The Poverty Problem: How Education Can Promote Resilience and Counter Poverty's Impact on Brain Development and Functioning
280
The Poverty Problem: How Education Can Promote Resilience and Counter Poverty's Impact on Brain Development and Functioning
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Overview
Economic hardship is changing our students’ brain structures at a genetic level, producing psychological, behavioral, and cognitive issues that dramatically impact learning, behavior, physical health, and emotional stability. But there is hope.
This groundbreaking book by one of the nation’s top experts in brain science and resilience offers solutions that will change minds, attitudes, and behaviors. Learn about how problems develop between people of different races, how the brain develops in persistent poverty, and how it might react to solutions. Inside, you will find real-life applications on topics including:
• The lack of culturally competent instruction and its impact on students of color
• Poverty's effect on language development and how it can be positively influenced
• The importance of reading
How to counteract the effects of the widespread stress in lower SES environments
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781071842928 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
| Publication date: | 02/10/2021 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Sales rank: | 1,007,003 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Summary xi
About the Author xv
Introduction: The Invisible Line 1
How a strange sequence of events and one individual's arbitrary decision shaped a nation's thinking and behavior toward poverty.
Chapter 1 The New Deal-The Old Way 9
Why the lack of cultural competent instruction on poverty contributes to the poor self-image of students of color.
Chapter 2 More Than a Lapse in Judgment 21
Poverty compromises the capacity of the prefrontal cortex, limiting the brain's ability to focus, analyze, and plan. The loss of capacity causes our mental processor to slow, prohibiting full mental function. The outcome is poverty's cognitive load compromises decision-making regardless of intellect.
Chapter 3 Born Behind the Eight Ball 35
The stress related to poverty is so unique that it dramatically affects infant brain development during the first two years of life. The ramification of this type of stress inhibits infant-mother attachment and certain executive brain functions. The stress problems related to low SES are evident even in the most positive low-income homes and seem to intensify in cases of generational poverty. The result is a higher pattern of stress-related issues in low-income Black families due to their overrepresentation in persistent poverty.
Chapter 4 Speechless 49
Poverty diminishes language development and expressive language, altering academic achievement, social growth, and emotional stability. Because of these limitations, low SES has acted as a gag on the voices of the poor. Poverty reflects a perception that causes those who are socially advantaged to dismiss poor people as unintelligent.
Chapter 5 You've Lost That Loving Feeling 67
The emphasis on self, which is common to an individualist culture, coupled with access to information, negatively impacts the self-esteem of people living in poverty and is contributing to a drop in empathy.
Chapter 6 See No Evii, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil 79
Neuroscience has established that culture can alter brain function and can even produce brain mutations. In the same manner, poverty can modify certain hardwired brain functions that produce social bias. Much of a child's intuitive understanding of the social world is a product of how humans have evolved to notice facial, hand, posture, and voice tone cues. Under normal circumstances, our focus on these cues creates instantaneous biases concerning others. The purpose is to help us identify individuals who are safe and avoid people who are threatening. However, under the stress of poverty, our abilities to read and appropriately respond to these hardwired cues can be compromised and negatively influence social behavior.
Chapter 7 Poverty is a Story of Risk 95
Poverty and resiliency are so closely correlated that poverty usually predicts poor resiliency, and poor resiliency often predicts poverty. Socioeconomic status is not an organism that can interact directly with people's brains and bodies. It is the predictable risk factors that usually occur with economic hardship that produce the outcomes commonly associated with poverty. Resiliency studies identified the specific risk factors associated with failed life outcomes. Unfortunately, the majority of the risk factors found in resiliency studies are associated with poverty.
Chapter 8 Principles of Good Instruction for Students from Low SES 115
This chapter seeks to highlight the validated principles of good instruction that have success with students from low SES across the globe. Neuroscience research supports these evidence-based principles. When teachers have confidence that instructional strategies will work, it increases perseverance and certainty, which positively affects outcomes.
Chapter 9 The Only Academic Protective Factor 129
Reading is the only academic protective factor identified in resiliency research. One reason might be that the ability to read is not only reflective of a healthy brain but also a student's ability to maintain grade-level reading milestones signifies normative brain development. The process the brain uses to read changes as we age. Perhaps reading is the most crucial academic skill primary school students should master because if reading lags, the brain begins to produce alternative pathways to compensate for the brain regions not performing efficiently. Once the brain develops alternative pathways, it becomes difficult to correct as children age. However, if a struggling reader can attain and maintain reading on grade level, it improves the structure and functioning of many regions of the brain, providing a wide range of unrelated benefits.
Chapter 10 Promoting Resiliency 141
This chapter details how schools can successfully promote protective factors so that students can become more resilient. The ability to develop protective factors is a strength-based approach to combating the adverse effects of poverty. For schools with a high concentration of students from low SES, building protective factors is a proactive approach for addressing expected academic, behavioral, and mental health issues students will face.
Appendix A Model Lesson: Goal Setting 169
Appendix B Model Lesson: Promoting Hope and Expectation 201
Appendix C Model Lesson: Having a Good Sense of Humor 219
References 231
Index 257