Jean Moule offers insights to cultural competence

It wasn’t until last year that professor Jean Moule’s adult son revealed to her that as a child he’d frequently been called a racial epithet on the playground.

“He was called the N-word every day at school in rural Oregon because that is the name people called him,” Moule said. “They didn’t call him Matt, they called him that. I had no idea he was having that kind of discrimination on him daily.”

Moule, an associate professor in the College of Education at Oregon State University, now uses this story, among many others, to help other educators understand the importance of cultural competence.

In the book “Cultural Competence: A Primer for Educators,” which Moule co-wrote, cultural competence is described as the ability to successfully teach students who come from cultures different than that of the teacher.

“It entails mastering some pretty complex awareness and sensitivities, various bodies of knowledge about the cultures you’re working with, and a set of skills that underlay cross-cultural teaching and communication,” Moule said.

In order to express to readers the importance of cultural competence, Moule often uses stories, including tales of her mixed-race family, to explain what kinds of differences, misunderstanding and racism — both overt and unconscious — can be present in a classroom.

“Personal stories cannot be denied,” she said. They also resonate with the reader.

“Stories live in a different part of our brains,” she said. “We remember stories differently, where we don’t remember lists.”

In Oregon one out of every four students is a person of color, but only one out of every 25 teachers is a teacher of color. As the demographics of classrooms change to include more students of color, cultural competence will become even more important.

Moule hopes the educators she’s training will not only be able to handle cultural differences in the classroom, but they’ll also be more aware of the world in which their young students will be facing.

“When students understand more completely the society in which we’re embedded, then they see the need to take action and they do,” Moule said. “They become socially active, they begin to give their students the skills to be empowered and to know what they may be coming up against by themselves.”

One of those young teachers is graduate student Eric Marsh, who is part of an immersion program through the OSU College of Education. In 11 months Marsh will receive his teaching license, a bilingual endorsement and his master’s degree.

Marsh, who is white, teaches at a northeast Portland elementary school which has a predominantly African American student body. The immersion program is helping him become a culturally competent teacher in many ways, he said.

“The program introduced me to ideas of race and co-existence and education within and among different racial groups,” he said, “and I found that to be particularly helpful.”

For Moule, cultural competence can’t be confined within one class or one lesson, but her program and her book starts teachers on the path toward understanding their students a little better.

“It’s a journey,” she said.

By THERESA HOGUE- Gazette-Times reporter