Parent Empowerment Lunch
Dr. Na'im Akbar


Our research emphasis, our question, and our theoretical focus are on the few that failed…Why hasn’t someone said, ‘How in the world did the vast majority of these people do as well as they did?'


Dr. Akbar started by saying that we need to consider shifting how we think about what we do in our research and practice in working with culturally diverse groups in education. The focus of our research tends to be on weakness, deficiency, and the few people who have failed. We always ask “why aren’t you performing according to the norm that we have set before you got here?” Then we try to bring students up to the norm in terms of performance and behavior.

We do not consider the environmental reality of the culturally diverse groups we are looking at and do not consider the trauma and stress that they are operating under. We do not look at those who have survived a difficult situation—one that is not familiar to them—with great strength. And the fact is, the vast majority of students perform reasonably well considering that the learning environment is not positive and that Latino, Asian, and African American students are in an educational system that does not reflect who they are or their world or language.

What we need to ask is how the vast majority of people do as well as they do, given their circumstances. We need to ask what accounts for the success of the students who may be average in their performance but are actually above average, and in many cases exceptional, when you take into account the environment they are in. We need to look at those who are succeeding and ask what the source of their strength is and understand their resilience. How, for example, have African Americans kept from being completely hopeless and depressed given how they have been treated historically and currently in the U.S., e.g., it used to be prohibited to teach literacy to African American children.

Dr. Akbar also raised the question of whether or not cultural assimilation for any group that has cultural integrity is a good thing. Through assimilation, some of the positive aspects of those cultures, e.g., the value of family for Latinos, get lost. People lose their capacity to deal with difficult circumstances and do well. We should look at characteristics of the unique cultural strengths of groups and build on those strengths.

We also need to appreciate the power of the “double consciousness,” that is the empowerment that has come from the ability to master multiple worlds. For example, a Latino person who speaks Spanish but also understands English very well is better equipped with his/her bilingual capacity than a person who speaks only one language. A person is more powerful when he or she is able to be comfortably connected and anchored in both the culture of his or her heritage and the culture of his or her circumstance, and to make them both fit without sacrificing the best that he or she can be.