A small number of black educators and psychologists, believing that black children learn in distinctly different ways than do white children, have been urging schools to adapt their instructional methods to this difference.
So far they have not had much success, as even many of their black colleagues are quick to reject most of what they say as coming dangerously close to stereotyping black children.
Nonetheless, the theory has been gaining growing attention since it became the center of a dispute last fall about a New York State Board of Regents booklet examining the reasons for the dropout rate in high school and the subject of a recent rancorous debate among educators at an Albany conference on learning styles.
So far, the idea remains just theory, and it may have been put into practice at only an experimental preschool in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Chances for Expression Cited
Those who put forth the theory of differences argue that black children require instructions that deal more with people than with symbols or abstractions. They say black pupils need more chances for expressive talking rather than writing. Black children also require more freedom to move around the classroom without being rebuked for misbehavior, these educators say.Continue reading the main story
Those who reject the theory say that there are wide variations among children within ethnic groups based on economic, geographical and personality differences.
''I think when we assign attributes to children in terms of ethnic background, the individual is ignored,'' said Dr. Dorothy S. Strickland, a professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia University.
''We may be pushing an Asian child too hard simply because we expect him to excel in science and he may be drawn to poetry and music while the black child may be the budding scientist,'' said Dr. Strickland, who is black.
Others have challenged the theory as promoting stereotyping and possible segregation of black children. Even the theory's proponents acknowledge that white scholars making the same argument might be branded as racist.
But proponents of the learning styles theory say they are motivated by a desire to understand why black children continue to perform poorer in class and on tests than white children. They suggest that not all the differences can be attributed to the social and economic problems faced by many black pupils.
Dr. Janice Hale-Benson, an associate professor of education at Cleveland State University, argues that black children come from a distinct Africa-rooted culture and are given the burden, one not placed on whites, of adapting to a second culture.
''We like soul food, rhythm and blues and jazz music,'' she said. ''We have distinctive worship styles, distinctive artistic experiences.''
Yet, upon entering school, black children are expected to have already mastered white cultural concepts and objects, Dr. Hale-Benson said. Tinkertoys was cited as an example.
Language is used differently in black culture than in white culture, she said. Black children may be better at generating ideas orally than at writing them down, but people draw inferences about their thinking ability by the way they write, she said.
''In black culture, it's not what you say, it's how you say it,'' Dr. Hale-Benson said. ''We value charismatic and stylistic use of language rather than fluency and vocabulary breadth.''
She cited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Jackson as virtuosos of the religiously derived black oral tradition. She also cited rap music and ritualistic games that involve taunting as examples of a black emphasis on performance.
''Children are rewarded for using language in an expressive way,'' she said. ''But there's no place in the first grade where that's appreciated and incorporated into the educational process as a strength. There's no place given for that on the test.''
Both she and Dr. Barbara J. Shade, an educational psychologist who heads the education division at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside, said that black children, reared in large families where they are passed around from lap to lap, ''are more people oriented'' than white children, who they said might be reared in playpens with toys.
''They're really paying attention to the social environment - how people are feeling about them, how they are accepting them,'' said Dr. Shade. ''The result is that teachers who are warm and encouraging get much higher achievement out of black children.'' 'It's Body Oriented'
She said that in the classroom a black child would respond more intently to an emotion-laden story about a person rather than to information presented abstractly. Dr. Shade said that rather than teaching black children that 1 plus 1 equals 2 by using written symbols, a teacher might show how Johnny joining Mary in the front of the room makes two children.
''It's tactile, it's body oriented, it's more personal,'' said Dr. Shade, ''because they can see we're talking about different people, whereas 1 and 1 are simply symbols and symbols tend not to be in their particular culture.''
Dr. Hale-Benson contended that black children also develop differently physiologically, acquiring motor skills and hand-eye coordination sooner than white children. ''When black children come to the classroom and don't conform, we begin to label them hyperactive,'' she said. ''They elicit more discipline and are thought of as unruly.''
One corollary of the learning styles theory is that black teachers, intuitively grasping the theory, teach black children better than white teachers do. ''It is no accident that many of our scientists and mathematicians have come from black colleges,'' Dr. Shade said.
Many of these positions are challenged by educators like Dr. Strickland. She says instuction that starts with the concrete then moves to the abstract or that uses human illustrations is ''just good teaching for any child,'' white or black.
''I would feel more comfortable as a parent if the teacher were able to attempt to find out why the child is behaving the way he or she behaves rather than saying that's the way this particular group behaves,'' she said.
Some learning styles theorists take a more moderate stance. Dr. Edmund W. Gordon, the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology at Yale University, says that individual variations are far more important than group characteristics. Nevertheless, he said, ''There are some behaviors that occur in high frequency in low-income black kids that don't help in their academic work.'' One trait, he said, is a lack of precision in the use of language, numbers and time, a trait that can hobble work in science and mathematics. Program for 30 Children
Proponents of the learning styles theory are just beginning to translate their ideas into classroom practice. Dr. Hale-Benson runs a preschool program for 30 children in a church in Shaker Heights, where small groups of pupils spend much of their time learning by engaging in play and conversation with each other. Preliminary data, Dr. Hale-Benson said, indicate that children at her school are performing better on intelligence tests than a comparable group of children in a regular school.
Dr. Strickland, while not questioning the motives of the learning styles theorists, suggests their energy might be better put to working on other causes of the black-white learning disparity, such as family background, housing and nutrition.
She recalls that in the 1970's researchers tried to use books written in black urban dialect to enhance reading and writing skills. What the researchers found, she said, was that there were wide variations in dialect: some children said ''5 cent'' for 5 cents and other did not. Many children were confused seeing readings with unfamiliar as well as unconventional usage.
''It was easier to introduce them to standard English, which they've at least heard and which you eventually want them to learn,'' she said.Continue reading the main story