This document discusses challenges educators face in addressing opportunity gaps. It argues that educators often hold beliefs like color blindness, cultural conflicts, myths of meritocracy, deficit mindsets, and context neutral thinking. These beliefs prevent educators from recognizing how students' racial experiences impact their education and from considering systemic barriers to achievement. The document calls on educators to broaden their beliefs, become aware of their implicit biases, understand students' diverse backgrounds, and view achievement as shaped by both individual effort and external factors.

1. Challenging Educators to
Broaden Beliefs System and
Shift Mind Sets to Address
Opportunity Gaps
Aurora Fiengo-Varn, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Spanish
Mississippi Valley State University

6. 1. Color Blindness
2. Cultural Conflicts
3. Myth of Meritocracy
4. Deficit Mind-Set and Low
Expectations
5. Context Neutral Mind-Set

7.  Educators avoid and reject their own
and their students’ racialized
experiences in their decision making.
 Educators see race as a taboo topic
that is irrelevant and inconsequential
to the success of their students.
 Educators do not recognize how race
can manifest in teaching, learning,
and curricular experiences

8.  M1: If I acknowledge the racial or
ethnic background of my students or
myself, I may be considered racist.
 M2: If I admit that people experience
the world differently and that race is
an important dimension of people’s
experience, I may be seen as
“politically incorrect.”
 M3: I should treat all my students the
same regardless of who they are.

11.  Educators teach their
students in a myopic manner;
they do not consider how
racially diverse students
experience the world inside
the classroom, inside the
school, and in society.

12.  Curriculum and
instructional decisions are
grounded in “white norm”
that students of color have
to just “deal with.”

13.  Race
is seen as marginal,
not central, issue in
developing lessons and
enacting those lessons.

15.  Inconsistency emerges in the
teaching and learning context
based on gender, socioeconomics,
age, geography, etc.
 Conflicts may be historically or
currently shaped.
 Educators see their culture as
superior to that of their students.

17.  M1: I must teach students based on how
I teach my own children, not based on
their cultural ways of knowing.
 M2: I’m not going to tolerate students
joking around with me during class. If
they misbehave, they are going to the
office.
 “Those” students need to adapt and
assimilate into the culture of my
classroom and accept the consequence
if they do not.

20.  Educators refer students of color to
the office when they misbehave.
 Educators refer culturally diverse
students to special education when
they are not grasping instructional
material rather than attempting to
adjust teaching to students’ learning
styles.
 A disproportionate number of diverse
students are suspended and expelled.

21.  Educators accept the idea that
people are rewarded based on
their ability, performance, effort,
and talents.
 Systemic and institutional
structures and barriers are not
considered.
 Individual achievement is seen as
an independent variable.

22.  M1 All people are born with the
same opportunities; if they just
follow the formula for success:
work hard, put forth effort, and
follow the law.
 M2 If students do not succeed, it
is because they are not working
hard enough. It has nothing to
do with outside factors.

23.  Somestudents do not have
aptitude to reach academic
success. There is no
problem with the system.

26.  Educators do not give students multiple
chances for success because they believe
the students are not working hard
enough.
 Educators do not delve deeply into the
reasons behind students’ lack of
engagement.
 Students’ family or financial problems
are not considered as a source of
impediment for academic achievement.

27.  Educators approach their work
focusing on what students lack
than on the assets they bring.
 Educators have a narrow view of
what it means to be “normal” or
“successful.” These views are based
on their own cultural references,
which may be inconsistent with
others.

28.  Educators do not believe that
culturally diverse students are
capable of rigorous academic
curriculum, so they provide
unchallenging learning
opportunities in the classroom.

29. I need to distance students
from the bleak reality of their
present condition.
 If I expect too much, I am
setting them up for failure.
 Teachers have to make up for
deficiencies rather than build
up on what students have.

30.  Itis my job to concentrate
on test scores.
 Those students do not
have resources to meet
expectation.

33.  Educators spend their time
remediating students instead of
building on the knowledge students
bring into the classroom.
 Educators refuse to allow students
to develop their own thinking skills.
Students are expected to
regurgitate a right answer that the
educator has provided.

34.  Very little discussion and creative
learning opportunities are available,
only busy work.
 Water down curriculum and low
expectations.
 Push to get the right answer.
 No thinking outside the box to
develop critical and analytical skills.

35.  Educators approach their work without
a keen sense of how contextual,
ecological, and environmental realities
shape opportunities to learn.
 Educators concentrate on learning
subject matters and consider it
unimportant the complexities of
teaching in different contexts such as
urban/rural spaces.

36.  Kids are just kids. If I teach my class
well, the type of school does not
matter.
 It is not necessary for me to
understand the historical and current
realities of the school communities
where I teach.
 It is not necessary for me to rally the
local community to empower,
energize, and motivate students
inside the school.

39.  Educators do not build from the
knowledge or established
resources of the local community.
 Rather than constructing
knowledge with the community,
educators miss opportunities to
build partnerships in the social
context.