Broadening Teachers’ Understanding of Diverse Cultures : Schools: Workshop aims to help educators promote good relations between immigrant and non-immigrant students.

Coming to America from the Philippines as educated adults, Enrique and Prosy dela Cruz never found identity to be an issue.

But in raising their two Los Angeles-born children, they have come to realize how fragile the youngsters’ Filipino American identity can be because of their interactions outside the home.

“They’re being told they’re different all the time,” said Enrique dela Cruz, assistant director of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA and a philosopher by training. “Our challenge has been to put positive meaning into this so that they don’t feel marginal.”

Two years ago, their son, Carlo, came home from first grade and said he didn’t want to return to school. Carlo had brought home notes from his teacher that said “he didn’t know his ABCs and was not participating in class.”

Bewildered, his mother went to see the teacher. She learned that the teacher, who was white, had assumed Carlo “didn’t know anything,” the mother said, because he was quiet.

As the family discussed Carlo’s predicament that evening, the 6-year-old blurted out: “Mom, why do people have to know what is in my mind? Why do I have to say everything?”

His mother was touched by the remark, but she also knew that while “silence is golden in my culture,” in a Los Angeles classroom, the boy’s reticence would not only be unappreciated but misconstrued.

Prosy dela Cruz, an administrator with the state Department of Health Services, cringed thinking how close Carlo had come to being turned off to school. She realized that preparing schoolteachers for handling Los Angeles’ diverse students was an urgent matter.

Carlo’s experience was not unusual in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where nearly 90% of the students are nonwhite but 57% of the teachers are white.

On Saturday, Dela Cruz and other graduates of an interethnic leadership training program--considered one of the nation’s best--sponsored a conference at Loyola Marymount University to educate educators.

In this first effort to tap teachers by the alumni of Leadership Development in Interethnic Relations, or LDIR, organizers focused on what educators can do to promote good relations between immigrant and non-immigrant students.

In the aftermath of Proposition 187 and the prevailing anti-immigrant mood nationwide, immigrant students are too often viewed as liabilities, said Kathleen Hiyake, coordinator of LDIR, a collaborative effort by three leading Asian, Latino and African American organizations. “We don’t realize the resources these children have,” she said. “They’re the ones who know how to cross cultures.”

With American employers increasingly looking for workers with language and people skills--such as an ability to work with diverse employees--these children may well be ahead of their monocultural and monolingual classmates when they’re ready to enter the work force, Hiyake said. “The teachers need to understand this,” she added.

There is resistance among some teachers, however, said Sterling Delone, an LDIR alumnus who has taught for 20 years. These teachers are closing their eyes to a Los Angeles reality, he said. For example, he noted, “Teachers have to teach not only English and math but they also have to know Vietnamese customs.”

*

The task is for all--be they white, black, yellow, brown or red--to learn about each other, said Delone.

The job isn’t easy even for those who are prepared, he admitted, because students bring their own baggage about people who are not like them. “Students mirror what adults exemplify,” he said. “They segregate themselves by groups.”

Sometimes when teachers discuss Cinco de Mayo, African American students may resent it, and Latino students may feel likewise about observing Black History Month, Delone said.

Indeed, tensions between Latinos and blacks often revolve around cultural celebrations, said Ruben Lizardo, whose MultiCultural Collaborative, a post-riot group assessing race-relations programs, is studying the school district’s multicultural efforts.

Lizardo said less than 15% of the district’s 618,000 students get even minimal exposure--an hour a month--to instruction on multiculturalism, a statistic he called “alarming.”

The weekend conference included sessions on cultural styles, ethnic histories and demographics, mediation in schools for diverse populations and strategies for classroom debate on immigration.

Each March, 30 people from diverse backgrounds are chosen for the nine-month leadership training program. The goal for each graduate is to reach out to 50 people in an endeavor to improve race relations.

A brainchild of Stewart Kwoh, president of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, the project is now jointly run by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Jah’Shams Abdul-Mumin, head of a youth group and another LDIR graduate, said racial understanding requires honesty and a willingness to share with others one’s feelings and views about race.

“I was so caught up in African American struggles that I didn’t realize other people had the same issues,” he said. The nine-month training changed his life, he said, because he was able to find common ground with leaders from other communities.

*

Elena Yee, 24, who is among the youngest LDIR graduates, says the training has transformed her too. Born in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, she had not paid much attention to her heritage because she was striving to be accepted in the mainstream. Now, Yee is in touch with her ethnicity and feels good about that. “We have to know who we are, accept and respect ourselves, then accept and respect others,” she said.

If they had their way, organizers would make the training a part of the school curriculum. “Learning human relations skills to better work with others--particularly different ethnic groups--is essential to being successful in the 1990s,” Kwoh said. “But you can’t automatically gain it.”