Equitable teaching for young children in Central Mexico

• In Event: The Equity Initiative: Advancing Equity at the Classroom Level

Proposal

More research is needed on equity in educational inputs or processes in developed and developing countries alike. Some studies show that supportive, well-organized, and instructionally-rich teaching practices enhance children’s learning and development across various classroom contexts. Yet the ways these “generic” aspects of teaching are culturally motivated and communicated within classrooms also matter. We define equitable teaching as the combination of cultural and generic dimensions, and explore hypotheses that generic aspects of teaching quality are culturally instantiated. We use two scoring protocols to code videoed interactions in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms in Central Mexico, sampled from public schools across different communities. The first protocol, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), is a widely-used measure of generic quality, organized in a recent factor analysis in Mexico into three domains: Emotional Support, Social Relationships for Teaching, and Instructional Interactions. The second protocol, the Classroom Assessment of Sociocultural Interactions (CASI), measures ten cultural dimensions of teaching and is also organized into three domains: Life Applications, Interdependence, and Agency. Life Applications addresses how classrooms explore and value children’s interests, beliefs, knowledge, and experiences in order to make personal connections with classroom content. Interdependence addresses how classrooms socialize children to relate to and work with one another to motivate learning and establish social identities. And Agency concerns how choice and freedom are managed, including opportunities for children to make decisions, have responsibility, and experience new social roles in the classroom. We coded four 20-minute video segments per teacher, using the CLASS and the CASI for each segment, and conducted a series of multiple regression models to examine our hypotheses. We found several moderate correlations between CLASS and CASI dimensions, and that cultural dimensions of teaching accounted for nearly a third of the overall variation in instructional quality per CLASS dimensions. “Social organization,” a dimension of Interdependence, demonstrated the strongest unique effect. We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of providing equitable teaching for diverse children in Mexican classrooms.

Authors

• Bryant Jensen, Brigham Young University

• María Guadalupe Pérez Martínez, Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes