Middle ground on learning styles?

Recently, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright made a speech in which he suggested that black and white students inherently learn differently. NPR’s Tell Me More explored that statement with two education professors, Pedro Noguera and Janice Hale.

The conversation goes back and forth, with Hale defending Wright’s statements with her own research on the learning styles of African-American children, while Noguera worries that this kind of race-based reductionism will lend credence to claims that black (and Latino) students are inferior to white students.

Noguera’s point is that it is very easy to twist evidence saying that kids of different races learn differently into a terrible argument that kids of different races are inherently inferior.

Hale’s point is that in being so afraid of this twisted use of the information, we are doing a disservice to black children, who could benefit if only teachers were prepared to teach them where they are.

In the end, the argument I found most compelling was Noguera’s reminder that:

There is a great deal of diversity within groups. Not all black children learn the same way, not all white children learn the same way. There are a lot of individual differences. We also know that most children learn better when there’s active learning.

It reminds me of the ongoing debates over Ruby Payne’s work on teaching children in poverty and over Leonard Sax’s insistence that boys and girls learn differently.

In all three of these very similar debates, I always find myself wishing that someone was synthesizing the positions into a carefully reasoned middle ground. Because while I lean toward agreeing with Noguera, Hale had some interesting and important points. And while the works of Ruby Payne and Leonard Sax strike me as dangerously reductionist when considered in isolation, I also find elements of truth in the things they say.

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Because early literacy experience plays such a role in later learning, I would tend to agree with Noguera’s reminder - all learning is about the individual.  Culture is not about race, but about the environments we live in. Therefore culture must play a huge role in how our students learn.  Until we learn how to tap into this - with hands-on, minds-on personal learning, this unfortunately will continue to be an issue. Lori Norton Meir’s synthesis article “A Thrice Learned Lesson from the Literate Life of A Five Year Old” immediately comes to mind.