Developmental Education and Ethnic Minorities

Ethnic Minorities and the Purposes of Developmental Education

From its beginnings, developmental education endeavored to broaden access to higher education. [Page 641]In the immediate postwar era, developmental education grew out of the pressures on educational institutions created by returning military personnel who were attending college with government support through the GI Bill. Many of these students had not been in school for years and were underprepared to meet the academic demands of college classrooms. The goal of supporting their access to college was framed in terms of helping them “get up to speed” through “remediation”.

In the remedial approaches to developmental education developed in the postwar era, students were understood as suffering from deficiencies that made it difficult or impossible for them to succeed in school. Remedial education programs provided coursework designed to enable students to overcome their deficiencies and fit themselves into the expectations of institutions. In this period, the work of developmental education was understood as going in only one direction—the students would be changed by their exposure to the curriculum and blend into institutions as they then existed.

As ethnic minority students entered higher education in greater numbers during and after the 1960s, they brought with them new perspectives on culture, knowledge, and social group power that would inform the later emergence of multicultural education. These perspectives reflected the sensibilities and insights of the larger movements for democratic progress that had opened the doors of higher education and begun to impact scholarly research in many disciplines. Specifically, the new perspectives challenged the neutrality and universality of the forms of knowledge and conventions of participation that had traditionally been privileged and valued by educational institutions. Highlighting the ways that knowledge always inevitably reflects the perspectives of those who make it, the new students and new faculty argued against the remedial approach that saw student differences only as deficiencies.

According to the new perspectives inspired by the goal of including ethnic minorities, particular forms of knowledge and ways of being were privileged in educational institutions not because they were empirically “better” but because they reflected the norms and practices of powerful social groups. Students and faculty began to propose that rather than institutionalizing—and thus perpetuating—the privileges of powerful groups, education should enable group equity in the creation of new knowledge. If education in general and developmental education in particular were to truly provide full access, they would have to involve students in learning academic skills and knowledge that would enable them to actively question the ways that schools reflect the relations of power among social groups in the society. In keeping with this principle, developmental education could best support the access of new ethnic minority students by seeing them as different rather than deficient. This shift in perspective fundamentally redefined the purposes of developmental education away from focusing on what students lack and toward building students' capacities to contribute to education and society.

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