelopment and child rearing, education

Weisner began by suggesting the breadth that isencompassed in the word "culture." It includesnot only ritual, myths, holidays, celebrations, andfoods, but tools for the mind: ideas about theworld, about social organization, and aboutvalues. He differentiated culture from ethnicity,which is a label. sometimes negative, imposed by alarger social system. He also warned the facultythat culture was not just for exotic peoples: white.middle-class Americans have a culture, too. Oneparadox encountered in studying other cultures isthat the researcher begins to see more clearly thebasis of his own.

Weisner also pointed out that it is not sufficientmerely to identify important features of students'cultures. Once that is done, faculty and staff haveto identify which features are salient to their goalsand decide how best to utilize them. There arefour responses to a particular cultural feature, anyof which may be appropriate depending on theobjectives the teacher has set. The first is toextend the cultural feature into the classroom. Ifstudents are used to a great deal of peerinteraction at home, for example, the teacher canutilize peer interaction as a teaching strategy,focusing that interaction on tasks to be done orskills to be learned. Secondly, a teacher maychoose to ignore a feature of the culture, neither

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forbidding nor encouraging it. (Note that this is aprincipled decision, not an oversight caused byinsufficient knowledge.) Thirdly, one can reject afeature of the student's culture. If high levels ofphysical violence exist at home, faculty andadministration can strictly enforce rules thatforbid hitting and other forms of violence atschool. Finally, a particular feature of a student'sculture can be encouraged, such as memorizationthrough storytelling.

Weisner introduced the participants in thesymposium. As coordinator, one of his goals wasto present scholars tackling the problem of cultureand learning from several different perspectives toshow something of the complexity of the researchand the range of opinions that the topic generates.

James VigilProfessor of Anthropology and Director of EthnicStudies, USCResearch interests: Hispanic-American culturalhistory. Hispa, tic-Americans and education, andMexican-American self-identity

In the first part of his presentation, James Vigiloutlined the way in which four different culturalgroupsIndian, Spanish. Mexican andAmericanblended to form what he called theChicano, or Mexican-American, identity. Hebriefly sketched the historical, as well as culturalforces that fueled this process. With thisbackground, he turned to the topic of educationand acculturation. It has long been a hypothesisin the larger society that the more completelyChicano students have become acculturated to thedominant society, the better they do in school.Vigil's research, however, turned up otherfindings. First, the path to assimilation is not thesame for each individual. In studying Chicanostudents, Vigil identified six different subgroups atvarious stages of assimilation ranging from theMexicano, who speaks Spanish. follows traditional

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Mexican cultural patterns, and is eager to getahead, to the fully 'assimilated English speaker,who identifies himself as an American. In betweenthese two extremes were groups he called thecholos, streetwise teenagers, often gang members.who speak little or no Spanish and non-standardEnglish; the Hollywood swingers, also partiallyacculturated who concentrate on partying andmay take drugs; the stoners, heavily involved indrugs; and a new group, the cha-cha's, first-generation Mexicans trying to distinguishthemselves from the other groups. In terms ofschool performance, the partially acculturatedstudents did markedly less well than theMexicanos or the fully assimilated Americans. Hefound several factors predictive of studentsuccess, including a strong, supportive father, astrong work-ethic in the family, a clear ethnicidentity (either Hispanic or American),encouragement from significant others, andindividual temperament. Vigil concluded with awarning that no ethnic group is homogeneous.Seen by the insider or the careful researcher,there are always a variety of different subculturesor life paths.

Douglass Price-WilliamsProfessor of Anthropology and Psychology, UCLAResearch interests: cultural influences on modes ofthought and cognition

The study of cognition has involved researchersfrom three disciplines: psychology, anthropologyand linguistics, each with its own particularbiases. Therefore, comparing results and makingsense of the research can be a complex process inand of itself. The word cognition covers threebroad areas: perception, memory and expression.all of which are subject to cultural influences. Akey study on perception was done with simpleoptical illusions to test the hypothesis that habitsof visual inference were influenced by thesurrounding environment (desert, jungle, tundra)

and by the subjects' means of livelihood(hunter/gatherer, farmer, fisherman). Americansand peoples of other Westernized cultures tendedto perceive the optical illusion, whilehunter/gatherers did not. A related study of fielddependency, in which subjects were asked to finda specific shape in a complicated visual pattern,showed that fishermen tended to be fieldindependent while farmers were field dependent.

Storage of data, or memory, also seems to beinfluenced by cultural features. Researchers havefound that the structural features of memory arerooted in the physical nervous system and soindependent of culture. Control features, how anindividual retrieves a particular piece ofinformation, are dramatically shaped by culture.One common method for remembering items inWestern culture is the strategy of classification.Given a series of random words or objects,Westerners often organize them into relatedgroups, remembering all the words related to foodtogether, for example. Many non-Westerncultures, on the other hand, use stories toremember lists. In the Marshall Islands.navigators use a complex system of sticks tiedtogether with muscle shells to rememberimportant information such as distance andcurrents. The length of the sticks refers todistance, the shape refers to currents and swells,the muscle shells refer to islands. Eachindividual's bundle is different from that of anyother because they are mnemonic devicesnot representations.

Price-Williams used researcn in the area ofexpression to show how scholars often studyelements of a culture in which they are interested,rather than those features important in theculture itself. Among Australian aborigines andNative Americans. waking dreams are importantreligious and social experiences. Westerninvestigators are hampered in their study by alack of anything comparable in our culture. Eventhe vocabulary available to them distorts the

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experience. One researcher may call a wakingdream a vision, another a hallucination. More isrevealed about the biases of individual researchersby their choice of words than is revealed about theculture which they are studying.

Ronald GallimoreProfessor of Psychiatry, Behavioral Sciences,Education, UCLAResearch interests: culture and teaching, learning.and school innovation

Ronald Gallimore has been the director of aninnovative school teaching literacy skills toHawaiian elementary school children. He startswith the premise that all teachers are responsiblefor passing on a body of knowledge to children.All children, whether from ethnic minorities or thedominant culture, moreover, come to school tolearn new things. The classroom teacher shouldmake some accommodations to the students'culture, but what those accommodations may beis determined by the individual interactionbetween teacher and student, not by reference to alist of culture features or theories.

Over the years, reseai chers on education havefound it difficult to identify what good teaching is.By studying the ways in which societies socializetheir children, Gallimore has come to believe thatgood teaching is "assisted learning." It occurswhen the teacher (who may be a parent, an oldersibling, or a master craftsman) assists a child toengage in a cognitive process beyond the child'sown ability level and brings it to a successfulconclusion. A parent whose four-year-old childhas lost a shoe, for example, assists the process ofremembering by breaking down the task: "Is it inyour bedroom? The living room? Outside?"Finally, the child remembers and exclaims, "Yes!"A cognitive process that is usually internal in anadult is external in the teaching process. Theteacher and the child do it together. The process

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that the child is learning appears first in theinterpersonal relationship between the teacherand the child.

If teaching is to be successful, the teacher mustmake some accommodations to the child's culture.Gallimore warns, however, against basingaccommodations on generalizations about aparticular culture. In doing so, the teacher maymiss the needs of the particular, individual childwho stands before him. Rather than look atgeneralizations about ethnic cultures, Gallimorerecommends looking at the child's eco-culturalniche. The eco-cultural niche is the localenvironment in which the family lives with itsresources, strengths, and problems. The eco-cultural niche includes such factors assubsistence level, workload of the parents, child-care practices, and other mundane factorsinvolved in daily life. A good way to explore theeco-cultural niche is to map out the daily routineof the child, asking for each activity setting who isthere, what is being done, why is it being done,and how is it being done. In Gallimore'sexperience of running an experimental school, thecultural data he and his assistants obtained weremore useful in explaining why a certain classroomstructure was successful than in suggesting newstrategies to try.

Claude GoldenbergLennox School. District, UCLAResearch interests: putting educational theory tothe test in rea' classroom settings

Currently a first-grade teacher, Claude Goldenbergbegan by asking the questions most faculty werepondering: What does culture have to do witheducation? Should I take cultural differences intoaccount in the classroom? If so, how? Mostpeople advocating multicultural educationhypothesize that the white, middle-classenvironment of the school may be alien to children

icom other cultures. If teachers learn about thefeatures of a child's culture, that knowledge will,supposedly, help them be more responsive to thestudent. Troubled by that theory, Goldenbergworries that teachers may wind up teachingcultural abstractions not the real children intheir classroom.

He cites four problems with the superficialapplication of ideas about particular ethniccultures. The first is that individuals differ widelywithin a culture. The various groups of Mexican-American teenagers that James Vigil describedprovide a perfect example of the heterogeneitywithin a "single" culture. Cultural generalizationsdo not hold true for every member of a particularculture. Second, individual differences within aculture are often greater than those betweencultures. Just because a particular behavior(reading the newspaper, for example) is lessfrequent in an Hispanic-American household thanin an Anglo-American home does not mean that itis alien to the Hispanic-American child orinfrequent in all Hispanic-American households.Third, the instructional consequences of culturaldifferences are far from clear. As Weisner pointedout, a teacher may choose to ignore or reject acertain cultural feature. Cultural interpretationsof a child's behavior, moreover, may do him harm.If an Hispanic-American child's reading difficultyis attributed to the cultural generalization thatthere is less reading in the home, the teacher maynot pursue other more important causes of hisreading disability. Finally, focusing on culturaldifferences obscures cultural similarities. In hisexperience as an elementary and junior highschool teacher, Goldenberg discovered that thevast majority of Hispanic-American parents sharemany values with Anglo-American parents.including a desire to be contacted when their childis in trouble with school work or behavior and abelief that parental involvement is crucial to theirchild's educational success.

Children from ethnically diverse cultures needsound academic instruction first and foremost.Many principles of learning are valid acrosscultures, such as the need for feedback to assessone's progress in mastering a given task. Anotherbroadly applicable principle is the need to haveteachers relate what students already know towhat they have just learned. Goldenberg's adviceto teachers, then, is to establish objectives and beprepared to change instructional strategies whenstudents do not achieve them. "Attend to thechild," he said, "and the cultural issues will attendto themselves. If they are important, they willemerge."

Carole BrownerProfessor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.UCLAResearch interests: relationship between culturalbeliefs and health in Hispanics

Mount St. Mary's College has a number of strongacademic programs in health care fields includingpre-medical, nursing. physical therapy. physicaltherapy assistant, and occupational therapyassistant programs. Educating health careprofessionals to serve Southern California'smulticultural population means paying increasingattention to cultural dimensions of health andillness. Because of the strong interest in issues ofculture and health, the symposium includedCarole Browner, who has done extensive researchon this subject among Hispanic women inColumbia and Mexico. She focused on issuesrelating to women's reproductive health andcontrol of their fertility. Not surprisingly, shefound women's attitudes toward pregnancydepended greatly on their social and economicstatus. In Columbia. she studied women whosought abortions compared with those whocontinued their pregnancies. These women livedin an urban area of Columbia in traditionalnuclear families, usually some distance from

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relatives. They did not work outside the home.Husbands frequently carried on affairs with otherwomen simultaneously. She found that thedecision to continue or terminate a pregnancy wasalmost exclusively based on the strength of thewoman's relationship with her male partner. Ifthe relationship was strong, the woman continuedthe pregnancy. If the relationship seemedunstable or if the man had ended the relationship,the woman terminated the pregnancy. If thewoman consulted her partner, his views aboutcontinuing or ending the pregnancy always tookprecedence over hers. In this socio-economicenvironment, women and their children cannotsurvive without the support of a man, which madethe marital relationship the overridingconsideration in fertility decisions.

Abortion is considered both a sin and a crime invery traditional, Catholic Columbia, and womenknown to have had abortions are stigmatized.Browner wondered how women gathered sufficientresolve to defy cultural norms. In interviews withover two hundred pregnant women, she learnedthat Columbian women viewed a missed period aslate and regarded the taking of herbal and otherremedies as a way to regulate menstruation, notachieve abortion. Failure to menstruate isregarded in Columbia as a serious threat to awoman's health, leading to tumors, cancer andother illnesses. Most women believed that it wasmorally correct to attempt to regulatemenstruation within the first month after a missedperiod, and about half felt that efforts couldcontinue into the second month as a way tomaintain health. These remedies were regardedas a test of pregnancy. If a woman were notpregnant, they would bring on her menses; if shewere pregnant, they would do no harm to motheror fetus. In casual conversations, Brownerdiscovered that men seem to be largely unaware ofthese remedies. She hypothesizes that having thissecret knowledge about remedies to regulatemenstruation represents women's attempt tomaintain a degree of control over their own

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fertility. Clearly, then, the way a woman thinksabout menstruation and pregnancy has significanteffects on the timing and kind of health care sheseeks; her social and economic status has aprofound influence on fertility decisions.

SummaryScholars and researchers disagree about theeffects of culture on learning. Some scholars,frequently those studying classroom interactions,believe that it has a weak effect. Others, studyingculture from an anthropological and psychologicalpoint of view, conclude it is of the utmostimportance. Weisner suggested that both of theseapproaches are beneficial for colleges anduniversities responding to multicultural studentpopulations. "In the classroom, you have to beresponsive teachers interacting with individualstudents and using whatever techniques areeffectivecultural accommodations or othermethods. As an institution, however, there is aprior set of responsibilities that make the efforts ofthe faculty possible. There must be a collective,institutional cultural sensitivity that creates aframework in which it is possible to discussculture in the classroom without becomingpolitical." He urged faculty applying for mini-grants to select an obtainable goalimprovingretention of Hispanic nursing students, forexampleand to focus on the students, at thesame time being alert to any cultural factors thatmight emerge. He urged others, particularlyadministration and staff, to do research onstudents' eco-cultural niches in order to look forcultural features which could be incorporated intocampus life as well as the curriculum.

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IIIMini-grants

The experience of another culture was profound.It touched my life so that I will never be thesame again.

MSMC mini-grant recipient

The symposium summarized in the last chapterand other presentations created an open dialogueabout culture and its role in education. The ideaspresented also stimulated many of the facto.ty andstaff to conduct their own research into thiscomplex subject. Mini-grants were the vehicle bywhich the college promoted such intellectualexplorations. The mini-grant program wasadministered by the director of the CAPHE projectwith the help of an advisory committee of faculty,administrators, and staff. The application, review.and evaluation process which Mount St. Mary'sadopted is described in the following pages.

Objectives

Faculty, administrators, and staff wereencouraged to submit proposals related to theobjectives outlined in the CAPHE grant:

1. To help faculty and staff betterunderstand the cultures, values andlearning styles of multicultural studentswho make up an increasingly largerproportion of the student body.

2. To research topics related to minoritiesand the curriculum or student services.

3. To increase faculty and staff awarenessof their own assumptions and culturalvalues.

4. To make the campus more comfortablefor multicultural students.

5. To improve the retention rate amongethnic minority students.

Application Procedures

Eligibility All full-time faculty, administrators,and administrative staff were eligible to apply.Faculty, administrators, and staff working theequivalent of three-quarters full-time who hadbeen employed by the college for more than fiveyears were also eligible.

Proposals Applicants were required to submit thefollowing items in their proposals:

1. Objectives of the project.

2. Statement of how the project related to theobjectives of the faculty/staff developmentprogram.

3. Description of the project, including anymaterials that would result, such as abibliography, syllabus, and teaching aids.

4. Description of how the project'scontribution to the goals of the faculty/staffdevelopment program might be evaluated.

5. Criteria, method, and timeline forevaluation.

6. Staff involved.

7. Timeline for projects completion.

8. Budget for project (maximum grant of$1,000).

9. Letter of support from department chair orsupervisor.

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Dates Mount St. Mary's received the CAPHEgrant iri the month of January. The director andadvisory committee established four opportunitiesto submit proposals: in June and November of thefirst year and in April and September of thesecond year. Mini-grants awarded in June orApril had an expected completion date of thefollowing September, while those awarded inNovember ran through June, and those issued inSeptember finished in April.

Criteria for Selection The advisory committeeand program director evaluated all proposals.Successful applications demonstrated thefollowing characteristics:

1. Fulfilled the purposes and objectives ofthe faculty/staff development program.

2. Related to the mission, current needs, andgoals of the college.

3. Gave promise of long-term benefits.

4. Would significantly enhance minoritystudent learning.

5. Would impact a large number of students.

6. Utilized qualified staff sufficient to achievestated goals.

7. Demonstrated a realistic, adequatelydocumented budget.

8. Was well organized and well written.

9. Stated clear objectives with activitiesappropriate to the achievement of theobjectives.

10. Indicated the staff member responsible foreach task described.

Project Reports Successful applicants wererequired to give the project director brief monthlyupdates of three to five sentences. They were alsorequired to submit final reports at the completion

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of the funding period and to share their resultswith other faculty, staff, and administrators inwritten and oral reports as deemed appropriate bythe project director.

Awards

The project director and her committee wereinundated with applications. As mentioned in the"Foreword," 30 research projects were funded,involving 20 departments and administrativeoffices and utilizing the talents of over 40members of the faculty and staff. In order todemonstrate the wide range of research stimulatedby this faculty/staff development program, apartial listing of the funded projects isincluded here.

I. Academic Area ProjectsA. Connections: The Relationship of Art

from Different CulturesNorman Schwab, Professor,Department of Art

B. Multicultural Literature: AnAnnotated Bibliography4 nne Johnstone, Instructor.Department of English

C. Preparing Teachers for CulturallyDiverse ClassroomsNancy Davis Burstein, AssistantProfessor, Department of Education

D. Enhancing Student TeacherInstruction with Preschoolers inMulticultural Settings through VideoTechnologySister Imelda D'Agostino, CSJ,Assistant Professor. Department ofEducation

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E. Secondary Teacher Education:Strategies for Teaching Students fromDiverse Cultural and LinguisticBackgroundsJoel Levine. Assistant Professor.Department of Education

F. Health Care and Native AmericanMedicine: A Journey of DiscoverySharon Golub. Instructor.Department of Nursing

G. How Culture Influences the Ability ofPregnant Adolescents from African- andHispanic-Americar, Cultures to MeetNutritional RequiremeiCatherine Casey, Assistant Professor,Department of Nursing

H. Analysis of Attrition Data of MinorityStudents in NursingMary Hicks. J. Eileen McArow. MarySloper, Nancy Taylor. Faculty,Department of Nursing

I. Cross-Cultural Communication: A CourseModuleZona Chalifowc. Karen Jensen. MaryWilpon. Faculty, Department of Nursing

J. Nutrition from the Melting PotMary C. Colavito, Assistant Professor.Department of Biology

K. Cooperative Learning Strategies in theLife Science CurriculumJane E. Lingua. Assistant Professor.Department of Biology

L. A Lexicon of Religious TermsSister Karen Wilhelmy. CSJ, AssistantProfessor, Department of ReligiousStudies

M. Ethikon ColloquiaMarie Egan, IHM. Associate Professor.Department of Religious Studies

N. Theories and Issues in Development witha Cross-Cultural EmphasisJoanne Krakow. Associate Professor,Department of Psychology

II. Library and Media CenterProjectsA. Culturally Diverse Library Acquisitions

Mary Sedgwick and John Coultas.Librarians

B. Instructional Media Center AcquisitionsClaudia Reed, Director of MSMC Libraries

III. Student Life and StudentServices ProjectsA. Different Voices: Multicultural Dimensions

of LeadershipCheryl Mabey. Director of the LeadershipProgram

B. Financial Aid Opportunities for African-American StudentsBeverly Porter. Director of Financial Aid

C. Academic Advisement: The Hispanic-American PerspectiveAngelitos Echeverria-Garrett. Instructor.Department of Biology

D. A'Resource Guide for the Teaching ofEnglish Survival Skills to AdultImmigrantsSister Consuelo Aguilar. CSJ. Director ofthe ESOLD Program (English for Speakersof Other Languages and Dialects)

E. Alumnae Mentors: Cross-referencingAccomplishments and EthnicityMargaret Horst. Director of AlumnaeRelations

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F. Reference Guide to Ethnic Newspapers inthe Greater Los Angeles AreaDerek Garbellini, News Office Associate.and Nina Kidd. News Office Writer

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Summaries of Mini-grant Projects

As teachers, find out what works well in theclassroom and share it with each other.

Thomas Weisner

As the list of projects shows, the mini-grants wereremarkably diverse in subject matter. They werealso different in methodology and results. Somegenerated tangible products: a bibliography ofauthors from minority cultures, a soiircebook ofnutritional information on ethnic cuisines, and alibrary of slides showing graphic art bycontemporary artists from diverse cultures.Others resulted in course syllabi revised to includemulticultural content. Some researchers devisednew methodologies to use in their courses, suchas the videotaping of practice teaching in pre-school classrooms, or created new materials, suchas biology laboratory exercises based oncooperative learning techniques. Other resultswere textbooks on teaching in multiculturalclassrooms for use in elementary and secondaryeducation courses. All projects changed thefaculty and staff engaged in them, as well as othermembers of the college community with whomthey shared the results through formalpresentations, informal discussions, and written

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reports. Simultaneously, the collegeadministration continued to stimulate discussionthrough in-service conferences. As greaternumbers of faculty and staff became involved inmini-grants, more people added their voices tothe dialogue.

Summaries of six projects are presented here inorder to reflect something of the :-..ubstance ofMount St. Mary's faculty /staff developmentprogram and to spark the reader's interest inpursuing research on topics related to culture andlearning. Several of the projects funded by mini-grants will be published in full as monographs inthis series.

2J

Multicultural Literature:An Annotated Bibliographyfrom Anne Johnstone, Instructor, Department of English

Readread everything.

Maya Angelou. 1986 HorizonsConvocation Speaker

Many liberal arts courses offered by colleges anduniversities today make no reference to the lifeexperiences of ethnic minorities. Sometimes, thisomission is the result of a philosophical decision:the role of the university is to convey the best thatWestern culture has to offer. More often, however,literature and scholarship by and about ethnicminorities is absent from reading lists and classdiscussions because faculty members themselvesdid not receive a multicultural education. Facultyand staff need resources to help them select andutilize works of imaginative literature, biographies,autobiographies, histories, and cultural studiesrepresentative of many minority groups. Toprovide such a resource for the faculty at MountSt. Mary's College, Anne Johnstone, instructor inthe English department and director of the CAPHEgrant, compiled an annotated bibliography ofliterature by African-, Asian-, Hispanic-, andNative-American authors.

Most, though not all, entries are extensivelyannotated. The annotations may includeJohnstone's own critical responses to particularworks, quotations from the authors aboutindividual works and the writing process. andexcerpts from selected texts. The quotations,typical of style and content in each case, capturethe work's primary themes and theses, makingthis bibliography something of an anthology aswell. Annotations are more detailed on lesser-known works and authors; established writerssuch as James Baldwin appear with bibliograhicdata only. Authors included meet the followingcriteria: 1) they have published since 1960;2) their writing merits critical analysis and issuitable for college courses: 3) they are Americans

from one of the four cultures mentioned above;4) they write in English.

The list of authors is incomplete because theproject was finished in September, 1986, omittingimportant works published after this date. It isalso limited by the difficulty of obtaining books byminority authors, who are often published bysmall presses with limited resources for keepingbooks in print. Most university libraries have fewof these among their holdings to draw on andpublic libraries practically none. Despite itslimitations, the bibliography can serve as aresource for librarians wishing to addmulticultural titles to their holdings as well as tofaculty broadening course reading lists.

Presented below are very brief excerpts from eachsection of the bibliography. Readers interested inthe entire 50-page bibliography should look for itsappearance as another monograph in this series,to be published in 1992.

African-American AuthorsAngelou, Maya. All God's Children Need Traveling

Shoes. New York: Random House. 1986.

. And Still I Rise. New York: RandomHouse, 1978.In Part I, "Touch Me, Life, Not Softly," thepoet calls forth and welcomes a range ofpositive and negative human experiences:struggle, love, work, family life, sexuality,relationship, remembering. The poemscontain strong feeling intermeshed withcommitment to individual purpose and aclear identity of self, particularly expressedin "Phenomenal Woman." In Part Ii,

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"Traveling," the poet portrays places andsituations from the perspective of herheritage and experiences.

My Arkansas

There is a deep broodingIn ArkansasOld crimes like moss pendfrom poplar trees.The sullen earthis much toored for comfort.

Part III, "And Still I Rise." ends thecollection with poems of transcendence:

You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted liesYou may trod me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.

.Just Give Me Cool Drink of Water fore I Die.New York: Random House. 1971.Part I, "When Love is a Scream ofAnguish," draws subjects from emotionsevoked when love is textured withobstacles and hypocrisy. Part II, "JustBefore the World Ends," portrays the rangeof emotions inherent in struggle,particularly in work for civil rights andjustice, sometimes fulfilling, but manytimes frustrating. Anger threads throughthese works recalling racial tragedy andechoing Langston Hughes' question. "Whathappens to a dream deferred?" Alwayswithin the fervor, however, is a lyric qualitywhich transcends anger and despair.

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. Gather Together In My Name. New York:Random House, 1974.

Asian-American Authors

Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei. Fish Souls. GreenwoodPress, 1974.

. Random Possession. New York: I. ReedBooks, 1979.

. Summits Move with the Tide. GreenwoodPress, 1974.Berssenbrugge writes poetry with minimallines and images, allowing the wordsthemselves to advance and expand in themind of the reader. She creates a momentand then fills it with implication, drawingfrom nature and Chinese symbolism, butdisrupting these with intrusions of varioussortssometimes idiomaticwhichconvey her view that "no beauty existswithout danger, and no danger existswithout beauty."

.The Heat Bird. Providence: Burning Deck,1983.This book contains four sections: "PackRat Sieve," "Farolita," "Ricochet off Water,"and 'The Heat Bird." Each may be read asone long narrative poem or as a series ofindividual pieces. All focus on cyclesrealand symbolicwithin human experience incontemporary society. The title piecefurther symbolizes human experiencethrough birds who live on carrion.

Chan, Tin-Yake. The Sandalwood Mountains.Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1975.

Chang, Diane. Eye to Eye. New York:Harper and Row.

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. The Frontiers of Love. New Y,)rk: RandomHouse, 1956.Three Eurasian characters in this novelattempt to sift through the life situationsthey confront in order to find meaning andidentity as .ndividuals in a less thanaffirming environment. Chang says of herwork, "I believe an abiding interest incharacter and emotion informs all myworknot only because the relationships,situations and problems I write about ariseout of the characters of my protagonists,out of their personalities, but also becauseI seem preoccupied a lot with identity orselfness. Being or becoming seems to bethe underlying denominator of my work."Chang was born in New York, but spenther childhood in China: consequently, sheknows of the cultural dichotomy hercharacters face. In the following excerpt.Sylvia, born from a mixed marriage,reflects upon her mother's past.

Americans like her mother had beenallowed to stay out of the internmentcamps because of their Chinesehusbands: instead they were required towear red arm bands with numbersprinted on them. She wasconspicuousas Sylvia had alwaysfound her mother conspicuousand toany Japanese gendarme who wanted tostop her and inspect her identity card,Helen was 123.

Hispanic American Authors

Algarin, Miguel. Body Bee Calling 'from the 21stCentury). Houston: Arte Publico, 1982.Algarin calls these poems "nuyoricanfolklore." His statements to the futurecome out of a multicultural environment ina big city. His subjects leap from thegraphically sensual to the abstract and

mystical. reflecting similar ranges in histwo major influences: Walt Whitman andPablo Neruda.

. On Call. Houston: Arte Publico. 1980.These bilingual poems cut deeply into thesAlf-identity and way of life of people wholive on the edge of survival. Algarinexposes the depths of human sensation inshocking images while not judging anyevent, only acknowledging humansituations, conditions and prejudices.

2 3

Rosa

Puma called asking me to remind youthat he made love to you,that he didn't declare war against

your legs,that he didn't violate your nothat he was searching for your yesthrough the nothat lurks beneath the seeming wanting

to resist,he says it was love you made not hate,that it was mutual yieldingnot the severing of parts.

The Time is Now. Houston: Arte Publico,1985.Algarin explores connecting energy whichhe presents as "chemistry" or the"conversation" between the individual anda loved one, the individual and politics.and the individual and God. Theconnection expands and contracts.changing the proximity of the two inrelationship, while keeping them bonded ina single unit. In each relationship theindividual becomes new, but not alwaysbetter, in response to the other.

Alurista. Floricanto en Azilan. Los Angeles:Chicano Studies Center. UCLA. 1971.In these "flower songs," Alurista brings a

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new dimension to the literary motif of carpediem. "seize the day." Rather than usingthe argument, "Life is short and time isfleeting," to entice a young lover into sexualpleasure, here the poet calls all humanbeings, but particularly Chicanos, to walk,run, ride through existence, throwing offempty restrictions while actively seekingharmony and unity.

. Nationchild Plumaroja. San Diego:Toltecas en Aztlan, 1972.

Native-American Authors

Allen, Paula Gunn (Laguna/Sioux). Studies inAmerican Indian Literature: Essays andCourse Designs. New York: ModernLanguage Association, 1983.Paula Gunn Allen stipulates her intentionin this collection to provide informationbasic to an understanding which willprevent distortion in the teaching of NativeAmerican literature. She emphasizes"significance, context, and aesthetics," allarising, she believes, out of "continuity andculture." In her introduction, she says,"Significance, like beauty, is usuallyrelated to experience, to emotional andintellectual patterns, and to deep values.all of which one forms within a culturalframework." Aesthetics, she asserts, hasmeaning only within a tribal or socialcontext. She offers three importantguidelines to the non-Native-Americaninstructor presenting Native-Americanliterature in courses of study: 1) provideauthentic background material so that theelements of the work come across asintended: 2) avoid attitudes of paternalismor colonialism which breed a sense ofcultural inferiority and promote self-hatredin Native Americans: and 3) avoid clichecharacterizations such as the "primitive" or

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"noble savage." The book is divided intothe following sections: "Oral Literature,""Personal Narrative," "American IndianWomen's Literature," "Modern andContemporary American Indian Literature,"and 'The Indian in American Literature."

.The Blind Lion. Berkeley: Thorp SpringsPress, 1975.

. A Cannon Between My Knees. New York:Strawberry, 1978.

. Coyote's Daylight Trip. Albuquerque: LaConfluencia, 1978Coyote, in the manner of a clown, mirrorshuman foibles and exposes truth throughhis antics. Allen explores these tricks andthe creativity of Coyote in her poems whileexposing him to varying lights of day andenhancing him with a contemporaryperspective. Nonetheless, she reminds usthat he is the prototype, the original, thefirst cause of human energy. She openswith the concept.

The key is in remembering, in what ischosen for the dream.

In the silence of recovery we holdThe rituals of the dawn.Now as then.Watch.

. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Femininein American Indian Tradition. New York:Beacon, 1986.

Connections:The Relationship Of Art From Different Culturesfrom Norman Schwab, Professor, Department of Art

I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me.

Terence

The art of African-, Asian- and Hispanic-Americans has been slow to find its way into theclassroom. Art history courses concentrate on thegreat masters such as Michelangelo, Da Vinci,Rembrandt, and Van Gogh. Even classes inmodern art tend to focus on well-known figuressuch as Pollock, O'Keeffe, and Warhol. ProfessorNorman Schwab saw the mini-grants as anopportunity to add balance to his art historyclasses by photographing the work ofcontemporary ethnic artists. He compiled acollection of 130 slides, concentrating on the workof African-, Asian- and Hispanic-American artistsexhibiting in Southern California. Although thisgeographical focus somewhat limits the scope ofthe project, his collection and its accompanyingcommentary indicate the diversity brought tocontemporary art by the thousands of minorityartists working throughout the United States.

The purpose of this collection is to show people,especially students. the great outpouring ofcreativity that diversity stimulates. (To help inthat endeavor, Mount St. Mary's Collegeanticipates making a set of slides and commentaryavailable at a later date.) Artists from all ethnicgroups contribute to. and at the same time reflect,the character of American society. Exposur: totheir work helps all Americans gain insight intothemselves and each other. Although the surveyshows the world as seen through the eyes ofAfrican-, Asian-, and Hispanic-Americans, theethnic background is not always apparent in thework. While the art of the late '60s and early '70saddresses the struggle of minority groups in a verydirect manner. the work of the late '70s and '80stends to be more ambiguous, less socially orientedand more abstract. One of the concepts all theartists believe in is their importance to society.

Although intuitive and subjective, artists do reflectuniversal truth in the crucible of the presentmoment.

When discussing with students the work of ethnicartists like those in his collection, Schwabemphasizes the connections among art f:.omvarious cultures. Sometimes, these connectionsare straightforward, acknowledged by the artiststhemselves. The Impressionists, for example, werequite explicit about their debt to Asian art, andthe Cubists owed much to the art of Africanpeoples. In other cases, the artist deliberatelyborrows from a cultural heritage. One exampleSchwab uses can be found in the work of FridaKahlo, wife of Diego Rivera. Kahlo, who wasseriously injured in a bus accident that led to over30 surgeries in the course of her life, frequentlydealt with the theme of suffering in her paintings.The painting, Broken Column, for example, showsa woman trussed in the straps and bars oftraction. Her body is open to reveal a shatteredIonic column. This column suggests the body'sskeletal structure, now ruined and unable toperform its function of support. Significantly, it isan Ionic column, the Greek order most associatedwith the feminine. Kahlo, a Mexican painter, usesthis image from classical Greek civilization toemphasize her point.

In another painting, The Little Deer. Kahlo depictsherself as an antler-crowned deer that has beenwounded by nine arrows. The subject of thepainting is not only her physical pain, but thepsychological suffering caused by Diego Rivera'sfrequent infidelities. In this painting, she drawsher images from traditional pictures of the saints,such as Mantegna's St. Sebastian martyred byarrows. The antler headdress is also an allusionsuggesting the horns that the cuckolded husbandof an unfaithful wife is said to sprout, according toa mocking European tradition.

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Some connections between artists of differentcultures occur because they are dealing with thesame existential dilemma. Images of thedismembered Osiris, so often found on Egyptianfunerary objects, and pictures of the crucifiedChrist show artists from very different culturesand ages dealing with the mystery of death andthe hope of immortality. On a gold coffer from thetomb of Tutankhamen the reassembled body ofOsiris emerges from a tree to new life, just asChrist is often depicted rising from the emptytomb. Artists as different as Botticelli, Gauguin.Kahlo and African-American Rex Gorleigh use theimages of vines and plants to suggest the processof lifebudding. growing. bearing fruit, and dying.These are not borrowings so much as artists usingimages common to many human cultures.

Some works of art deal explicitly with the clash ofcultures and the resulting pain. Backed Into aCorner, an installation piece by African-AmericanSandra Roe, depicts the danger in ordinarysituations that members of minority groups oftenface. The piece consists of abstract, sculpturalshapes combined with painted walls to form thecorner of a life-sized room. The viewer confrontsthe piece as if standing at the edge, looking into afantastic interior space of vibrant color anddynamic imagery. The playful consideration ofhis colorful phantasmagoria, however, is soon

replaced by anxiety as the true, ominous nature ofthe work is revealed. At closer examination, onenotices wedges of broken glass and images ofpsychological pain laced throughout the work. Inthe corner, a network of biomorphic forms,perhaps suggesting a figure. is puncturedthroughout with colorfully painted steel spikes. Aplausible interpretation is that the piece is aboutfear and entrapment. The idea that danger can befound where you least expect it, behind aninnocent and seemingly frivolous facade, is centralto the message of the piece. In the artist'sstatement. Sandra Roe uses these words toexpress htr thoughts about her art: "Life, Death,Loving. Living in this diverse world, and aboveall, Survival."

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Much of the art contained in Schwab's collectionof 130 slides can be summarized by Roe's words.Some of the works deal with being "backed into acorner." Others deal with being freed from thatcorner, and still other work celebrates thatfreedom. Even the most painful of these works isinspiringfilled with the fierce joy of grapplingwith the human condition. That human struggleto express the meaning of life most deeplyconnects works of art from all ethnic groups andperiods of time. Using visual symbols to expressan equilibrium between one's inner worldtheworld of selfand the outer worldthe physicaland human environmentis the job and thelegacy of artists. They have always dealt with thecosmic questions: Who am I? What am I doinghere? How can I survive? The context haschanged, the forms of communication havechanged, but these concerns remain central toartistic expression.

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Cross-cultural Communication:A Course Modulefrom Zona Chalifoux, Karen Jensen, and Mary Wilson, Faculty, Department of Nursing

In order to use cultural variables effectively. . . youhave to get inside the experience of the other. It's areciprocal. empathetic understanding that youultimately have to reach.

Thomas Weisner

Because of the rich ethnic diversity of the greaterLos Angeles area, nurses often care for patientsfrom ethnic groups other than their own.Communication between nurse and patient can beimpeded by a variety of factors. Languagedifference is the most obvious barrier tocommunication. Even among people fluent inEnglish, differences in cognitive styles, non-verbalbehavior, cultural views (on time, illness, andstatus, for example), and cultural values maycause miscommunication. Failure tocommunicate may have serious results such asinaccurate reporting of symptoms by the patient,misunderstanding of symptoms by the nurse, orfailure to understand and comply with necessarytreatment. Teachers, attorneys, and businesspeople encounter similar difficulties inproviding service because of culturalmisunderstandings. An understanding of cross-cultural communication, then, is necessary ifMSMC students are to function effectively intheir careers.

Faced with this reality, three members of thenursing faculty set out to design a course moduleon cross-cultural communication. The one-unitmodule can stand on its own or be integrated intoa psychology of communication class. As aprelude to the course design, Zona Chalifoux,Karen Jensen, and Mary Wilson undertook areview of the literature on cross-culturalcommunication with particular emphasis onhealth care. They prepared an annotatedbibliography of relevant material and beganacquiring books and articles.

In the second phase of the project, theyestablished course objectives, outlined content,identified teaching resources, selected learningactivities, and designed a pre- and post-test. Oneof their hardest problems was identifying the kindand amount of material appropriate to a one-unitmodule. They also had difficulty defining culturalgroups. Asian-Americans, for example, includevery different ethnic groups such as Chinese,Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Indonesianpeoples. Recognizing that content would belimited, they developed a conceptual frameworkfor students, a framework they could apply to anycross-cultural situation they encountered.

The completed module attempts to help studentsdevelop an understanding of and a facility withcross-cultural communication. Because studentsat Mount St. Mary's College come from a widevariety of ethnic groups, the course can have agreat immediacy and practical value. Faculty canmodel, as well as lecture about. cross-culturalcommunication. Students in the class can serveas resources on the values and views of their ownculture. By articulating their beliefs to oneanother, they become more aware of theunconscious assumptions they may be making.

The module begins with the following coursedescription:

Ethnic background can have a tremendousimpact on communication style. The goal ofthis unit in cross-cultural communication isto provide the students with a frameworkwithin which they can acquire knowledge anddevelop communication skills that will assistthem in communicating more effectively in aculturally diverse environment. This unit willalso attempt to foster student sensitivity to,appreciation of, and respect for all cultures.

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Course structure is based on seven objectives.

Upon completion of this unit the student willbe able to:

1. Describe the importance of cross-culturalcommunication.

2. Define key terms in the discipline of cross-cultural communication.

3. Develop understanding of the relationshipbetween culture and the communicationprocess.

4. Describe the constituent variables of cross-cultural communication.

5. Identify variations in communication stylesamong African-. Anglo-. Asian-. andHispanic-Americans.

6. Seek opportunities for positive interactionwith individuals of different cultural groups.

7. Demonstrate skill in locating information onan ethnic minority from library holdings.mass media, and personal observations.

A variety of learning activities is included for eachobjective. Faculty members can tailorassignments to their own personality and to thecharacteristics of the particular group of studentsthey have in any given term. Assignments includereading, keeping a journal, writing a researchpaper from observations of cross-culturalcommunication, interacting with students ofdifferent ethnic groups, and taking part insimulations.

For each objective, students have at least oneassignment that involves them in experientiallearning. Objective three, for example, is "todevelop an understanding of the relationshipbetween culture and the communication process."Four different learning activities have been

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designed to enable students to achieve thisobjective. They begin by reading assigned pages ofthe course text, Understanding InterculturalCommunications by L. Samovar, R. Porter and N.Jain, and attending class lectures. As anassignment, students are required to answer thefollowing questions in their communicationnotebook.

1. Why are culture and communicationconsidered to be inseparable?

2. What is culture? How does it affect ourdaily lives?

3. How does culture affect us throughout thecourse of our lives?

4. What are the unique distinguishingcharacteristics of cross-culturalcommunication? How does cross-culturalcommunication differ from everyday forms ofcommunication?

5. What are the differences between cross-cultural, interracial and inter-ethnic formsof communication?

6. What are the differences betweensubcultures and subgroups? How can wedetermine whether a particular group ofpeople are members of a subgroup or asubculture?

In addition, students are required to get first handexperience of cross-cultural communication byattending a cross-cultural event and reporting tothe class. Here are their instructions.

Attend a cross-cultural event (e.g., foreignstudents' reception on your campus,international students' picnic, internationalnight, international students' dinner orsimilar function) involving persons fromseveral countries. Try to meet some personsfrom foreign countries and find out the

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purpose of their visit, their cross-culturaladjustment experiences, and their futureplans. Keep track of your communicationexperience and problems with each person.In what ways are these experiences andproblems different from communication withpersons from your own culture?

One major assignment, designed for objectives fivethrough seven, is a research paper on thecommunication styles of African-, Anglo-, Asian-,or Hispanic-Americans. Students are evaluatedon their oral participation in class (bothdiscussions and oral reports), theircommunication notebooks, and their researchpapers, in addition to a final examination.

The final examination is a complex instrumentdesigned to serve a number of different purposes.It is administered to students at the beginning andend of the course module. Test results are usedboth to measure student attainment of objectivesand to diagnose course strengths and weaknesses.In order to determine student attitudes toward

various cultural groups, test designers alsodevised a series of "scale" questions. Sometimesstudents were asked to select adjectives ratingparticular cultural groups. At other times theywere asked to report their own preferences in aparticular situation such as the choice of a labpartner. Pre- and post-tests are also compared todetermine whether changes in attitude haveoccurred.

A complete course outline with learning activities,suggested resources for teachers, tests, andannotated bibliography will be available in thisseries of monographs in 1992.

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Health Care and Native-American Medicine:A Journey of Discoveryfrom Shay on Golub. R.N.. Instructor. Department of Nursing

People's beliefs and attitudes about health play atremendous role in health care decisions.

Carole Browner

Throughout the Southwest, Native-Americansoften receive substandard medical care. Whileaccess and economic constraints are a large partof the problem, Sharon Golub hypothesized thatcultural misunderstandings may also stand in theway of treatment. Native-Americans. for example,may be reluctant to submit themselves tocontemporary medical practices because ofcultural beliefs. Those who do seek out Westernmedicine may fail to comply with treatmentinstructions because they violate cultural valuesor are poorly explained. A nurse knowledgeableabout traditional, Native-American medicine,Golub reasoned. might be able to reconcile the twoapproaches to health and improve the quality ofcare given to Native-Americans.

Golub set out to learn more about Native-American medicine with the goal of passing thisinformation on to students. By sensitizingstudents to the beliefs of Indian cultures, shecould help them become better caregivers toNative-Americans. Learning the way cultureimpacts health in one ethnic group, moreover,would enable her students to explore, on theirown, the link between culture and health in otherethnic populations they served.

Funded by a mini-grant, Golub attended aconference in Tucson, Arizona, sponsored by St.Mary's Hospital and Health Center. This unusualfacility integrates Native-American healing andWestern medical practices. Speakers includedEdgar Monetatchi, Jr., executive director oftraditional Indian medicine at St. Mary's Hospital,

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Tucson, Frank Clarke, a physician who is also aHaulapai Indian, and Jack Whitecrow, executivedirector of the National Indian Health Board.

Golub expected to hear about herbal remedies andpoultices: instead, she learned about the spiritualand psychological dimensions of health andillness. At the end of the conference, she hadchanged as a person, with new attitudes towardher patients, her students and even her ownhealth. What began as a research project becamepart of a spiritual journey. In her project report,she invites her reader on a similar journey.presenting a transcription of her notes. Heropening remarks and a few excerpts from hernotes follow:

What follows are my personal transcriptions ofsome of my personal notes from theconference. One of the most important things Ilearned in Tucson is that we travel differentroads and have different time plans. We havedifferent experiences to learn different lessons.Therefore, I present the material to you as itwas presented to me. In the following writing.you may hear different things than I did. Youmust come to draw your own conclusions,your own lessons. your own philosophy.

Wellness and Illness

"In Traditional Indian Medicine we talk aboutbeing well. If you know that you are well, you willbe well. You can decide to be well. Therefore, youcan see that Traditional Indian Medicine hasnothing to do with illness. It has everything to dowith wellness. You choose to be well in spirit, andyour body does it. You put the love on (the love ofGod, and of those people who love you. perhaps,the love of the medicine man) like another skin.It is ever present: you breathe in love. Pain is areminder that you are not loving yourself. Becareful of your brain and let your spirit do the

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healing. Put your brain in your pocket and let therest of you do the work. When you say, 'I am sickand tired of being sick and tired,' you are ready toget well. You come into a state of comfort; thenyou can do anything. In comfort, you can love,learn, create, expand. Become a lover withhappiness, joy, pleasure. Then it will beimpossible to be ill.

"The caregiver nourishes himself by releasingguilt. You are not responsible for the patient'sdisease. He is responsible for his disease.Facilitate healing within each individual who asksfor help. They must ask; then they must openthemselves up to receive. Recognize that you canonly help those who want help. then love themunconditionally."

Alonzo Flores, Cheyenne

"A word on humility [which the medicine manmust possess]. It does not mean subservience orgroveling. It means respect and recognition thatother people need to do what they need to do togrow. DO NOT CHALLENGE. DO NOT JUDGE.You do not know where the other person is in his

growth. The medicine man speaks with spirit aswell as words. He speaks with the spirits becausethat's where he and his patient will learn thetruth. A disease involves looking and learning.'What will you do with it? You wanted thisdisease. You got it. Now, what will you do withit?' The disease comes to you because you havelived in such a way as to invite it. You needed it.Why? How does it serve you and what will you dowith it?"

Edgar Monetatchi, Jr., ComancheExecutive Director of Traditional IndianMedicineSt. Mary's Hospital, Tucson

The Medicine Wheel

"The study of the medicine wheel leads you toknowledge of yourself. Its purpose is to help yousurvive, pursue and proceed. How do you knowwhere you are in the wheel? You must look withinyourself. In the medicine wheel there are fourpoints: North, South, East, and West. For eachdirection there is a color, a word, and an animal.

The Medicine Wheel

WestBlackBear

Seeing from WithinCharacter: Indecisive

NorthWhite

Buffalo or DeerStrength or Wisdom

Character: DemandingEast

YellowEagle

Vision or IlluminationCharacter: Decisive

SouthGreenMouse

Love, Trust or InnocenceCharacter: Victim

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"The man of the East has great foresight andvision. The person from the West is as a bear. Hecannot walk a straight line. The bear person isunable to make a decision. The eagle person cansee many things the bear person cannot see. Ifsomeone takes advantage of you, you are a personof the South, the mouse. You must become awhole person. You must be balanced in allattributes. You must daily learn your lessons andjourney toward the center of the wheel. Wherewere you born on the wheel? You must lookinward to find out. What kind of person were youwhen you became aware of the world? If you werebratty, demanding, you were the buffalo. Thismeans you will be a good provider, but you will becold hearted if you are not balanced. You will bewhite, cold, of the North. In life you need to yearnfor more. You must take advantage of learningexperiences. There are 360 different degrees thatyou can take from as you move through the circle.Each will give you a slightly different experience.Regardless of how long you live, you must applyand receive the gifts of the directions."

Jake WhitecrowExecutive DirectorNational Indian Health Board

The Spiritual Life

"Religion is man's formulation of what he sees.But true spirituality is of God. The spiritual liferequires a great deal of prayer. It can take manyforms but can take place anywhere. In healing,bring yourself before the Great Spirit forpurification. Then you can pray for othersperhaps for their healing. Offer the problem toGod. You must stay in touch. Surround yourselfwith a loving preser 'e. You must be patient.Answers may come slowly. There is a saying 'whatgoes around comes around.' When the time isright, the cure is easy. Conversely, there are thosewho still have lessons to learn to accept the

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consequences of their actions. Practice patience.Don't succumb to the unwillingness to wait. Toomuch prayer may lead to nausea. Be in balance.Eat something.

"You bless us all with your presence when youbless yourself with your own love. Try this: seeyourself as water in a stream. If you see a rockahead, you can go over or under it or flow aroundit gently. Don't fight obstacles. Religion is talking.Spirituality is walking."

Edgar Monetatchi

Paul Ortega

Alonzo Flores

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Lexicon of Religious Termsfrom Sister Karen Wilhelrny, CSJ, with Eugene Frick, Alexis Navarro and Father Aloysius MichaelFaculty, Department of Religious Studies

Studying an aspect of culture that you don't havewords or concepts for is very difficult.

Douglass Price-Williams

Religious beliefs, rituals, and practices permeateand reflect the culture from which they come.Because religion and culture are inextricablybound together, the faculty of the religious studiesdepartment hypothesized that cultural experienceswould affect students' understanding of thetechnical vocabulary used in their classes. AnAfrican-American student, for example, may haveassociations with the words "gospel" or "salvation"that are very different from those of an Hispanic-American or Irish-American. In order to makesure that students understood the precisedefinitions of technical terms, the religious studiesfaculty undertook the project of constructing alexicon with clear definitions and examples ofdiffering cultural associations with each word.

The faculty began by compiling and defining a listof words that make up the special vocabularyused in religious studies classes. For purposes ofevaluation, they pre-tested students to determinetheir knowledge of a random sample of theseterms. Of the 182 students tested, 117 studentsscored at or below 65% correct. The need for thelexicon was clear! Using a working draft of thedefinitions, faculty members began the project ofrefining and reworking the definitions toclarify them for the students. They also askedstudents to provide examples from their ownethnic backgrounds which would complementthe definitions.

This task took far more time than was anticipated.largely because students were unable to supplyexamples of cultural associations with the words.Many resorted to quizzing parents andgrandparentG with little success. Facultymembers asked graduate students from different

cultural backgrounds to help with the project anddid only slightly better. Why so few examplesemerged is not clear. One hypothesis is that thetask was beyond the students' understanding oftheir own cultures. Another is that studentseducated in a multicultural environment come toshare a body of cultural knowledge that is"American," and so agree on the definitions andassociations of the terms. Another factor may bethe Catholic nature of Mount St. Mary's College.Many religious studies courses deal with Christia.scripture, ethics, and theology, although there arecourses on world religions, Judaism, Asianreligions, and Islam. Thus, many of the terms inthe lexicon arise from the Christian tradition. Amajority of the college's students come from theChristian tradition as well: about 60% of thestudent body are Catholic and many students inthe remaining 40% are Protestant. The culturalsimilarities among Christians of college age. then,may be greater than their differences.

Faced with this unexpected result, the facultydecided to try to eliminate examples that wereculturally exclusive and simplify definitions tohelp students understand them. Together, facultyand students rewrote the definitions until thefinal lexicon was achieved. In some instancesculturally specific examples were possible.and these have been included in lexicon, butmost often students and faculty agreed that noculturally specific examples were neededfor clarity.

The post-test done by the department indicatedthat students had gained much from the work ofthe project. Almost 89% scored 75% or better onan identification of randomly selected terms. Thefaculty learned as much as the students. In thisparticular instance, culture proved to be a weakvariable as Dr. Gallimore and Dr. Goldbergsuggested in the symposium on culture and

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learning. Pedagogical methods, particularly thosestrengthening learning and language skills, weremore important than cultural misunderstanding.A sample of terms defined in the lexicon isgiven below.

Excerpt from the LexiconAgape The unconditional love of a Christian for

the neighbor. Thus, agape goes beyondfriendships and preferences based onmutual attraction, shared interests, ethnicorigins and personal charm to the kind oflove that God in Jesus has for us. Agape isnot the Golden Rule of self-love, but thetruth of God's love for us which isundeserved, unmerited. and freely given.The New Testament speaks of two kinds oflove originating from agape: 1) the love ofcommunity (koinonia) and 2) the love ofservice (diakonia).

Agnosticism Suspension or denial of thepossibility of certain knowledge of theexistence of God, the nature of God, or anyother supra-empirical realities (e.g.,afterlife, the Tao and its tao. BRAHMAN-ATMAN, and so on) because tangible andverifiable evidence for belief/unbelief isinconclusive.

Buddha Fully enlightened One, total condition ofenlightenment, an unconditional final stateof being beyond all (life/death & self/world)experiences normally known. There aregenerally three kinds of buddhas orbuddhahood levels: 1) earthly (real,human person), 2) heavenly-transcendent(spiritual being, never human), and3) unconditional (a state beyond allpersons, trans-personal). Many Buddhistsrevere 1) Gotama, and/or 2) Amida, and/or3) Vairochana as representatives of threekinds ("bodies") of the Buddha.

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God Generally, a singular, supreme Being(Great Spirit, Yahweh, Allah, Siva) orUltimate Vital Force or Law (Tao Tien).Usually, God is the ultimate creator, lord,and destroyer of all other beings. Becausethere may be many gods in one religionand because there are many differentdefinitions of God in many religions,religious scholars define God as a term orsymbol for the unique, ultimate reality orbeing that is singular by its absoluteness,eternity, transcendence, and unconditionalcharacter. God may be person, personal,or non-personal in nature: a reality greaterthan all others that can be known orconceived: ultimate reality experienced asultimate concern.

Incarnation Generally, any person or being inwhich God/Ultimate Reality dwells ormanifests itselftemporarily (Avatars ofHinduism, mandi of Islam). In theChristian sense, a singular human beingin whom the presence of and unionwith God are so intense that then_ is anidentification of the two as oneperson (Jesus).

Law/Torah This refers to the Pentateuch (thefirst five books of the Hebrew Scriptures).It is to be understood as norms for a lifedemonstrating Yahweh's involvement in allaspects of life for Israel.

Meditation One of the many yogas (disciplinesthat restrain and concentrate and purify)of the inner self, the "mind" (thinking,feeling, imagining, remembering,passions/desiring) and the "herIrt":meditation opens this inner self toGod/Ultimate Reality. Aims at returningmind and heart to their roots in soul orAtman (deepest interior level or state inone's self) which is experienced in one ofthree ways: 1) as insight or

awakening/enlightenment to the truth,2) as tranquility of ongoing innerpeace/quiet of abiding in silence, or 3) asemptiness, unconditional state beyond allinsight or moods or activity of any kind,absorption in the One ultimate anduniversal reality.

Reformation A movement in the Church duringthe Middle Ages, which resulted in thebeginning of the division of the Church intovarious denominations. The movementwas lead by Martin Luther in 1517 becauseof the erosion of papal authority andabuses such as the selling of indulgences.

Reincarnation Rebirth of the soul or othercomponents of a prior self in a subsequentlife-form (spiritual, human, or animal, forexample) according to deeds or karma(deeds and residues) or other criteria ofevaluation (such as spiritual level ofdevelopment).

Religion In general, a comprehensive vision andway of life, rooted in an understanding orexperience of ultimate reality, which aimsat the total transformation of the self, itslife, and its world in accord with thatvision. This vision and way of life areinterdependent and integrated into allareas of one's self (mind, heart, soul, body,psyche) and one's life (deeds, intents,words) and one's world (relationships,society); every aspect can become religious

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in orientation. The way of life usuallyincludes five elements: 1) rituals ofworship and celebration; 2) moral rites,disciplines, ideals; 3) spiritual disciplinesand ideals; 4) community life withstructures of fellowship and authority; and5) sacred texts, traditions, and history asroots of identification. Generally religionsare founded by God or by religiousgeniuses (prophets, sages, saints,incarnations) who more or less embody thebasic truths, values, and ideals of lifedistinctive to that community.

IN THE HISPANIC CULTURE: "La Religion"is the great canopy under which Hispanicslive. It covers every aspect of life and issacred to the point that they should bewilling to die for it.

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Different Voices:Multicultural Dimensions of Leadershipfrom Cheryl Mabey. Director of the Leadership Program

Let each of us so live that we will not regret yearsof useless virtue, inertia and timidity. Let each ofus so live that in dying we can say, "All myconscious life and energy have been dedicated tothe most noble cause in the world: the liberationof the human mind and spirit. beginning withmy own."

Maya Angelou. 1986 HorizonsConvocation Speaker

Mount St. Mary's College emphasizes leadershipdevelopment as well as academic excellence. Ournationally recognized Women's LeadershipProgram (featured by the New York Times in aDecember '90 article) offers students theopportunity to study and practice leadershiptechniques through single courses or a minor inleadership studies. The program focuses on theindividualanalyzing and perfecting eachstudent's unique leadership style. Because of thisemphasis on the individual. Cheryl Mabey, thedirector of the leadership program. was interestedin studying leadership styles in minority cultures.Her goal was to broaden curricular materials onculture and leadership for the senior leadershipseminar, the capstone experience of the program.

She planned to survey current literature on thesubject of leadership theory and practice inminority cultures. To flesh out the theory, sheintended to compile oral histories of MSMCgraduates from various ethnic backgrounds forspecific examples of the way culture affected theirleadership styles. Almost immediately, she raninto a major obstacle. Information on leadershipin minority cultures was scarce. Various works inthe fields of educational research, history,anthropology and psychology touched on thesubject as did biographies of individual leaders,but no work existed that synthesized diverse

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cultural views of leadership. She and herstudents would have to do the synthesis forthemselves from primary sources.

Fortunately, Mabey did find other scholars askingquestions similar to hers. A conference onleadership sponsored by the American Associationof Colleges examined "Leadership in DiversePlaces." The National Women Studies Conferencefocused upon subcultures within the UnitedStates at its 1988 conference "Leadership andPower: Women's Alliances for Social Change." Atthe Wingspread Conference in March, 1988, theRutgers Chair in Women's Studies identified amajor need for research into the contributionswhich feminism and ethnic minorities can make todiscussions of leadership and diversity. Even theCenter for Creative Leadership, a corporate think-tank, included a luncheon round-table discussionon leadership and ethnic diversity at its annualleadership education conference. Mabey attendedsome of these meetings, corresponded with otherscholars studying leadership styles among ethnicminorities, and read extensively. She began todraw some tentative conclusions about the waysin which leadership among ethnic minoritiesdiffers from traditional styles of leading. One ofher discoveries was that leadership in minoritysubcultures has many characteristics incommon with "transformational" or "servantleadership" styles.

A Different Kind of Leader

A hierarchical model of leadership is deeply rootedin Western culture, so deeply rooted that it oftengoes unquestioned. When introduced to theconcept of servant leadership, a high-rankingchurchman asked in real confusion, "But a leaderhas to be over others. How can he be a servant tothem?" This pyramidal model of socialorganization, with the broad base of ordinarypeople on the bottom and the leader isolated from

3G

them at the top, is the dominant concept ofleadership in the United States, but it is not thenorm in many minority cultures.

The paradox of the servant-leader is a goodintroduction to ideas about leadership from othercultural perspectives. Robert K. Greenleafintroduced this term into leadership studies in hisbook Servant Leadership. Troubled by the loss ofpublic confidence in traditional forms ofleadership, he retired from his position as Directorof Management Research at AT&T. He began tosearch for a new paradigm different from the"great man" or the "organizational manager"described in standard texts on leadership. Hefound it in Hermann Hesse's novel, Journey to theEast, which contains the parable of Leo. Leo, thehumble guide on the journey, turns out to be acharismatic leader. Greenleaf describes Leo asone who "ostensibly served only in menial waysbut who, by the quality of his inner life that wasmanifest in his presence, lifted men up and madethe journey possible."

Green leafs characterization of leadership departsdramatically from traditional theories, which holdthat leadership can be defined by personalitytraits (competitiveness, ambition, forcefulness andso on) or by a position of formal authority in ahierarchical organization (president, dean, andchairman of the oard). Both of these theoriesdominated leadership studies through the 1960sand fit comfortably with a mainly male, white,European mind-set.

Many minority cultures, on the other hand,discourage competition just as female socializationdoes. Traditional Hispanic-American, African-American and Native-American cultures stronglyemphasize the importance of pulling together,helping others, and de-emphasize rivalry andcompetition. The pyramid does not representleadership to them.

Among Native-American cultures, respect andinfluence are given to people who have developedspiritual, physical, and artistic abilities thatbenefit the community whether or not theytranslate into marketable skills or commercialsuccess. One Native-American at a recentwomen's studies conference mentioned that herrole as "aunt" gave her more recognition in thetribe than her published works because "aunt"helped the community. Her academic success wasless important because it represented achievementof individual goals.

International scholars have theorized that eachmajor culture has its own epistemology, logic, andprocesses for acting. Many of the basic premisesabout leadingits goals and processesmay seemalien to people of other than European extraction.The concern for individual acquisition of power,status or wealth as a major goal of learning andleading is consistent with European epistemology.Such goals are inconsistent with African-Americancultures, which place a higher value onrelationships between people, and Asian-Americancultures, which place their highest value on thecohesiveness of the group.

3

In a multicultural society, the respect for diversitywill ultimately need to include a respect fordifferent philosophical premises and leadershipstyles. The leadership studies literatureoutsideof biographies and qualitative researchmethodologyis a long way from incorporating theAfrican or Asian approaches into the scientific,cognitive way of counting and measuringmanagers' and leaders' behavior. Such diversitywould add depth and meaning to the narrowconstruct of leadership typical of European andEuro-American textbooks.

Having found the best source of information aboutleadership and minority cultures in biographiesand autobiographies, Mabey decided to approachthe senior leadership seminar in an experientialway. Small groups of students would be assigned

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to study various ethnic cultures throughinterviews, films and personal narratives. Theirtask was to identify the dominant leadershipstyles and techniques and present thisinformation to the class in the words of the leadersthemselves through a readers' theater. Hersyllabus follows.

Unit Plan for "Voices:Multicultural Ways of Leading"

I. Introduction to WesternLeadership Model

A. Review of history text in AmericanHistory/Western Civilization for whatcharacterizes a leader" (i.e., male,position holder, top of hierarchicalstructure, traits).

B. Distribute articles regarding StanfordUniversity's curriculum change of "core"readings including former Secretary ofEducation William Bennett's view.Discuss why broadening the culturalcontext of students is a political issue.Does this university decision/publicpolicy debate reflect some narrowlydefined notion of who should bea leader?

C. Outline leadership model, which MarilynLoden defines as "masculine" in herFeminine Leadership. Is this model ofleadership the prevalent cultural modelin the U. S.?

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IL Tale of 0 and ValuingDifference

A. After students have read RosabethKanter's Tale of 0, list anecdotesfrom their own life stories of "0"experiences. Generate a list ofpossibilitieswhat options do "O's" havein the face of dominant "X" culture?

B. Have students write their opinionsregarding diversity. "Is it better or worsefor society to fuse "O's" into "X's"?Discuss thoughts after studentshave written.

III. Review of Literature(In exploring research/writing onmulticultural ways of leading, it isimportant to underscore that no text ormajor work exists focusing upon thecultural contexts of leading in a generalway. In fact, as in many writings by thirdworld women, the works which exist are onhighly specialized topics or are publishedby small presses. Ideas different from themainstream are difficult to explore in ageneral forum.)

A. Extended bibliography will be distributedto students to review and use infurther study.

B. Discuss anthropological view that aperson can not truly become anotherculture. Reflections on Fieldwork inMorocco by Bruce Payne and John Ott ofDuke University contains passagessuggesting the more an individualstudies/travels to a different culture, themore the person learns about his or herown culture. The "other" always remains

t,

"other." Exploration and analysis ofmulticultural dimensions of leadership,then, cannot proceed comprehensivelyor easily.

C. Life Story/Case Study Methodology.Students will select a different culturalperspective from their own. In order toconstruct alternative cultural models ofleading, specific life stories of third worldwomen in the U.S. (Asian-Americans,African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans.and Native-Americans) will be exploredthrough reading and film.

IV. Class Project inMulticultural Ways ofLeading

A. Initial Organization of Project: Studentsselect cultural group for study. Readingassignments are distributed withdominant Western leadership modelworksheet.

B. Initial Group Discussion: With initialreadings completed, students meet ingroups and work through worksheet onany leadership characteristics differentfrom the Western leadership model.

C. Fieldwork/Independent Study: Studentsconduct interviews and/or read moreextensively. Think. Keep journal withinterview entries, reaction/quotes.

D. Group Projects: Students discussexperiences in groups. Then each groupformulates outline of "voices" from theselected ethnic culture. Material mayinclude interviews and reading theychoose to share with other "voices."Students meet/write/compile subgroup"voice" for rough reading in class (not toexceed fifteen minutes per subgroup).

E. Synthesize Project Into Readers' Theater:Groups present their "voices"uninterrupted. Peer assessment inwriting. What did the listener like?What did she want to know more about?What common themes are beingexpressed? What contradictions? Classforms editing group to synthesize smallgroup "voices" into multicultural wholeabout living and leading. Class approvessynthesis. Practices. Present to in sited"experts" and interested students.

V. Multicultural ThemesRegarding Leadership

A. After the students' reading. viewingvideos/films, meeting women differentfrom themselves and integrating voicesinto a readers theater, the class returnsto what, if any, generalized distinctionsexist from the dominant/male model ofWestern leadership. Specific themes theclass will explore include: style ofleading, group/organizational structure.objective of leading. communication/problem-solving style, keycharacteristics. Students will be askedto probe issues of self-reliance andcommunity appropriate activism in whatarenas, degree of leader-initiated/leader-responsive behavior.

Final examination question will focus uponalternatives to Western leadership model.

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Moving Forward:Beyond the Faculty/Staff Development Program

We celebrate the marvelous variety and richnessthat the ethnic cultures we share among us bring toeach of us, and we point up the need. the serious,enduring need, to understand that richness andjoy in it.

Sister Magdalen Coughlin. CSJ. Chancellor ofMount St. Mary's College

As the mini-grant summaries suggest. thefaculty/staff development program occasionedmuch research and some concrete, curricularchange in individual classes. Among the tangibleresults were course revisions in the departmentsof art, education, and biology: new courses inpsychology, communication, and leadership: newmethodologies in the biological sciences andteacher preparation classes: and new resources forthe teaching of art and literature. Many facultymembers who did not apply for mini-grants madesmall changes such as including a discussion ofminority voting patterns in a political science classor adding a novel by an African-American authorto a reading list. Attitudinal changes, althoughdifficult to quantify or document, occurred as well.When asked what qualities they wished to developin their students, almost every faculty memberincluded an appreciation for cultural diversity.Faculty, administration, and staff at the collegeacknowledged that the program had been aneffective first step in the evolution of multiculturaleducation at Mount St. Mary's College.

Although significant changes had occurred, theywere piecemeal and tended to be in upper divisionor professional courses. Faculty in thedepartment of education, for example, had usedmini-grants for revising teacher preparationclasses to include techniques effective inmulticultural classrooms. Their efforts were sosuccessful that, of five colleges reviewed, MountSt. Mary's was the only one to receive fullaccreditation under the new Standards of the

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State of California, which require thatmulticultural issues be taught in professional(methods) courses. Spurred on by their success,the education faculty applied for and received anadditional grant from CAPHE/NYNEX withmatching funds from the ARCO Foundation tointroduce multicultural material into subjectmatter classes, such as English and history,required of elementary teaching candidates. TheInfusing Multicultural Perspectives Across theCurriculum program, or IMPAC, as it is called, hasinvolved faculty from many different departmentsand is beginning to change lower division classesin the baccalaureate program.

While the IMPAC program has made an enormouscontribution to multicultural education at MountSt. Mary's, it, too, falls short of beingcomprehensive. The administration and seniorfaculty recognized that if Mount St. Mary's Collegewas truly committed to multicultural education,an overall review and revision of the curricula wasneeded. Major questions had to be asked,among them:

What information do students need to learnabout other cultures?

What skills do they need to develop to thrivein and appreciate a multicultural world?

What departments and courses can bestconvey this information and developthese skills?

Which courses should be required and howshould courses be sequenced?

What additional education will faculty need?

What new resources, particularly in thelibrary, media center, art and musicdepartments will the college need?

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A presidentially appointed an hoc committee offaculty and administrators from both campuseswas assigned the task of organizing this majorundertaking. Their four-year plan for a review andrevision of MSMC's associate and baccalaureategeneral studies (core) curricula and selectedmajors has been funded by the Knight and Fordfoundations, the Pew Charitable Trust and theClowes Fund, Inc.

This revision began in the fall of 1990 withadditional faculty and staff developmentopportunities designed to help with theintroduction of new multicultural courses and tostimulate discussions of what constitutesessential information and competencies for thenew century, balancing the heritage of Westerncivilization with the history, literature, arts,philosophy, and religions of Africa, Asia, theMiddle East and Latin America. Somepresentations continued the college's explorationof the differing perspective that ethnic groups havedeveloped because of culture and socio-economicconditions. In another facet of the program,linguistic simulations gave participants thevicarious experience of thinking in anotherlanguage and trying to process the informationreceived. Strategies for effectively teachingstudents whose cultural background is differentfrom that of the mainstream were also examined.

The second year has given some focus to revisingrequired courses for the associate in arts degreeand adapting content in selected majors tomulticultural learners. Another goal in the secondand third years is the revision of the generalstudies program to produce a baccalaureate corecurriculum characterized by required courses thatare multicultural in content and incorporate:collaborative and active learning techniques;structured small group activities: team teachingby faculty from various departments and outsidepractitioners; and alternative methods ofmeasuring student learning.

In the third and fourth years the revised curriculain selected majors and in the associate andbaccalaureate degree programs will beimplemented and evaluated with changes made asthe evaluation warrants. In preparation forintroducing the new curricula, faculty in the art,literature, and music departments haveresearched the availability of appropriateinstructional materials that will assist them inbalancing in their syllabi the Western heritagewith that of other cultures, especially of Africa,Asia, and Central and Latin America. These artsand humanities faculty are working with thelibrarians and media center staff to purchaseprint and non-print materials for humanitiescourses and for art and music education.

When the curricular revisions are completed in1995, Mount St. Mary's College will have acomprehensive program of multiculturaleducation in place. What will that mean forstudents? They will experience an education thatrecognizes cultural diversity as a fact of life inAmerican society and in the world. An educationthat explores what is common to all cultures ashuman beings try to answer the cosmic questions:Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?An education that celebrates what is unique andirreplaceable in each culture. In the giving andreceiving of such an education, all of us at MountSt. Mary's hope to understand better our society.each other, and the cultures in which we haveour roots.

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A Final Word

Faculty and staff development is an essential firststep in bringing multicultural education tocolleges and universities. The experience ofMount St. Mary's College indicates that asuccessful faculty/staff development program willbe characterized by diversity, a variety of learningopportunities, and long-range goals. MSMCinvited scholars from many fieldssociology,anthropology, psychology, and educationas wellas artists, musicians, and writers to share theirtalents with the college community. Presenterscame from different ethnic groups and haddivergent viewpoints on the subject of culture andlearning. The program was characterized by arange of opportunities to become involved. Inaddition to lectures and seminars. faculty andstaff were invited to simulations and to workshopsduring which they could revise their own coursematerials. Individual research was supportedthrough mini-grants. Finally, the aims of theprogram were long-term. Successful multiculturaleducation involves a broadening of perspectivethat comes about only gradually through ongoingopportunities for learning and institutionalsupport as individuals try out new ideas andtechniques. Launching such a developmentprogram is challenging. but even small steps bringtangible, rewarding results and build momentumfor further efforts. However strenuous, facultyand staff development on the subject of cultureand learning is worth the effort. It preparesinstitutions, faculties and students for the worldof the future.

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