Introduction
As part of the application, I have decided to create a pamphlet that would inform the educators how Hispanic women can be helped to achieve great levels of education and at the same time maintain their culture. They should get involved in education and at the same time learn to maintain their culture. Hispanic women are less educated than their non-Hispanic women. Statistics indicate that 36% of Hispanic women have less than high school education while on the other hand, only 10 % of the non-Hispanic women have less than high school education. Women who are employed work full time and earn less compared to their non-Hispanic counterparts yet their labor participation is the same. Culture makes Hispanic women to be treated as a minority group and their work is mostly seen as that of the kitchen. In this pamphlet, I will give suggestions on how these women can involve themselves in education and take high roles at the same time maintaining their culture.
Main body
According to Ntiri (2000), Hispanics are referred to as a minority group and he suggests that there are great advantages for high education among women because the 21st century requires learned people to face challenges. I would encourage the teachers to adopt an education system which according to Kenneth Boulding (1991) and Senge (1998) will focus on how the individuals will develop, learn and change. Interdisciplinary perspectives should be critical in looking at academic subjects independently in terms of translation and integration.
To support the Hispanic women, I suggest that the teachers should introduce several disciplines in terms of mastery, mental models, shared vision, system thinking, and pursuit of team learning. This will help in supporting a multifaceted type of learning between individuals and their facilitators in the long run. Schools should also be recreated to give a capacity for the learning organization to sustain and implement changes in the education system.
I have the idea that teachers should provide positive messages to the learning community to encourage them to become aware of their innermost feelings and bias in education and this will greatly benefit the learners especially those from minority groups like the Hispania. This paradigm shift will be based on the practice of historical tribes, which will teach the children lessons on life and learning so that they will adapt themselves to the kind of life they will live. I felt that the teachers should adopt an assessment method that will have additional accountability and ownership of learning that should only take place when a student can decide on his or her educational path. This will help the students realize that which will show them their role in the overall context and not only concentrate on the learning tasks. The ability to learn should be the supreme mission and the teacher should be the key ingredient for success regardless of their ethnicity, sexual orientation, and social-economical status. For the teachers to achieve this, they should adopt five strategies in their teaching where they should not push too hard for growth, they should look forward to identifying the most significant challenges in learning and the potential impact on the group, they should identify the sources and nature of resistance and finally help the students trust in themselves and be in a position to make their judgments.
Hispanic people did not focus on the long-term aspect of learning because of the oppressive powers of tradition and status that contradicted their desire to learn. Therefore, I have an idea that these people should be provided with the proper information to be in a position to resist oppressive forces that try to prevent people from gaining new knowledge. Proper time management is important because it will help in the collaborative creative thinking process and the ability to reflect upon problems
It is my idea that self-efficacy theory should be adopted which holds the belief that one’s expectations about his or her ability influence the ability to successfully initiate and execute courses of action. The theory proposes that these beliefs determine, to a great extent, an individual’s willingness to initiate specific behaviors and persistence in the face of obstacles or barriers. Since there is evidence to suggest that Hispanic women are likely to encounter multiple barriers in the pursuit of their educational and occupational aspirations, the self-efficacy construct could facilitate understanding their career development process and thus make them succeed.
Hispanic students face a lot of barriers that are linked to self-concept and thus I have addressed this issue to make sure high education initiatives succeed. Issues of constructing oneself is a success determining factor and so I would urge the trainers to know the needs of Hispanic Students in education and when they get equipped with knowledge about what motivates the students, they will have the ability to guide them towards higher education and career choices. Hispanic women are facing major social changes in their role and position which has shifted their position in the workforce and this has resulted from education. Historically part of the ethnicity and culture of Hispanic women is familial behavior but they are also trying to achieve modernity in the new education system. Increasing integration of Hispanic women into the education system has made their family values and beliefs weak, even though family cohesion, integration exchange, and emotional support are part of the Hispanic families.
Senge (1998) analyzed learning based on what can be referred to as “shift mind” which is responsible for bringing change to undervalued race or caste. I felt that teachers should adopt the western way of teaching which will help the students grasp the deeper meaning of learning because learning involves a process where individuals are required to broaden their understanding by moving from their traditional way of thinking towards the new process. A quantitative survey of Hispanic women indicates that they have a strong sense of purpose and also belief in their ability to succeed. These Hispanic women have also a strong and self connectivity to their parents and are also aware of the various political, social, economic, and educational inequities in Florida County. These individuals are very bright and their success results from social justice and thus the school administrative programs should produce advocates for social change rather than using the school as socializing instruments that do not have cultures that prepare people for change. Culture change brings the moral climate of the organization and the individual maturity of the people within.
Value is a constant eternal truth about human nature that an individual believes is important and right while the mental model is a set of assumptions developed about how the world or other complex systems work. Through the mental model, information is processed effectively to make proper decisions but this mental model is a variable that allows flexibility to rebuild and reexamine assumptions. Hispanic women belong to the values whereas their learning organizations serve as mental models though they are weak because they are not used to rethinking the organizational infrastructure of learning. Senge’s (1998) management philosophy applies to best practices that identify loopholes for alternative school settings that serve students at risk, where, as discussed above, individuals have values but do not experience perfect mental models because they are restricted by a culture that does not allow change either in their vision or their systemic approach. In the longer run, this limits their approach to education for Hispanic males only. It is my view that this thinking needs to be changed and refined through promoting multicultural education that would immediately raise the validity and necessity of not limiting education to the boys alone, but educating Hispanic girls according to the latest systems thinking in organizational leadership as presented by Senge (1998).
Senge’s (1998) term, “personal mastery”, means that current and future leaders initiate and choose any path of personal growth according to their own choice and will because mastery is a personal experience that can be acquired with personal interest and cannot be forced. Personal mastery is missing among Hispanic women because most Hispanic families keep their females out of literacy programs. I felt that Hispanic education must be promoted in Florida County where, despite the constant increase in sheer numbers of immigrant students, the responsibility for educating immigrant students is not evenly shared across the country.
Hispanic students’ growth in the nation is moving towards stabilization, school dropout rates among Hispanics are high and thus limit access to higher education. A common assumption is that Hispanic families are tied to their cultural values and therefore do not appreciate girls acquiring higher education. This raises the question about families’ vision and understanding of education. This contradicts the findings that 94 percent of Hispanics supported the notion that even married women have the right to complete their education.
If we put the above scenario in the context of Senge’s (1998) philosophy, it gives us a murky picture of Hispanics that do not share a common vision and purpose. Although their cultural values unite them, in education, they still lag what Senge (1998) calls a true organizational learning approach. Hispanic schools, particularly in Florida County, have never been “learning organizations” since they lack the real purpose to intentionally nurture the newcomers that come to them through a variety of channels (including immigrants). Such learning institutions never bother about the stakes for female students while continuing with their education and how far they go to settle disputes with their family members as a result of letting them carry on with their education. Thus when Senge‘s (1998) notion of making meaning is adopted which states that organizational life is a lifelong process of growth and learning is a lifelong experience that requires a practical approach because learning never stops.
My idea to the teachers in Florida County is that they should be more oriented towards recognizing their true responsibility to identify cultural differences and establish within the limited framework of these differences an environment that encourages all of their students and such relationships between students and teachers should often develop without being gender biased (Von Bertalanffy 1950). I also suggest that teachers should be adequately prepared to establish a learning environment for male students, that is fair and encouraging to students from a variety of cultural and racial backgrounds. They should not prioritize students based on gender and at the same time should not establish differential expectations and discipline patterns that discourage female students. Such attitudes will lead towards a team-building approach. As a result, system thinking is never achieved because a tendency towards methodological thinking is lacking and the system remains devoid of feedback where the institutional leaders never bother to analyze their created “model of learning”.
I suggest the adoption of the general systems theory, Von Bertalanffy (1950) which proposed the concept of the open and closed system theory that was inspired by his work in developmental biology. A significant contribution to the field was based on the argument that living organisms cannot be understood as equilibrium systems since they possess the capability of maintaining themselves in a continual non-equilibrium state. He identified two distinct types of systems thought which are mechanistic and organism (von Bertalanffy, 1950). Human sociology belongs to both thoughts. Von Bertalanffy did not believe in the traditional spontaneous emergence of traits that human beings possess, in contrast to developments in chaos theory. Von Bertalanffy envisioned similar insights on the autonomy, creativity, and spontaneity of living organisms and believed that human nature depicts all the progressive emerging traits that complex self-organizing systems uphold. Bertalanffy (1950) believed that it emphasizes the active and self-organizing character of human behavior (Hammond, 2003). Nevertheless, von Bertalanffy (1950) distinguished between the two approaches based on their organizing concepts which are; feedback and homeostasis that should be applied to Hispanic women. Since human beings react in a non-equilibrium state, they are exposed to justify some sort of action and reaction. Both factors depend upon the intensity to which they are put to practice. For example, Hispanic women have better opportunities to be independent to choose their careers if they react strongly to their surroundings, particularly the internal system of learning institutions.
Boulding (1991) suggested that there is a strong disposition among humans to organize the unorganized and to form groups where none previously existed. In the latter case, the organization itself creates the group. This notion goes along with the ideology of multiculturalism that plays a vital role in Florida’s learning institutions. Many unorganized Hispanic groups are influenced by gender, race, and class. This has affected their capabilities to make decisions due to the fear of conflict. Conflict with the dominant culture, which has historically had the upper hand and has resulted in inequality, is intense. Boulding’s theory fits Florida County. Boulding suggested that organizations frequently organize themselves against something, and often in the absence of a perception of conflict because their reason for existence is weakened or disappears and they suffer from internal disorganization or even dissolution.
The institutional barriers that prevent girls and women from receiving the same educational opportunities as males, such as the rules which prevent women from studying at Oxford and Cambridge, should be alleviated. Discrimination against women relative to choosing their paths should also be prevented. There are still formal barriers in informal processes that indicate that women and girls are not welcome. There are also gender divisions in education; to some extent, they have gone underground while flourishing in the face of considerable effort to suppress them.
Boulding (1991) pointed out that one of the problems of a social organization relates to the criteria by which people limit themselves to acquire freedom without conflict. The dilemma with such measures is that they can only be taken as assumptions or rough topological illustrations rather than as exact measures because the greater the area of freedom is required. As an economist, Boulding illustrated that situations that restrict individual freedom in society are due to unstable social dynamics systems that are frequently subject to unpredictable change. Nevertheless, the succession of states of a social system is not random because some of the usual regularities are easily detected. Even if the system is not stable enough to permit unconditional prediction of its future states, at least enough can usually be known about it to set limits on the probability of various future positions (Boulding, 1991).
The limited boundary as described above may be applied to the education of Hispanic females in Florida County. Females may be getting a good education as males but may not get equal employment opportunities. This is illustrated when an organization, despite realizing the myriad aspect of equality in employment, has a formal commitment to equality of women’s education and opportunity yet demonstrates through its internal policies that there are reasons to prefer men over women (even if less qualified than women). Occupational mobility is not the same among them as education, but research indicates how little difference getting a good education may make to women and their careers and how the percentage of women getting into senior managerial jobs in Florida County is declining.
When viewed in light of Boulding’s (1991) theory, this illustrates the economic scenario that includes static equilibrium models that work best under conflict processes, resulting in changing views of educational sociologists, who have shifted their interest away from formal obstacles towards interpersonal and interaction processes. Boulding’s (1991) analysis of behavior from an economic perspective stated that skills are not prevalent in the behavior of men through communication but revealed through commodities. Commodities do not refer to the close relationships that exist between men and their subject matters. This illustrates that the main contributions of the social sciences to the conduct of business have not only come from the economic side but also the more behavioral sciences of psychology and sociology. Boulding saw human sciences about the psychology of advertising. This, when visualized under the broad paradigm of the sociology of education, therefore, those Hispanic women who acquire education ought to illustrate their capabilities through marketing their professional careers. This will not only boost the morale of those who are less educated but also will serve as the first step towards ethnicity and gender-dislodged class as the main theme, making the whole field less traditionally sociological.
I feel that Super’s development theory should also be adopted in the learning institution. Super’s (1957) development theory attempts to explain changes in career-related behaviors and attitudes across the lifespan, emphasizing the process and the content of career decision-making. This theory seems the most researched of all the available theoretical constructs. This theory may be relevant to the study of African American and Hispanic American women, considering their decisions and career choice over time to help them maintain their culture even as they reach great heights in education.
Conclusion
In this pamphlet, I have suggested the ways and theories that need to be adopted by the teachers to help the Hispanic people achieve great heights in education as they hold to their cultures. This will also prevent discrimination of the minority groups like the Hispanic people in a high learning institution.
Reference list
- Boulding, K. E. (1991). An overview of Kenneth Boulding publications.
- Ntiri, D. (2001). Access to higher education for nontraditional students and minorities in a technology-focused society. New York. Urban Education.
- Senge, P. (1998). The practice of innovation. Leader to Leader.
- Super, D. (1957). Psychology of careers. New York: Harper & Brothers.
- Von Bertalanffy, L. (1950). An outline of general systems theory. New York: New York University Press.