Diversity Conference at SDSU, 4/25/09

On Friday of last week, I attended a Marine recruit graduation ceremony at MCRD for my first cousin's son (which makes the son my second cousin??). On the following day, Saturday April 25, I attended the 2nd Annual Student Diversity Conference at SDSU.

By coincidence or sychronicity, the two events juxtaposed oddly. The first celebrated uniformity, the bringing together of diverse individuals and molding them into a cohesive team. At various times spectators expressed approval at the sight of 400 individuals in identical uniforms, marching in impeccable formation. To most veterans who have participated in such things though, military drill is an overrated form of entertainment. I appreciate what my cousin's kid went through, but there's nothing to the ceremony that I haven't seen, heard, and even experienced first-hand before. Perhaps it's an important ritual and worthy of respectful attention, but just the same there's a weary sense of familiarity about it all.

My expectations for the Diversity Conference the next day weren't much higher. I was expecting to hear those same old tributes to "strength through diversity" and those same tired buzzwords uttered over and over, as familiar as a Sousa march or a series of barked orders and snappy salutes at a military ceremony.

At the conference there was some of that, but there was also an underlying sense of realism that reminded me of several of the presentations I'd attended at CATESOL '09 the week before. The prevailing sentiment common to many of the presentations at the Diversity Conference was that this nation committed itself several decades ago to the concept of strength through diversity, that there can be no turning back now, and that we must come to terms with the situation we are in.

I had a chance to talk to the keynote speaker individually toward the end of the conference, and perhaps our conversation was helpful in her closing statement, where she reminded us that we must teach the students that come to us rather than the students we wish we had or the students we think we would have had in the times before "diversity" was considered to be so important. It could even be legitimately argued that society was less dysfunctional when there was less questioning of the legitimacy of standards and of the relevance of curriculum; students just "got with the system" and perhaps came out better educated than they do today. However, the social context of today is not the social context of bygone days.

As it does periodically, America is going through another re-inventing of itself, and we as educators need to be aware.

One especially interesting presentation focused on the trend of urban universities to re-focus on becoming "elitist" institutions devoted to research and prestige ranking, while largely abandoning their urban mission. One Temple University report in particular infamously summed up that "access is the kiss of death for the urban university." Very much a data-driven presentation and partly intended to show that SDSU was doing relatively well in this area, there was nevertheless great awareness among both presenters and attendees of the problem of maintaining standards while trying to serve a student body representative of the general population.

The presenters offered no easy answers to this conundrum, though an attendee I'd met earlier in the day during a workshop on conflict among ethnically diverse high school students pointed out during the group discussion that students today are in more-or-less open rebellion against traditional curriculum and measures of achievement, and that what is going on is more complex than a simple "dumbing down" of the system. I offered my own somewhat glum assessment that perhaps the future belongs to those recently immigrated to this country from cultures that value obedience, rote memorization, and conformity.

A presentation by Karen Cadiero-Kaplan, a former president of CATESOL, featured digital "arpilleras" (i.e., tapestries) developed as student projects in the bilingual education program at SDSU. The discussion afterward turned to bilingual education and included a table of the "California Latino Higher Education Pipeline", which showed that only about 60% of 9th graders go on to graduate from high school, then about 33% of these go on to college and about 25% of those graduate with a bachelor's degree. To put it most saliently, the numbers dwindle from 328 high school graduates to only 26 of these becoming college graduates.

The title of her presentation was "Bi-literacy & Social Justices". Having worked as a bilingual aide in public school for a time, I couldn't resist pointing out during the discussion that bilingual education is less a matter of social justice than of "social politics." From my own anecdotal experience, immigrant groups with a large population and resulting political clout are most likely to receive bilingual services and to become dependent on them, while smaller and less influential groups are more likely to assimilate quickly and even surpass the larger group in achievement!

By the end of the day, I was glad to see that my own somewhat jaundiced view on this whole problem of accomodating everyone while maintaining a functional society was not so far out of the mainstream. Even those who speak optimistically of the virtues of diversity seem to recognize the enormity of the challenges, and agree that likely the community colleges will bear the brunt of them. The Basic Skills Initiative is probably the most visible manifestation of this. In the end we probably aren't looking to create something as conformist as a graduating class of Marine Corps recruits, but there is a recognition that within the parameters of tolerance for diversity we have to develop reasonable expectations and standards for students. At this conference, I got the impression that everyone concerned is at least trying.

thateslguy = Kevin Staff