WICKED problems are new and/or increasingly complex challenges that have no easy solutions. Violence on high school campuses in Jamaica is a wicked problem because the root cause is complex and diverse, usually connected to the multiple subcultural identities on the island.

Still, all hope is not lost as it is possible to treat the violence epidemic in high schools by implementing culturally responsive pedagogy.

The need for a culturally responsive education system emerged primarily because of diversity. Culturally responsive teaching is more than catering to the needs of diverse cultural backgrounds, usually originating from varied countries, it also concerns respecting and capitalising on subcultures within a country’s broader culture to bridge the gap between diversity and curriculum standards.

In the Jamaican public school system, excluding the few cases of foreign nationals, diversity is multilayered since Jamaican students from different communities with varied subcultural identities assemble to celebrate their differences and enrich the teaching and learning experience. However, celebrating differences in some school communities remains wishful thinking as countless student-student and student-teacher violent cases continue to dominate the news hour.

Teachers have grown tired of what appears to be a battlefield for so many of their colleagues, and some have decided that enough is enough. They are out!

COMMUNITY CHARACTERISTICS AND IMPACT

Not unique to Jamaican educational campuses, school violence is a harmful cultural brand of specific communities — those that are underserved and marginalised. While this piece does not aim to perpetuate community stigma and profiling, identifying the characteristics of communities in which school violence is prevalent is essential for the objective of this column: to call on school leaders and classroom teachers to recognise, respect, and capitalise on community or subcultural diversity to end school violence. A survey of newspaper articles related to school violence, published in local newspapers in the last three years, was conducted using content analysis. The results show that 100 per cent of schools that have recorded heinous violent acts are located in relatively underserved, marginalised, and culturally diverse communities.

Understanding community characteristics provides context for the climate that impacts students’ outlook and self-perception. Across the world researchers have found that volatile communities usually produce a significant percentage of and negatively affect at-risk students, causing them to develop low self-efficacy. While this finding cannot be overgeneralised, many other scholars have also stated that at-risk and insecure students wage war on their peers and teachers for many reasons, including, but not limited to, defending their subcultural identity and self-perception.

In 2017 Dr Lorna Grant from the Department of Criminal Justice at North Carolina Central University conducted scientific research on violence in Jamaica’s high schools. Dr Grant noted that dealing with school violence in Jamaica is remarkably challenging because the “disrespect” students rightfully experience is often unexpressed, and school officials often downplay or ignore the multiple root causes. To disrespect is essentially to devalue what is important to others. In addition, these unexpressed allegations are immensely diverse and usually connected to students’ varied subcultural backgrounds. While language is the most common element shared by Jamaican students, educators must recognise that learners’ differences go beyond language.

Often shaped by communities, these differences comprise values, attitudes, personal philosophies, experiences, and interests. These traits constitute subcultural diversities that educators unintentionally and, sometimes, intentionally mischaracterise and undervalue to promote curriculum standardisation. Jamaica currently does not have a good track record of catering to the diverse needs of students.

One common malpractice in the Jamaican education system is to impose “formality” and “professionalism” on all students, irrespective of their backgrounds and cultural identities. This imposition mirrors colonial governance, a failed and despised approach used to control and underrate people’s interests and lived experiences. Therefore, it is unfathomable that some school principals and teachers believe that marginalised and at-risk children are interested in colonial education. The dissonance between curriculum standards and subcultural identities is wreaking havoc in the public school system, and a new pedagogical approach, at least new for some of these schools, could be the solution.

CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING

Culturally responsive teaching is a globally practised pedagogical approach predominantly used in second language learning settings but originated as an approach to bridge the cultural gap between African American students and the education system. According to Dr Gloria Ladson-Billings, the professor who coined the term ‘culturally relevant teaching’, the primary tenets of the approach are to highlight and embrace students’ differences, connect with their families and communities, and contextualise learning outcomes to their daily lives. Dr Ladson-Billings noted that the main benefits of implementing culturally responsive teaching relate to academic success, cultural competence, and socio-political consciousness.

As a result of learning experiences and pedagogical practices that genuinely respect and include students’ cultural and subcultural differences, students develop their intellectual capacity as they master content areas. Cultural competence refers to students’ ability to appreciate theirs and the subcultural identities of their peers. Socio-political consciousness is applying school knowledge to real-world problems. To achieve these benefits in the Jamaican context, principals must advocate and lead a new version of education reform that emphasizes employing a wide array of techniques that do not infringe on their learners’ subcultural identities and differences. This reform may imply creating new curricula specific to schools in underserved, marginalised, and culturally diverse communities.

Other key areas within the Jamaican society, such as the business sector, differ in operation based on location, which has led to stability and accounted for individual business success. The education sector must also differ.

PRACTICAL STRATEGIES

While teachers can employ several strategies to include culturally relevant teaching, the following techniques are practical for current and future Jamaican principals and teachers to significantly reduce, if not end, the school violence epidemic:

• Advocate curriculum diversion to cater to the surrounding communities. Principals must advocate and initiate the desired changes to facilitate subcultural diversity and celebrate children’s uniqueness in the confinement of law and order. This reform would create a more inclusive education system gutted of systemic prejudice.

• Loosen up dialogue. Sometimes children refuse to express themselves because school leaders and teachers appear overly formal and inaccessible. It is no coincidence that love and belonging appear on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Children need love, which is either confused with abuse or given in strange ways in many homes. Loosening up conversations at school would create a new haven for students deprived of love and a sense of belonging.

• sPlan lessons deliberately focused on connecting learning goals to students’ real-life issues. Avoid recycling old lesson plans, understanding that culture is fluid and ever-changing.

• Allow students to guide the learning process. Occasionally negotiate the teaching approach. Forget about what the head of a department wants. Students’ learning needs should not be dictated to them.

• Deliberately promote community involvement. School administrators must desist from calling in parents solely to complain. Invite them to spend a few minutes learning alongside their children in the classroom. Invite community members to teach a familiar topic. This plan can be achieved through a new school programme called “open class”.

• Connect with teachers who have positively impacted the lives of at-risk students.

The dissonance between curriculum standards and subcultural diversities wreaks havoc in society, manifesting as school violence. The refusal to connect learning goals to students’ lived experiences, embrace learners’ differences, and teaching students to celebrate their identities has alienated at-risk and insecure learners, contributing to school violence and broader societal dysfunctionalities. This, however, can be curbed through culturally responsive teaching.

Implementing this novel approach may be arduous, but it is the opportunity to write a new story for Jamaica’s 60th Independence anniversary and beyond.

Akeem Nash is a doctoral student in second language instruction.