Addressing the "Culture of Poverty" Myth and Using Documentary Films

Disrupting the Stereotypes of Poverty

Jennifer Parrill Lopez

* As a class, we choose to employ person-first language and avoid terminology with negative connotations.  However, direct quotes of other authors remain unaltered.

            If you’ve been identified as Appalachian, people think they know a little something about you.  Drawing on the common stereotype, they may assume that you are poor, uneducated, lazy, and welfare dependent.  We have studied how critical literacy and Place Based Education give our students the opportunity to unpack these stereotypes, explore the fallacy of an “Appalachian Culture,” and view themselves as participants who influence the body of work that surrounds their identity. 

This week, we applied a similar lens to the stigma of poverty through reading selections from Paul Gorski’s Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap, specifically Chapter 4 “The Trouble with the ‘Culture of Poverty’ and Other Stereotypes about People in Poverty” and Chapter 9 “The Mother of All Strategies: Committing to Working With Rather than On Families in Poverty.”  Like “Appalachian,” poverty has been misidentified as a culture whose inherent weakness must be remedied from the outside.  Once we understand the myth of the “culture of poverty,” we as pre-service teachers can begin to interrogate and remedy our deficit view of students and families living in material poverty.

Why is it important for educators to critically consider the social stigma and prevailing inaccuracies surrounding poverty?  We, though teachers, are unwitting consumers of this false model.  As Brandi stated,

“Unlearning prejudices and stereotypes takes years, but we have to do it if we want to serve our kids well and not just be nice to them.  We grow up with a single narrative of what poor people are like, what Appalachians are like, and we constantly have to redress that.”

Brittany expressed a need for this self-awareness, “I will need to push all my students, no matter what I know about their background and home life.”  If we allow our assumptions to inform pedagogy, then lower expectations of students living in poverty result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Gorski credits Oscar Lewis with coining the term “culture of poverty” in his 1959 work Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty and many theorists have since based their work on this concept of a shared set of traits among those in poverty.  However, subsequent research has determined that “poor people* do not share a predictable, consistent culture” (55).  Nevertheless, “the same type of application of Lewis’s work survives today in (Ruby) Payne’s (2005) mind-set of poverty model, which claims that poverty is attributable, not to inequities or to an unequal distribution of opportunity or even to educational access disparities, but to the problematic ‘culture’ of poor families”*(54). 

            Gorski identifies five stereotypes associated with families in poverty and education – stereotypes that insidiously affect how we teach and interact with our students:

·      Stereotype 1: Poor People* Do Not Value Education

·      Stereotype 2: Poor People Are Lazy

·      Stereotype 3: Poor People Are Substance Abusers

·      Stereotype 4: Poor People Are Linguistically Deficient and Poor Communicators

·      Stereotype 5: Poor People Are Ineffective and Inattentive Parents

Of these, Stereotype 5 was predominant in our roundtable discussion as we examined how the structure of the school system disenfranchises those in poverty, the idea being that school is a system of social reproduction. “School is a place where the differences should be set aside, but really is put center stage, for instance with fundraisers” observed Brittany.  Carmen expressed the need to engage parents as equal partners.  This means considering the compatibility between the structure of parents’ lives and the structure of the school schedule.  Is the school structure incompatible with the availability of transportation and work demands? Home visits were suggested as a minimum effort for the elementary level, and suitable for at risk students at the secondary level.  Dr. Slocum pointed out that, “Being informed specifically about a person’s life enables you to make connections with your students…it takes a lot of practice to learn how to be in community with someone rather than about someone.” 

So we are left to dismantle our own misperceptions in preparation for teaching.  Dr. Slocum asks us,

“As a teacher, as an ethnographer – how are things working here, how are we interacting [in class with our students]? How do we experience whiteness? Class? Collecting data points and constantly testing – what am I being told about this person and by whom?  Does this actually make sense and why might this person be telling me this?  Kids make the same judgments about themselves and their classmates – develop facts and counter facts and set up a narrative about poverty that questions stereotypes rather than perpetuates them.”

This two-fold approach is challenging, not only because it means crafting a curriculum of social consciousness, but also because it demands a level of introspection that can be uncomfortable.  For instance, Carmen described her mother’s responsibilities as a school psychologist, making home visits to monitor students living in material poverty.  In order to clarify, I asked, “Assessing for neglect?”  My underlying belief was revealed - children living in poverty are at a higher risk for neglect.  When Brandi quickly amended with “impoverishment,” I realized my assumption.  This is what I mean by insidious.  We are hardly aware of our beliefs, but it is revealed through our actions and words.  This is where pretending to be socially just will fail and parents and students will see through the façade of “niceness”.

            Although there was predominant agreement with the position of the chapters, there was some discomfort with the representation of “middle class”.  Audra C. felt that Gorski, “constructed a ‘culture of wealth’ while attempting to dismantle the ‘culture of poverty’ – there’s no room for people who are not low SES to continue to interact and learn.”  Caleb asked, “Is there a ‘middle class culture’, but not a ‘culture of poverty’?”  Sam felt that the idea of social class bore further scrutiny, “What gets lost is that social class is a representation, an appearance like suburban-ism – one of the structures that creates poverty is the educational system itself – by privileging the suburban middle class ideal.”  If we are working to disrupt stereotypes surrounding low income, surely we should strive to abandon all misconceptions associated with class and socioeconomic status.

            So, we’ll continue to do the work and catch ourselves out – not just for the remainder of the semester, but for years to come.  Gorski mentions the ease with which we denounce those outside of our own group.  Will critical literacy and Place Based Education enable teachers and students to stop identifying with the group, and start identifying with individuals?  It’s a start.

Media Literacy Resources

            Film representations of the Appalachia often reinforce inaccurate stereotypes, focus heavily on mining issues, and center on historical rather than contemporary events.  Using film as an alternative text in the PBE classroom facilitates the dismantling of the falsely constructed image of Appalachia that reaches a broad audience through media.  Below are some suggested resources for media literacy/PBE lessons.

Films

Harlan County, USA (1976)

www.imdb.com/title/tt0074605/

Matewan (1987)

www.imdb.com/title/tt0093509/

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (2009)

www.imdb.com/title/tt1396227/

These and other titles can be found at Amazon, iTunes, youtube, and appalshop.org.
Media Literacy Questions for Analyzing Point of View:
PBS: Media Literacy Questions