Culturally Competent Essay by writingsensation

This paper explains that experts in education talk about "cultural competence" or the need for teachers to understand the cultures their own culture and the culture from which their students come especially because the student population is becoming more and more culturally varied and the number of teachers not from the majority culture (American of European descent) is decreasing. The paper stresses that commonly grouping students together, such as Hispanic or Native American, suggesting they have more similarities than they really do, can lead to stereotyping and problems in the classroom. The paper explains that differences between the dominant culture and subcultures can extend beyond grade school into college such as the problem of timelessness among some Native American cultures, which is in conflict with the concept of "cause and effect" in Western (European-influenced) thought.