“Children and adults are never solitary individuals, immune to the social and cultural forces around them. Gaining understanding of the cultural norms and assumptions we bring as teachers, as well as those brought by each of the students in our classes, is an often difficult task but is essential to providing a learning space that is welcoming and caring and sets up all students for academic and social success.” (p. 154, Mathew Knoester (2008), “Learning to Describe, Describing to Understand”)

In this passage, Knoester speaks to the critical importance for teachers of being both aware of their own cultural norms, and how they may be used as a frame of reference to assess students, and the cultural norms that their students bring with them. If these norms and ways of being and behaving of a teacher and a student are incompatible, a student may suffer consequences for simply for being who they are. In a society that is becoming more and more diverse, I can see this being the situation in a lot of classrooms and working to maintain the status quo; if teachers, who are often times white as we learned last class, unconsciously place higher value on the behavior and ways of being of their white students who may follow the teacher’s same cultural norms, white dominance and power will continue to be sustained in our society. One way to combat this occurring is the “descriptive review” of a student described by Knoester. In a descriptive review, things such as cultural norm incompatibilities may be highlighted and can be addressed. Though Knoester explains that descriptive reviews can be time consuming, the enormous benefits to be gained seem well worth the time they cost.