Emma Mecham

Logan, Utah
Master's Student, Theory and Practice of Writing
Utah State University

"The field school in Huanchaco is an ideal place to gain exposure to
various field methods, academic and ethical issues of Anthropology, the
Spanish language, and Peruvian culture. On top of all that, it's a really
good time."

The Community Classroom
by Emma Mecham

Introduction

Imagine joining a game that looks familiar enough only to discover that the rules are different from the ones you and your friends play by back home. It seems impossible to succeed in this new game because every time you make a move you discover you have trespassed against some rule all the other players intuitively know. You have a coach who truly wants you to succeed, but he can’t seem to identify for you how to play the game correctly because it seems so obvious to him. It is clear he is beginning to think you are either a malcontent or a fool. You discover that this game, though by all appearances the same one you played at home, is completely different.

As a volunteer mentor for Latino immigrants in the public schools, I work with students who feel just this way about school. Sometimes it seems to them that the conventions are designed just to trip them up. When the students get in trouble, they lower their eyes in humility, only to have angry teachers rebuff them for not looking their superiors in the eye when they are talking. They correctly copy the sentence from the text explaining liquefaction into their paper, only to be accused of plagiarism. If these students are to succeed in school, then educators must find ways to help them understand the rules of the game. It is not enough to simply tell them to respect the teacher; we must also help them unravel what it means to show respect in the cultural context of our classrooms. This issue was once a marginal one, applicable to only a few classrooms in Utah, but the changing demographics of the Western United States have brought the issue to the forefront for many educators.

As part of an effort to become a knowledgeable, effective ally for minority students, I have determined that I need to immerse myself in more cultural paradigms. If I can learn to see school both the way my students do and the way the educators in the Utah system do, I can be a bridge to help both parties recognize how to negotiate these expectations and find ways to succeed in both paradigms.

Methodology

In an effort to accomplish this goal, I have spent the last month researching the educational paradigm in Peru (specifically in the Trujillo area). I have relied on two primary methods: classroom observation and ethnographic interviewing. My observations have focused on four different school situations: art classes at one local public primary school, grades two through six at another local public primary school, secondary school classes at a private school in Trujillo, and Castellano classes at a university in Trujillo. In over 50 hours of classroom observations in these settings I have been able to:

• take notes about activities and interactions
• map some students’ movements within the classroom
• map teachers’ movements
• record timed and randomized measurements of some quantifiable actions (for example the number of students absent from the classroom and which activities consume the majority of classroom time)
• interact with students and teachers in the context of the classroom

The second method I have relied on is interviewing. The majority of the interviews have been informal conversations with parents, school faculty and staff, teachers in training, and students. In addition, I have had the opportunity on several occasions to conduct formal interviews with educators.

These methods have enabled me to experience a wide variety of educational contexts in the Trujillo area and gain access to visual representations of the pedagogical theory and values I have heard educators espouse. There are, of course, limitations intrinsic to the methods I have used. My presence in a classroom unavoidably alters the dynamic of that classroom. I often found I was distracting to the students and intimidating to the teachers who were unconvinced that my note taking was harmless. In addition, while I have tried to be an unbiased data collector, the conclusions I have drawn and the data I have collected during my observations and interviews are subject to my own bias and shaded by my own classroom paradigms. Given several factors, I was in many ways limited to the etic view of the Peruvian classroom. My ability to access the emic view was hindered by my limited language ability and by my inability to identify ways of discussing classroom behavior that transferred from my paradigm to my informants’ paradigms. Despite these limitations – and in some ways because of them – I believe these methods have been optimal for garnering the type and quality of information necessary to improve my understanding of the interactions in Peruvian classrooms in ways that I can use to support immigrant students in Utah schools.

Discussion

As I have observed and interviewed in Peru, I have come to the conclusion that the main difference between the paradigm of the education system in which I do my work, and the one I have been observing relates to the ideals of community. In my experience in Utah classrooms, the emphasis in teaching and learning is on individuals. The ideal of most educators and parents is that students should be taught and evaluated on their individual level; thus, the most successful teachers are those that relate to their students one-on-one, not as a group. The group is mostly a necessary evil that exists to serve the needs of individuals. This stance is not surprising given that the US education system has the European personal tutor paradigm for a parent. However, my research has indicated that this paradigm is nearly opposite from the ideals of the Peruvian education system. Though I would not go so far as to suggest that the individual exists only to serve the needs of the group, certainly the needs of the group take precedence over the needs of individuals – in fact, the two needs are not seen as competitive. While the literature on the value of communality in Latin America is well developed, there remains much work to be done in identifying how that value is transmitted through education paradigms .

In no way is the community paradigm more apparent than in the acquisition and use of materials by students in the classroom. Students do not appear to have a sense of restricted ownership over their own or others’ materials; supplies are freely passed around to whomever demonstrates the most urgent need for a ruler, a white-out pen, or an eraser. In truth, the materials belong not to a single individual, but to the group of individuals, irrespective of who purchased them and brought them to class.

Early on in my observations, I noticed an unusual amount of activity on the front row of the class I was observing. Three students in the center of the row (directly in front of the teacher) were passing a ruler back and forth. A pig-tailed girl sat in the middle of identical twin boys. The twins evidently had only one ruler so whenever one of the boys needed to use the ruler, they tapped the girl and she retrieved it from the boy on her other side. The boys seemed very comfortable with this situation and the girl – though she looked slightly annoyed when her attention was summoned with a hard tap from the ruler on one occasion – seemed to take the situation for granted. It seemed only natural to me for the brothers to share; after all, what mother wants to buy two rulers when one will do? As I continued my observations, however, I discovered that rulers were often passed around and not just among family.

On one occasion I watched as a colored pen made its way through three third-grade girls multiple times. They were sitting on the back row and passing the pen back and forth. They all needed access to a colored pen, but between them they evidently only had one. The girls passed it back and forth amiably, reaching across one another’s desks to take it or deposit it. They didn’t compete for use, but waited until the pen wasn’t being used to take it. I was unable to discern who actually owned the pen; it was clearly immaterial to the girls.

This kind of transfer of materials occurred regularly both while the teacher was talking and when he/she had stopped. Quite often the materials were transferred without comment form one student to the next. It appeared there was a standing arrangement about material transfer. On occasion, I was included in the transfer; when I had somehow managed to place myself in a transfer route, students would hand an item to me and gesture in the direction it was supposed to go.

Sometimes students had not arranged for the transfer of materials prior to an activity or assignment. On these occasions, the students did not hesitate to request materials from one another – even when the request required the student to get up and walk across the room. During an observation of a fifth-grade class, the girl I was sharing a desk with was routinely approached by classmates requesting a tool from her. Students came from all parts of the room to ask for supplies.

Never once did I hear a student refuse access to any supply they had when another student approached them. Sometimes the student didn’t have the needed supply and turned their classmate down, but I never witnessed an occasion when a student withheld their belongings. If they had it to share, they did.

Only once in my classroom time did I hear a student express thanks when she handed back a supply to her classmate. It was only then that I realized the supplies were almost always passed without comment – there was no expectation of thanks, nor any attempt to give it. The action was expected and accepted as part of appropriate classroom behavior.

This type of sharing of supplies is not a part of my own classroom paradigm where students generally have the idea that the supplies they bring to school are theirs alone and parents complain about irresponsibility if supplies are lost or used up too quickly. Recognizing this difference, I wondered about the roots of this behavior. One of my key informants, a primary education student at a local university, explained that in public schools many students cannot afford the kinds of supplies used in the classroom. In order for them to do their work, they have to share supplies. As my informant, Anita, spoke about the impetus for this sharing, she did not seem to think of it as a dilemma, simply a reality that is easily solved by the pooling of community resources within the classroom. Those students who have supplies share them, and those students who don’t, borrow them.

This expectation that students will share their supplies is not only intuitive, but it is also actually verbalized in the classroom. On one occasion in my observation, the teacher I observed reviewed the classroom rules with the class (for my benefit, I imagine). The second rule of three was “compartan bien.” This sense of resource pooling is so valued that it is an accepted rule of behavior (much stronger than just a suggestion or an expectation) in the classroom.

In another classroom, a teacher introduced me to her method of daily evaluation and reflection; at the end of each class period, her students are required to fill out a worksheet – “Reflexiono, luego respondo” – in which they evaluate their learning for the day. The students are asked to respond with a yes or no to the statement “Me comparte bien,” (sic). So important is the concept of sharing that while there are only nine questions on the worksheet to evaluate all the elements of class, one refers to sharing. Thus, while students may share supplies because some are lacking, the very willingness to do so is an indication of the value both students and teachers place on the importance of community resource pooling in the classroom.

Students who were routinely borrowing supplies from one another were, by necessity, often out of their seats; they frequently had to walk from one row of desks to the other to locate the writing utensil they needed. One of the most surprising elements of this behavior to me was that students did not hesitate to move around the classroom during almost every classroom activity – lectures, class discussion, deskwork, or group work. Multiple times (in classes from the second-grade to the university) I watched as students walked directly in front of the teacher while the teacher was addressing the class in order to exchange supplies or information with one another. This behavior was not often regulated or acknowledged by teachers. On the rare occasion that a teacher did suggest that a student sit during an activity, students capitulated, but only briefly. However, most often, students did not receive active feedback of any sort concerning their movement during class time.

Students did not only get out of their seats to access materials, but for other reasons as well. Students rose to sharpen pencils, to walk to the front of the room to see the board better, to tell another student some piece of information, or sometimes just for diversion. These students had an exceptional amount of freedom of movement in the classroom in comparison to my past experiences in schools. In not one of the classes I visited did most students stay in their chairs for the entire class period. In fact, when I recorded the number of students out of their seats at ten-minute intervals in primary school classrooms, I was astounded by the results. A random sampling of the classes I visited yielded an average of 6.2 students not seated at any given moment in the classroom (these students may have been standing beside their desks, across the room, or even out of the classroom at the moment of my measurement).

Often many students were absent from the classroom at one time. Usually students would stop and ask permission to use the bathroom before leaving the room, but sometimes not. In the university classrooms I observed, students made no comment before exiting – even in the middle of a lecture. While this did not surprise me, I was surprised to see this same pattern of behavior among primary and secondary students. Each time (with one exception) I saw a student exit the classroom in primary and secondary school classrooms without first consulting the teacher, they were stopped and questioned. However, once announcing their destination, in every case the students were permitted to leave. Often several students left the classroom together.

On one occasion, instead of attending class, I had the opportunity to observe the courtyard in the center of a school complex. All students and teachers who exited their classroom had to pass through the courtyard. During my observation, I saw upwards of twelve students in the courtyard at all times. Some of these students were legitimately out of the classroom on their way to or from the bathroom, but most were not. A group of fourth and fifth-grade boys were playing on the flagpole, a group of fifth and sixth-grade girls walked the perimeter of the courtyard arm in arm, and a fluid number of students from all grades watched me watch them.

When I asked some of the girls why they weren’t in class, they told me, “No hay clase.” I questioned this and they agreed that there was, in fact, class, but they had left. When I asked if it was OK with their teacher, the unofficial spokesman of the group smiled, and stepped back a bit as though a little guilty, but said it was fine with their teacher.

It may well have been fine with their teacher; as previously mentioned, I never saw a teacher refuse a request to leave the classroom. But I had to wonder why students were granted such freedom of movement.

Certainly classroom expectations are affected by the logistics of school circumstances. In the public school classrooms I observed there were sometimes as many as 42 students to one teacher. In formal interviews several educators acknowledged that public schools are overcrowded. However, while that may be a contributing factor to the freedom of movement students are granted in the classroom, (simply because of the difficulty involved in getting 42 fourth graders to sit still simultaneously) it doesn’t appear to be the real reason for toleration of so much movement.

As I interviewed people – both formally and informally – about children in the schools, one word peppered their comments over and over again: inquieto. When I asked for explanations about students’ behavior, I was often given the reply (as though it was obvious) that children are inquieto. I never could identify any tone of displeasure or negative stigma attached to this description by my informants. In fact, on one occasion a teacher directly identified a particular student as very inquieto in front of the student and his peers. The second-grader was not surprised, nor did he appear rebuffed; he joyfully agreed with the description and then demonstrated just how inquieto he could be by doing a hand dance with a big smile on his face. On another occasion, a teacher explained that she had designed her lesson plan specifically to meet the needs of niños inquietos.

My Spanish/English dictionary defines inquieto as "(a) (preocupado) anxious, worried, uneasy; estar ~ por to be anxious o worried about (b) (agitado) restless, unsettled." (Webster’s New World Spanish Dictionary 1992). And while restless seems to come close to the context in which my informants used the word, none of the definitions seems to be quite right. So, I began to ask people what the word meant when I heard them use it in their descriptions of students. There was essentially consensus from my informants about the meaning; Anita defined inquieto as “moviemiento, molestan su amigos,” and while she mentioned the drawback that students don’t pay attention when they are inquieto, she added that it was actually a good thing because it means “tienen mucho ganas y energia.” The teachers I spoke to seem to agree that it is necessary for students to have ample opportunities to move around in order to avoid squelching their animation.

Contextual Tasks 

In direct relation to this freedom of movement, I also began to notice a difference in emphasis on what US educators refer to as on-task behavior (concentration on a specific assigned task to the exclusion of all other tasks). In my observations, I rarely witnessed what I would call on-task behavior on the part of all – or even most – students in the classroom. This involved not only movement, but also conversation between both students and students and teachers. There was no hesitation on the part of students to ask teachers for help or evaluation at any time during the class period – even when the teacher was talking to another teacher or student, or to the class as a whole.

While some limitations and sequencing of behaviors were proscribed, many were not. For the most part, students responded to lecture format by staying in or near their desk and keeping conversation to a minimum. However, lecture time remained essentially on-task only so long as the teacher was facing the students; once the teacher turned his/her back to the students in order to write on the chalkboard, students immediately returned to standing, talking, moving, play -fighting, sometimes even throwing paper airplanes. In addition, after the teacher finished dispensing information and the students were instructed to read or write individually or as groups, the on-task behavior was measurably diminished.

On two occasions, in separate classrooms, I watched as a student whom the teacher had called to the front of the class to perform a visual example of a concept failed to remain on-task despite their position next to the teacher at the front of the class. On both occasions, when the teacher turned her back, the student wandered forward to play-fight with students on the front row. When the teachers turned back around and discovered the behavior of the students, neither of them responded with rancor. Quite often teachers did not even acknowledge this kind of off-task behavior. Frequently teachers would call students to attention when the behavior spontaneously changed because of their in-attention or absence from the classroom, but nothing in their reactions led me to believe that the behavior was condemned.

Nor did the teachers make noticeable efforts to avoid situations in which students could be off-task. Every public school classroom I visited was subject to multiple activities that I would call interruptions: parents knocked on the door to deliver forgotten lunches; other teachers, secretaries, and sometimes the janitor came to deliver papers or supplies, or consult with the teacher; the director came by to introduce visitors. The classroom was in no way isolated from the comings and goings of the rest of the school. This made for numerous breaks from lesson time and the dividing of teachers’ attention during a class period. Naturally, this resulted in lots of off-task behavior – students and teachers alike were focused not on one task, but on juggling multiple tasks.

In my own classroom paradigm, these interruptions would be considered negative distractions. However, when I tried to talk with Peruvian teachers about interruptions, I never got a response that had anything to do with the behavior I have described here. On the contrary, teachers talked about things like earthquakes, epileptic seizures, and kids having empty stomachs because they come from poor homes. These things were viewed as interruptions, but visitors to the classroom who took the teachers’ attention from the students were not.

In other ways the teachers chose not to constantly monitor on-task behavior. Teachers often left their classrooms during class time. They went to the school office, to one another’s rooms, to the courtyard to talk to a visitor (often me) – and rarely about anything more urgent than the weather. During this time, their students were left unattended. In all my observations, I never witnessed an unattended classroom behaving in ways I would consider on-task. In fact, it took only a turned-back for students to turn from their work.

Trying to question my informants about this behavior delicately yielded vague answers. Anita explained that because students and teachers don’t get regular breaks from their classes, they need to be granted leniency in their concentration on deskwork. This seemed unsubstantiated to me, however, since at all the schools I visited, classes broke for a rest or recess of some sort at least every three hours. Perhaps our understanding of continuous class time is different.

My suspicion, however, is that the real difference lies in our estimations of the value of being on-task. In my school paradigm, students should be on-task because one of the best ways they can accomplish learning is through concentration on isolated activities; this is what is meant in the pedagogical literature, in fact, by the phrase "being on-task." It would appear that such task-oriented learning is not the focus of the Peruvian classroom; teachers and students do not seem to view tasks in a vacuum; they are part of a dynamic, interrelated whole that involves multiple behaviors and relationships simultaneously. So, when the second-grade teacher leaves his class to talk to me about inflation, he is not failing to do his job – solidifying our relationship is just as much a part of his job as reading aloud to his students. Likewise, when students halt work because the teacher has left the classroom, they haven’t lost learning time – they are, after all, still in class. This does not mean that teachers place equal value on time students spend copying work from the board and racing erasers down the row of desks. It simply means that teachers don’t see the racing as prohibitive to the act of copying material from the board in the long run. Learning is not governed by tasks, but by the social matrix of the school.

Group Learning

This social matrix is central to the very idea of learning in the Peruvian classroom. Learning is not an individual act, but a group act in this paradigm. This foundation is apparent in pedagogical choices, in addition to classroom management decisions. In every classroom I visited, the majority of class time was spent in ping-pong teaching (a dialogue between teacher and students in which information and challenges are presented like serves and students are expected to respond with a verbal return). Lecture was the primary method of dispensing information and the expectation was that students would participate by filling in the verbal blanks of the teacher. For example, a teacher may say, “The adjective is . . .” and the class would respond, “Blue.” In this type of instruction, teachers rarely got full class participation in the answer, but the expectation seems to be that the group benefits from collectively providing the information.

In my classroom observations, I almost never saw a lesson plan emphasizing individual response or activity. On the rare occasion that a teacher gave instructions which didn’t apply to all the students, he or she was almost always instructing a student who, because of logistical constraints, was acting as proxy for the whole group.

For example, during a lesson on taste, one student was given a candy so that she could identify it as “dulce” and the group could correctly match that label to a list of items. Because the emphasis was not on individual experiential learning, only one student needed to experience the taste for the group to learn.

This method of teaching was also obvious in a computer class I observed at a local primary school. Because of resource constraints, the school only had one computer, however there were fifteen students in the class. While the teacher said she considered this inconvenient, she did not consider it a prohibitive impediment. In order to compensate, she simply called on one student to demonstrate skills they were discussing. The consequence was that during the entire class period, only two of the fifteen students even touched the computer. Nonetheless, the whole group was exposed to the concepts.

Group learning was also emphasized in disciplining techniques. Anita said that she has been taught in her classes on teaching that it is important not to single out a student when they are messing around; rather, a teacher should address the problem collectively. And although there were occasions when I saw a teacher individually respond to a behavior, the vast majority of the time they did not. Most often students were warned by the teacher calling out “niños” or “chicos.” Students are taught both information, and proper behavior through group dynamics, not individual experience.

Because students learn best as a group, according to this paradigm, they are dependent on collective individual participation in the group for success. One of the clearest manifestations of this that I observed was in a primary school classroom when students were assigned to copy the diagram on the board. Several students finished faster than the rest and the teacher suggested that they should help their fellow classmates draw the diagram so they could all finish together. The collective product output (30 diagrams about first-aid for burns) was valued over the individual experience of creating their own diagram. Each member of the group was responsible for group success. Another of the behaviors students were asked to evaluate on the “Reflexiono, luego respondo” worksheet was whether or not they collaborated with the group. So important is group learning that the teacher who designed the reflection framed part of it under the heading “Durante el trabajo en grupo,” the assumption being that no class period would pass without group work – community activity is the forum for knowledge acquisition.

Communal Knowledge Development

Given that group learning is central to the Peruvian classroom, it is not a surprise that knowledge development is also seen as a communal process. In contrast to the paradigm where the solitary genius is extolled, the Peruvian classroom is a place where replication of community knowledge is lauded. This pattern became more and more evident to me the longer I observed classroom activities. Students in the public schools I observed were never asked to create or develop new knowledge – the very idea seemed to be regarded as undesirable. The role of the student is to replicate, as closely as possible, previously generated knowledge. This role was routinely emphasized in lesson plans. Students were instructed to copy the information on the chalkboard – everything from the date and lesson title to sentence diagrams – in all the classrooms I visited. This often took a substantial amount of time.

During one of these reproduction activities, I watched as the student next to me copied the title of a diagram from the board and then carefully blotted it out with a white-out pen. She had copied the right word and spelled it correctly, but her reproduction did not resemble her teacher’s handwriting enough, so she did it over again. Her aim was not only to get the main idea of the diagram, rather to reproduce it in exactness, even down to the color of chalk her teacher had used.

In one classroom I listened as a story from the text was read aloud and then several students were asked to repeat the story for the class. They were not asked for interpretation or analysis, but for replication. This pattern was evident even in art classes – by nature a creative process – at a school where I observed. The art projects students were assigned were all replications of previously constructed art forms; students made caballitos de totora, models of the local fishermen’s boats, clay tiles illustrating fish, pelicans, and sea otters represented in Moche iconography, Chimu gourd drawings, and tracings of Disney characters. None of the sketchbooks I saw contained drawings original in subject or composition to the student – they were all replicas.

According to this paradigm, students will be knowledgeable when they have absorbed and can accurately reproduce the information already determined by the community. According to Anita, this belief governs the role of teachers. She told me that a teacher’s purpose is “conformar los ideas de los niños a los libros.” This replication of knowledge previously agreed upon as a means to education signifies the belief that knowledge is not an individual construction but a community act.

Conclusions

The central tenet of the Peruvian classroom is that the classroom is a community acting to educate, and thus improve, the whole; the focus is on group rather than individual advancement. This premise is both intuitive and articulated. In my observations and interviews I saw it demonstrated in five interrelated ways: (1) students pool community resources by sharing school supplies (2) students are allowed freedom of movement within a larger space than students in a US classroom because their context is not individual or personal, but collective and communal (3) the classroom experience cannot be divided into individually-oriented learning tasks that occur in isolation without reference to the nurturing relationshipsand social context in which they occur ; (4) the process of learning is achieved through group cooperation, not individual experience; (5) finally, knowledge is not only acquired, but also developed by the group as a whole; it is not an individual creation.

After spending approximately one month examining the Peruvian classroom paradigm, I am more convinced than ever that education is as much a cultural phenomenon as a cerebral one. It is no surprise that students who have been primarily exposed to an education paradigm based on a foundation of community find it difficult to instantly adjust to a paradigm founded on individualism. So pervasive is this central premise that it affects the way students acquire and use supplies, space, time, concentration, and knowledge within the classroom. In order for educators to meet the needs of multicultural students, they must recognize how inextricably linked culture and classroom behavior are. It takes time for students to learn dual culture proficiency, but even more than time, it takes recognition of where those paradigms diverge as well as an understanding of which behavior is dysfunctional and which is culturally constructed. The complexities are incredible and it will undoubtedly take more time and research to tease out all the factors complicating the lives of multicultural students.