Increasing awareness of class, ethnicity, culture, and race by expanding on students' own experiences.

Abstract

BRlSLlNcepts is demonstrated by showing how they relate to such important topics as education, health, interpersonal relations, and child rearing practices.Of course, social class, ethnicity, culture, and race do not exhaust the major concepts summarizing influences on human diversity. Others have been reviewed in previously published G. Stanley Hall collections: age (Kagan, 1985;Schlossberg, 1984); sex (Denmark, 1983); psychological abnormalities (Sarason, 1983); and the physical environment in which people find themselves (Saegert, 1986;Stokols, 1982). As with the four concepts examined in this chapter, many psychological phenomena can be understood only when viewed in the context of other factors. For instance, a person's age, sex, social class, cultural background, and current environment all affect obesity and a person's attitude toward and ease in losing weight (Brownell, 1982;Grunberg, 1982;Rodin, 1981). Yet there has to be a starting point for introducing these topics to students, and the best teaching method ma): be to treat them one at a time and later to cover combinations of and interactions among the four concepts.This chapter has three major parts. In the first, the concepts of class, ethnicity, culture, and race will be explained. Further, research will be reviewed that points out important relations between and among these four concepts and such dependent variables as educational achievement, health, interpersonal relationships, and child rearing practices. For all four concepts, the point will be made that the general label (e.g., class) is almost always too broad for a helpful analysis of human behavior. Rather than accepting the general label as having explanatory use, a better practice is to ask what more specific independent variables (e.g.. number of books in the home, which is partly affected by parental income) have an impact on dependent variables (e.g., progress in reading in school).In a second section, research will be reviewed that requires understanding of two or more of the concepts. In addition, other research areas will be reviewed that have suffered because of faulty understanding of the four concepts. To preview one conclusion, many research findings have found a purported relationship between race (especially Black-White differences) and educational achievement (reviewed by Katz, 1973, who is sensitive to the dangers of facile conclusions concerning supposed racial differences). Such findings disappear or become much smaller in magnitude when the class background of students is assessed (e. g., Bardouille-Crema, Black, and Feldhusen, 1986). That is, the largest differences are often between middle-class and working-class Whites, or between middleand working-class Blacks, rather than between students who happen to have different skin colors.A third section will consider the four concepts as social categories individuals use to think about other people and how to behave 142

Training to Think Culturally: A Multidimensional Comparative Framework

“…Trainees also explore the values of their family of origin, their present family, their life experiences with different cultures, and their theoretical slants in the same four basic parameters. Awareness of class, ethnicity, and religion are increased by focusing on the trainees’ own experiences (Brislin, 1988).…”

Ethnic minorities in the teaching of psychology.

“…In l ggGl 9g l, the percentage of renured ethnic minority faculry in doctoral departments was 3.tgo, i,ith 5o.z% of the ethnic minoriry in faculty positircns being tenured, 4Z.gVo in tenure-wack positions, and 7% in non-tenure-track positions (Russo, Olmedo, Stapp, & Fulcher, 1981). In 1988, Kohout et al, (1991 found that 4% of the tenured faculty were members of an ethnic minority, with 38% in tenure-track positions and 1306 in non-tenure-track positions. Although there was an increase after 9 years in the percentage of tenured ethnic minority faculty, a larger percentage of the ethnic minority faculty were found to be in non-tenure-track positions.…”

“…In 1980, 11.8% of the psychology graduate students were members of an ethnic minority. By 1988, in. p.r..rrt"ge had remained relatively sratic at 11.3% (Kohout & Pion, 1990; Pion et al, 1989).…”

How xenophobic is Australian psychology? A comment on the education and training of Australian psychologists

“…Certainly, there is no acknowledgement of culture within the Australian Psychological Society's guidelines for course accreditation or evidence that university curricula and professional psychological services on the whole acknowledge that the needs of persons from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds may differ from those of the cultural mainstream. In our Australian journals there is no debate about issues like what factors affect the outcome of cross-cultural interventions or how race of counsellor and client affect therapeutic outcomes as there is elsewhere (e.g., Brislin, 1988;Sue, 1988;Sue & Sue, 1990).…”