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We Need Tolerance Now More Than Ever

By Dr. Kathleen Shea for Living Values Education

On September 11th, at the exact hour of the attack on the World Trade Center, a Miami middle school teacher was at the studio of a local public television station receiving training in a global values education program called the Living Values Educational Program. Like most educators, one of her first thoughts was how best to help her students understand and cope with one of the most horrific events of a lifetime. "I was in the right place at the right time," she says. "I opened the Living Values Activities for Children Ages 8-14, and the first section was on the value of Peace. I walked into the classroom on September 12th, confident that I knew what to do!"

The events of September 11th have given rise to increased incidents of ethnic harassment in schools. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and federally funded Regional Equity Assistance Centers, have all issued memoranda to remind schools about their legal responsibilities to protect the rights of persons in our educational communities. According to Dr. Nancy Peck, Director of the Southeastern Equity Center:

"In an ironic way, this tragedy has provided both a checkpoint and a teachable moment for educators. It is a checkpoint because it has become a barometer of the progress or lack of progress that we have made in valuing differences in skin color, culture, and beliefs. It is an outstanding teachable moment, in that our children can see first-hand the results of the fear that intolerance, oppression, and powerlessness produce. Our children are fearful and very vulnerable at this point, and can easily be led to imitate the inappropriate acts of adults."

However, it`s not just the recent tragedies that make tolerance more important than ever. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 602 active hate groups located throughout the United States. As children both in the United States and abroad are increasingly exposed to violence and growing social problems, educators, counselors, and parents are asking for help to turn around these alarming trends. Most feel that part of the solution lies in an emphasis on values.

If Peace Is The Goal, Then Tolerance Is the Method!

Tolerance is a powerful, but often-misunderstood value. There are three levels of tolerance:

Enduring a situation which you don`t like anyway. From long checkout lines and highway gridlock, to physical illness, some situations demand tolerance. Simply enduring only increases feelings of anger, hostility, and pent up stress. Many people see tolerance in only this way!

Finding a way to adapt and deal with a situation; i.e. making some kind of a deal with yourself to take action, so that you don`t feel out of control and victimized by the situation. "White flight" from changing neighborhoods is an example of this. Taking medication for an illness is an action that helps people tolerate pain.

Being open and receptive to the beauty of differences. Through understanding, and with a genuine appreciation for the value of diversity, a person demonstrates tolerance in a practical way. A person has no need to endure or make a deal. As a result, relationships bloom and a civil society is the result.
Diversity Is Our Destiny

By 2025, no racial or ethnic group will form the majority of school students. Even traditionally homogeneous schools are changing. For example, at a single public high school in Annandale, Virginia, there are 2,200 students, speaking 34 different languages, from 72 countries. Each of the 200+ nations on the globe is represented in US schools today!

UNESCO proclaimed 1995 as the "Year for Tolerance." As we reflect on the value of tolerance, the Director General`s words help us to realize why we must promote this value to our children:

"Tolerance is not concession, not indifference. Tolerance is the knowledge of the other. It is mutual respect through mutual understanding. Let`s throw out the old myths and take up the results of current research. Man is not violent by nature. Intolerance is not ` in our genes.` Fear and ignorance are the root causes of intolerance, and its patterns can be imprinted on the human psyche from an early age."

Stressors In The Lives Of Immigrant Children

Significant life changes are always stressful, and can have serious physical and psychological effects, including depression sleep disturbances, and greater susceptibility to illness, substance abuse, and other addictions.

Although most educators born in the United States seldom experience the stress of immigration, they may relate to experiences of relocating to a new city, enrolling in a new school or feeling the loss of cherished friends and surroundings.

We can only imagine what is like for an immigrant child to cope with the multiple losses of country, customs, extended family or close family, friends, language and familiar sounds. This experience can have a profound impact on the child`s emotional, social and academic environment.

While the histories of immigrant students and their families differ in many ways, all share common characteristics. For each family, immigration is an exceedingly stressful experience, simultaneously offering hope for the future and threatening long-term stability. Following is a list of "risk" factors that may help the school counselor determine how much stress a family or a student may have to cope with.

Choice

While some immigrants come to this country having made a conscious decision to change their lives, others, such as refugees, have no choice. Most in this latter category would have never chosen to relocate, but because of war, persecution or other catastrophic events, they had to leave their countries to countries willing to offer them asylum.

While those independent and resilient adult immigrants who came by choice may have a positive outlook and the motivation and skills to manage the transition to another culture, the dependent children of these families had no input in the decision. Add to this the fact that in some cultures, women also do not participate in these major decisions. Children often feel pulled away from friends and extended families. Their feelings of grief are often overlooked by adults. The results are feelings of powerlessness that negatively affect their integration into their communities and schools.

Preparation and Support

Immigrant students come to American schools not only with a variety of languages, but also with a variety of skills in their native and second languages. Some may have been outstanding students in their countries while others may have never attended a school or may have come from linguistic environments with strong oral traditions. Those students who are well prepared in their own languages will do well in their new environments, while the ones with no schooling or oral tradition cultures may feel overwhelmed by the entire school environment. Some of them may be almost frozen with culture shock.

English Proficiency

Children who come immigrate from countries where English is a major language, such as Guyana or India or countries where English is a strong second language fare much better than students who are not proficient in English. And from this group, children whose alphabet is closer to English, such as Latin or Germanic, will fare better than students who come from countries whose alphabets scripts are very different. These children may feel overwhelmed and discouraged by the prospect of learning a totally new system of written and oral language.

Family Separation

Immigrant families usually come staggered. Often, the husband/father comes first to find a job and home, then he is followed by his wife and children. This may take months or years. In some families, a single mother comes first while her children remain with the grandmother for years. When the children come, they often find a new father in the home and new siblings.

Elizabeth Coelho says that, "family reunification after years of separation is often extremely difficult for parents and children alike. If a family arrives as a unit, all members experience adjustment at the same time. There is a commonality of experience to help bind the unit together. However, if parents and children are adjusting to each other as strangers whom they barely remember, there is an additional stress, one that many immigrant families never fully overcome."

As Burt Hellinger, in his phenomenological family constellation has proven, the harmony and bonding of the extended family is crucial to the well being of the entire family. Most immigrant families that come as a unit, leave behind the extended family and this loss has far-reaching consequences in the social and emotional stability of the newcomers. Immigrant children may be very averse to disclosing their issues and stresses to the guidance counselor or the teachers. This is true mostly when the parents and the students feel misunderstood due to the cultural gap existing between the educators and themselves. Many immigrant students who fall into this category feel isolated, with harmful repercussions to their emotional, social and academic lives.

Environmental Factors

Many families who immigrate to the United States start their lives in large cities and live in apartments. For most of them, apartment life is a new experience contrasting to their open spaces in more rural areas. This transition is a challenge for the families and their children. More often than not, the families are forced to spend more time living in close quarters, thus relationships become strained, becoming another source of stress. Parents worry more about their children`s safety and become more apprehensive about public transportation and neighborhood crime.

Minority Status

One of the most painful experiences for immigrants is the shift from being members of the majority in their countries to adjusting to a minority status in the United States. Children in their countries were able to identify with role models such as teachers, policemen, politicians, etc., who were of the same race and ethnicity as themselves. In the new country, there may be few positive models like themselves, and they may not have many people in a position of authority that look and speak like them. This can impact the motivation, as well as the self-esteem, of the children who often undergo an cultural identity crisis.

Loss of Status

Immigration frequently precipitates significant adjustments in income and social status, as families struggle to secure employment and affordable housing. Coehlo tells that, "Many well-qualified immigrants find themselves forced to take low-paying service or manufacturing occupations where lack of proficiency in the second language is not a problem -- and where they will find little opportunity to improve it. For many, these jobs become a dead end rather than a transition to the kind of employment they expected. Many working adults are emotionally exhausted from the frustration of being trapped in occupations for which they are overqualified and that do not provide the stimulus, challenge, or satisfaction they hoped for. What is worst is that many children may begin to view their parents as diminished; they may also feel responsible for what has happened to their parents, who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their children`s opportunities in the new land."

Power Changes in the Family

One important power shift occurs in the relationship between husband and wife. Many immigrant families come from countries with strong traditional family roles of male and female wherein the husband serves as the breadwinner while the female stays home with the children. In the United States, these roles are often challenged because of financial need, forcing the women to take employment. The families are exposed to different a set of values and power relationships. The men in these families soon begin to feel a diminished sense of self-esteem that may be conducive to feelings of frustration and anger.

The other important power shift happens between parents and children. When teenage children take part-time jobs, they begin to ask for more independence and privileges than they had in their home countries. Also children who acculturate faster than their parents and speak English better act as the translators and go-betweens of the adults and the institutions of the new country. These shifts in power can be another source of conflict and stress as the family adjusts to new roles within the family structure.

The Refugee Experience

Some immigrant students have come from war-torn countries, some have experienced extreme deprivation, violence, and have been victims of or witnesses to atrocities. Most of them have experienced some kind of family separation and have lived in refugee camps for months or years. These traumas add to the upheaval and psychological stressors of many newcomers to American schools.

Very often, these students will exhibit typical symptoms of post-traumatic stress which include: depression, impulsive behavior, explosive episodes, sleep disturbances, self-destructive behavior, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts.

Ideas To Support Immigrant Families In The Schools

• Create welcome signs in the native languages of the families and place them in visible places in the school.
• Assign a coordinator of Immigrant Affairs to be responsible for the reception of the immigrant families and the training of the school staff.
• Train the secretaries and other clerical staff to welcome parents appropriately.
• Know your cultural brokers: people who are completely bilingual and bicultural.
• Provide basic information about the length and the structure of the school day, the school calendar and what the student needs to bring to school.
• Be sure that all the information you present verbally is given to the family in printed form. This can be accomplish by giving them a "Welcome Booklet" in the family`s language.
• Create a Welcome Center in the school where immigrant parents can receive basic information and referrals.
• Provide the student with a "starter kit" of materials, including pencils, colored markers, ruler, eraser, notebook, picture dictionary, etc.
• Introduce the family to the grade teacher, the guidance counselor, the student "ambassador" from the same class.
• Form parent support groups. Topic for these groups can cover academic requirements, student rights and responsibilities, after-school programs, scholarship programs, health information, and other community resources.

Ideas To Support Immigrant Students In The Classroom

Creating a supportive and welcoming environment will assist the new immigrant students to a better transition and adjustment. Here are some suggestions for educators:

• Pronounce the student`s name correctly.
• Introduce the students to the class by telling what country and what language they speak.
• Translate and explain important announcements to newcomers.
• Every class should have an "ambassador," whose role is to be a "buddy" to the new students. These ambassadors should be trained to speak English slowly, to have patience with the newcomers, and to help them with everyday school needs.
• Incorporate multicultural images and expressions in the classroom and in the counselor`s office. Use key phrases with special meanings from the native language of the students.
• Hold a class celebration on the birthdays of cultural heroes and special national days.

Immigrant children come from many different backgrounds and have undergone many stressful experiences by the time they arrive at our schools. School counselors and educators can assist by identifying the causes of stress of these children and providing the necessary support systems to help them make a successful transition into their new culture.

REFERENCES

Coelho, E.: Social Integration Of Immigrant And Refugee Children, in Education. Second Language Children, Fred Genesee, editor. 1994.

Kagan, S. Beyond Language: Social And Cultural Factors In Schooling Language Minority Students. Evaluation, Dissemination And Assessment Center, Calfornia State University. 1986

The Complexity Of Multicultural Counseling

By Cristina Casanova M.A.; M.Ed. for GuidanceChannel.com"Culture controls our lives.
Culture is not something outside ourselves, but,
rather, an internalized perspective
that combines the teachings of every significant
person or group we have experienced
read about, or heard about and from whom we have
Learned something."
-Paul Pedersen,1993

As the American population becomes more and more diverse, counselors will need, more than ever, to have a strong multicultural foundation in their counseling practice. Pedersen (1994) states that "counselors who disregard a client's cultural context are unlikely to interpret a client's behavior accurately. The same behavior across cultures might have a different interpretation, just as different behaviors might have the same interpretation. Therefore developing multicultural awareness is essential for all counselors to accurately interpret the meaning of cultural similarities and differences."

Although counselors can choose to ignore the influence of culture in the client's life, the fact is that culture is now and will always continue to influence a client's behavior with or without the counselor's awareness.

What Do We Mean by Culture?

Webster's Dictionary (1989) defines culture as "the customary beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group." This definition of culture is broader than the narrow one that limits its meaning to ethnographic variables such as nationality and ethnicity. This definition includes:

• demographic variables such as age, gender, and place of residence
• status variables such as social, educational and economic levels
• affiliation variables that may be formal memberships or informal affiliations

Every element in the full range of demographic, status, and affiliation aspects works in similar ways as in ethnographic categories to shape a person's identity.

Multiculturalism makes us as look both at how we are the same and how we are different at the same time. Pedersen says that "each cultural perspective is unique, but each perspective also shares overlapping features with each other group like overlapping fish scales. We can best understand the cultural perspective by focusing one eye clearly on the part that is shared and the other on the part that is unique in a cross-eyed, but accurate perspective."

The Complexity of Culture

If you were asked to depict your culture, you might find the question vague, and might encounter some trouble in finding a comprehensive answer. If instead, you were asked what part of your culture influenced a particular choice in your life, like choosing a partner or a career, the task may still be difficult but less vague.

One way the counselor can appreciate the complexity of culture is by looking at the thousands of culturally-learned identities, affiliations, and roles all people assume at one time or another.

One of the complex tasks of the multicultural counselor is the identification of multiple perspectives within and among their clients. To understand the client, the counselor has to perceive the problem from the multiple viewpoints of the client’s culturally learned roles.

Multicultural counselors must consider the following in order to effectively work within the cultural context of their clients...

It is necessary for counselors to identify conflicting, culturally-learned viewpoints between the client and counselor.

Goldstein & Michaels's research on empathy in counseling established the significance of distinguishing between different viewpoints during counseling interviews. Counselors should not presume that one culture's viewpoint is right and another one is wrong. The multicultural perception requires the counselor to understand that two points of view can be right within their own cultural context.

Counselors must recognize that clients themselves may have multiple and possibly conflicting viewpoints.

The Behavioral counseling approach research conducted by Tanaka-Matsumi & Higginbotham indicates that the same person may take on different culturally-relevant roles or identifications, in different circumstances. In fact, this inner role conflict may be the very reason why the client is seeking counseling.

The behavior of clients must be analyzed within the context of the client's culture.

The capacity to take another's perspective has been an important technique in gestalt therapy and mediation. This capacity is also essential in getting an accurate clinical picture. However, the greater the difference in cultures between the counselor and client, the more challenging it will be for the counselor to accurately interpret the client's cultural perspective.

Counselors must listen and gather information without interrupting the client until all aspects of the conflict or problem are culturally understood.

Ivey (1989) underlines the importance of empathic and careful listening which will assist counselors to endure silence and to stay away from judgments until all perspectives of a culturally different client are understood.

It is important for multicultural counselors to refrain from offering simple solutions to complex issues and to validate the complexity of a client's cultural context.

Ivey (1989) found that the most frequent mistake new counselors made was that of giving a "premature solution" to their client's problem. This is even more of an issue in multicultural counseling when it is crucial to understand the issues from multiple cultural perspectives.

Counselors need to help clients learn to accept ambiguity and not ask clients to resolve the dissonance in favor of one culture or another.

The ability to tolerate ambiguity is now considered in the counseling literature as one of the most important skills of the multicultural counselor. The significance of each event will be composed of both positive and negative elements that have to be explored and understood in all their culturally complex ways.

It is crucial for counselors to understand and respect the values of collective cultures.

Ivey (1989) stated that traditional American counseling is biased towards an individualistic point of view. The individual's well-being is of utmost importance. But in collective societies, the welfare of the group may take precedence over the needs of the individual. The multicultural counselor's challenge is to balance the welfare of the client by examining the collective forces that impact the person and helping the client balance his needs and that of his group.

Counselors must be aware of how changing a client's feeling of power will affect his or her sense of well-being.

Power is an important factor in life and one that is culturally defined. Good multicultural counseling monitors whether the process of counseling diminishes or increases a client's power.

In order to provide accurate and worthwhile insight, counselors must understand their clients' cultural perspective.

Most theories of counseling emphasize a series of skills such as interpretation, reflection of feeling, and reflection of meaning to derive accurate insights. A multicultural counselor's accurate insight of the client's situation requires a high degree of awareness, knowledge and skill in the multicultural context.

A multicultural counselor is able to identify various support systems within a client's culture.

In many cultures family and social support systems are the preferred mode of counseling for the client. The multicultural counselor is aware of such systems and uses them appropriately to help the client achieve his/her goals.

Paul Pedersen says that "culture provides a unique perspective in which two persons can disagree without one being right and the other being wrong when their arguments are based on culturally different assumptions. It becomes possible for a counselor to identify common ground between two culturally different people whose expectations and ultimate goals are the same even though their behaviors may be very different." Multiculturalism gives the school counselors a valuable key for understanding both themselves and their clients. We can no longer ignore culture; to be unaware of our own learned assumptions as well as those of our clients is not consistent with the standards of good and appropriate counseling practices.

REFERENCES

Goldstein, A. & Michaels, G., Empathy: Development Training and Consequences, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1985.

Ivey, A.: Counseling and Psychotherapy: Skills Theory and Practice, Prentice Hall, 1989.

Pedersen, P.: A Handbook for Developing Multicultural Awareness, American Counseling Association, 1994

Tanaka-Matsumi, J. & Higginbotham, H.: Behavioral Approaches to Counseling Across Cultures, in Pederson, P. Counseling Across Cultures, University of Hawaii Press, 1989.