Beliefs

My Beliefs About Teaching and Learning

As an adult piano student, my skill level on the instrument is only comparable to those of some children. When I search for model playing videos for certain pieces of my level, what I usually get are performances by young teenagers or small kids. These youngsters are more than often Asians. From the comments of these videos, I first came across the saying “no matter how good you are at something, there always an Asian kid can do it better”. My feeling on the statement were a mixture of the ‘why do I even try’ discouragement and the stronger pride of belonging to this “better” ethnicity. Because of that pride, I didn’t realize this popular statement from the cyberspace was racist and stereotypical. After seeing this sentence or its variations again and again on the Internet, my critical thinking mind was triggered, warning me this belief could be a stereotype. However, I didn’t pay much attention to this subconscious warning, mostly because this stereotype also has been deeply rooted in my belief system of teaching and learning.

The main reason for this belief of Asian-supremacy in learning to be profoundly ingrained in my head is that the idea had not only been propaganda in my schools in China but also traction in western societies. As a part of the life-long patriotic indoctrination, we were taught in all levels of education that China has 5000 years of undisrupted civilization and Chinese people are industrious and courageous. The former claim is not internationally agreed upon by most scholars (Mair & Brooks, 2013; Ross, 2016; Wu et al., 2016), but many Chinese do buy this theory of our cultural history and believe as a result we are more intelligent than others. So, did I. On the other hand, people in the western world, including some prominent figures in the science community, also think some people are born to be smarter. In their controversial book, Herrnstein and Murray (1996) published their findings on racial difference in intelligence of the USA and reported that Asian Americans outperformed other ethnic groups in IQ tests. The second example in Figure 1 (Brand, 1987), a TIME Magazine cover, shows this stereotype already gained traction in the 1980s. Therefore, having spent most of my twenties in the west, my belief on the stereotype, that school achievement was dependent on the race, was unfortunately further reinforced by its popularity.

A teacher believing in such a racist assumption would lead to discriminatory treatments in the classroom like, for example, unequal expectations (Rubie-Davis, McDonald, & Flint, 2016) for students of different ethnicity. This will violate the teacher image I want to become (Liang, 2019), which is an inspiring teacher who equips with the cultural competence of Tangata Whenuatanga (Ministry of Education New Zealand & Education Council New Zealand, 2011). Recognizing the potential harms it might bring to the students, I started to question about this belief. Thanks to the tolerance of different voices on the Internet and in western media, I was able to deliberately find opinions and arguments that counteract my existing mindset. One of these opinions is from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). CSHL stripped James Watson, a Nobel laureate and one of the discoverers of DNA, of his honorary positions, in reaction to his refusal to take back statements linking intelligence with genetics (Gabbatiss, 2019). The Lab explained his statements were unsupported by science but merely prejudice. This stand is furthered supported by the detailed examinations of this belief in Video 1. There, three main reasons are given against the ethnic supremacy theory in learning: IQ tests (or most academic assessments) do not measure all types of intelligence; does not account for cultural bias; and do not consider environmental factors. These arguments finally convinced me my deep belief was a false one.

This is a long and complicated process of identification and demystification of a single mistaken belief. It demonstrates how subtle but meanwhile deep-seated such a belief can be in the mind. By documenting the process here, I am hoping this journal can be a handbook for myself in the future to be more open-minded and critical thinking in the classroom and beyond, so that I can quickly notice my other detrimental beliefs on teaching and learning and mitigate their negative impacts on the learners.

Go to Part II