Adjusting to their surroundings is difficult for teachers assigned to schools where most of the students and staff share a cultural background different from their own. In fact, these teachers experience the same "culture shock" that afflicts people who move to foreign countries, Eleanor York Johnson of Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., told her audience.
Stresses arise, for instance, when white, middle-class teachers enter classrooms in predominantly black urban schools, in remote rural areas, or on Indian reservations. To cross cultures successfully, teachers need training, preferably including an immersion experience, Johnson said.
"Crossing cultures is not easy," she emphasized. Those who accept the challenge must undergo "tremendous change in perspective, perhaps even in personal identity." Culture shock can be severe, producing symptoms such as depression, ethnocentrism, loneliness, and anger.
Of those who attempt to cross cultures—such as Peace Corps volunteers, missionaries, and transplanted business executives—few stay in the new culture for a long period, Johnson said. Similarly, many teachers leave school environments they find alien.
The right kind of training, however, can prepare teachers to withstand the stresses of crossing cultures, Johnson said. Trainees may learn information about the new culture, learn to think as people in the new culture do, and learn appropriate social behaviors. The "strongest and longest positive effects," however, come from "supervised cultural immersion experiences," which induce culture shock in manageable doses. "We must encourage teachers to experience this shock during training," not after placement, she said.
But immersion should not be like "dropping a tea bag in boiling water," she noted. Candidates need someone to guide them into the new culture. A white teacher in a black urban school, for example, will need someone to interpret events as that culture understands them.
Insufficient training can backfire, Johnson warned, by exposing teachers to the new culture just enough to make them resistant to it, but not enough to allow them to overcome their resistance. "Too often people rely on the contact hypothesis," she said: the assumption that if one visits or tutors in a culturally different school one will become acclimated to it. In fact, the effects of such forays are often negative.
Because the teaching force is predicted to remain largely white, while students are becoming increasingly diverse, the need for cross-cultural training experiences is pressing, Johnson pointed out.