"African-American Culture & Education"

Studies of African American children’s experiences of schooling is an additional case of out-group communication, and are here used to show examples of insufficient code-switching. 

Gay (2013) describes norms and rules for communication in a classroom and states that the behavioural expectations on students are a passive-receptive posture. That means that students have the role of the receiver of information that keeps eye contact and remains silent when the teacher is talking. Permission needs to be granted in order for the students to speak, and when speaking, they need to follow specific protocols, for example, speak in turns, be succinct and minimise the expression of emotions to the content of their speech. The undisputed fact is that conventional classrooms are not the rule. Gay (2013) mentions that there are ethnic groups that bring their own communicational style in the classroom, matching their ethnic characteristics of communication (engagement by verbal and nonverbal means). As Gay is quoting, it is highly possible for African Americans to challenge the teacher’s authority in the classroom and deviate from the norms of the conventional classroom. This is the second most popular reason why students are removed from the public school environment and roll into homeschooling.

There is an existing positive correlation between the volition to pursuit the freedom of expressing their own values and tradition of the African American population, and the increasing trend of homeschooling African American kids. Since 220,000 African American children are currently homeschooled (Huseman, 2015), conducted researched has shown that the reason for this trend is that African Americans prefer to communicate the morals and traditions of their own, as well as strengthening the communication skills of their children, instead of trusting the conventional public school (Mazana and Lundy, 2015). The same researchers have found that African American parents are increasingly taking responsibility for their kids’ education in an effort to protect the kids from institutional racism and stereotyping. Bearing in mind that the communicational behaviours and expressions differ for this racial group by being participatory-interactive (Gay, 2013), homeschooling is a way to avoid the issues of African American students being pigeonholed as “trouble-makers” just because their communication paths are in dispute with others. When kids are taught to communicate in an educational setting that is rooted in their heritage, they do better emotionally and socially, become much stronger and more expressive, because discrimination and racism are avoided. (Mazana and Lundy, 2015). The motivation for choosing to homeschool is substantiated as the forum to communicate a positive self-image of African American people.