Cultural Teaching and Learning

1. Culture
Teaching and
Learning
Prepared by:
SALVADOR D. ARQUILITA,MMEM

2. Culture, Teaching and Learning
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Culture-represents a set of characteristics (e.g. language, customs, food,
and holidays) attributable to clearly identifiable, distinct, and bounded
groups of people; a “Multicultural Society” is the relationship between
culture and society follows the tossed salad or mosaic theory: the idea
that many distinct cultures comprise a multicultural society.
One of the main goals of studying culture, teaching and learning is to
provide educators with a better understanding of the concept of culture
and enable them to put such understanding to work. Specifically, we
examines culture as a complex and layered construct rather than a list of
traits attributable to different, usually “exotic,” social groups. We are
getting to know culture, means actually grappling with the complexity
that surrounds the different meanings and uses of the culture concept
in education.
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3. Culture, Teaching and Learning
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To study one culture per day seems like an efficient and logical way for
teachers to learn about the overwhelming number of cultures within a
multi-cultural society. This particular approach to understanding
culture, also known as the Tourist‐based or Transmission approach, is
fairly common, especially in teacher training. It typically involves
“experts transmitting to practitioners’ certain traits of Culture ‘X’ or
Culture ‘Y’” (González, 1995).
Educators with an understanding of culture that will help them to
make more effective connections between their students’ social lives
and their learning in schools. Putting culture to work depends on
knowing culture in all of the previously mentioned ways so that it can
be applied effectively and appropriately in teaching and learning.
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4. Getting to Know Culture: Meaning and Uses
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Culture might refer to the idea of “Capital C” Culture: what is
often referred to as high culture, invoking associations with
certain refined tastes and habits typified by the classical arts,
like a Bach overture or the Mona Lisa. In this sense, some people
have “more” culture, while others have much less. In other
circumstances, someone might use culture as a catchall term
for the beliefs and practices that differentiate groups of people.
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Everyone “has” culture in equal measure, but the substance of
culture is different. In the context of schools and classrooms,
moreover, culture is often something that the “other” has,
and it is often viewed as a “problem” to be solved. This trend
frequently surfaces in teacher education courses, where
White pre- service teachers consistently claim that they have
no “culture” and are therefore genuinely concerned about
how they will teach “culturally diverse” students in their
classrooms. The differences, tensions, and conflicts
embedded in the meaning and uses of culture are actually not
new, but rather reflect the difficulty of defining a seemingly
commonsense concept.
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The concept of culture continues to change according to
broader social, economic, and political shifts, such as
industrialization and, more recently, globalization. In fact, some
contemporary anthropologists question whether the concept of
culture is still relevant at all or whether it needs to be replaced.
Anthropologists, for whom culture has been the central focus of
their study, have struggled and often failed to reach consensus
on a singular definition of culture (Kuper, 1999), in large part
because of the complexity of the concept as well as the
different ways in which the concept gets used to explain
human life.
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The majority of educators are introduced to the Culture concept
through discussion of and coursework on multicultural education,
where the primary focus is often on student identity and a
representation of ethnic groups across the curriculum. In other words,
“culture, for multiculturalists, refers primarily to collective social
identities engaged in struggles for social equality”
(Turner, 1993, p. 412).
For educators, the question of what culture is can be particularly
challenging, since Most teacher training programs increasingly
emphasize the importance of culture to learning but rarely
provide enough examples or experience to aid teachers in
understanding the concept. little effort is made to differentiate
between the understandings and uses of culture in different
academic fields.
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“Anthropology and its various concepts of culture are not
primarily oriented towards change, political mobilization, or
cultural transformation” and yet anthropological
understandings of how cultural practices are produced, and thus
mediate learning, are essential to providing a meaningful
programs of social and effective education to all students.
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In fact, “culture matters because it shapes all aspects of daily living and
activity. [And] unfortunately, the manner in which culture manifests
itself for students is frequently not understood in schools and is not
used effectively to enhance teaching and learning for all students”
(Howard, 2010, p.51).
These different approaches to understanding the connections between
culture and education are not made explicit, results in much of the
confusion and the superficial applications of culture that characterize
most teaching in schools today. This fact also explains why so many
teachers automatically link culture to ethnic or racial identity and fail
to understand that “every individual participates in many cultures”
that are not necessarily tied to ethnic or racial group membership
(Pollock, 2008, p. 370).
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Educators are in the unique position of being cultural brokers who cross
intellectual borders between anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural
studies, and multicultural education, to arrive at understandings of
culture that are both theoretically rich and pedagogically effective. We
focus primarily on anthropological approaches to understanding culture
through a critical lens that contributes to the multiple dimensions of
multicultural education (Banks, 2015). Focus on the development of those
aspects of the culture concept that pertain most significantly to teaching
and learning (see also Erickson, 2011).
Teachers must cultivate deeper understandings of how culture is
implicated in teaching and learning, moving beyond superficial
tourist—or “Holiday and Hero”—approaches. At the same time, the
persistent achievement gap between low‐income students and
students of color, on one hand, and middle‐ to upper‐middle‐income
White students, on the other, demands a view of culture aimed toward
transforming educational inequities.
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11. Early Origins in the Construct of Culture
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Eurocentric View, there were civilized and primitive people. The
civilized were those who had developed higher levels of culture,
while the primitives had either little or no culture.
In the Industrial Revolution, the concept of culture went
from meaning the growth of something, like horticulture or
agriculture, to signifying the creative aspirations of the
human mind. These early notions of culture, as a series of
increasingly superior manifestations of human creativity and
intellect, were closely tied to other prevalent modes of
thought at the time—Eurocentrism and evolutionism or
“theory of progress” in particular.
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12. Early Origins in the Construct of Culture
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For 21st‐century educators, there are two central components of this
earlier version of culture that remain significant and largely
misunderstood.
First is the use of culture to replace scientific racism in
explaining differences in human behavior. Subsequent section in this
chapter discuss the persistent and insidious conflations of culture and
race, which unfortunately reflect the limited success of these earlier
efforts by Boas and others to show that cultures are neither inherently
superior nor inferior.
Second is the centrality of teaching and learning to the very
meaning and substance of culture. One cannot conceive of education
in the absence of culture; education is the process by which culture is
constantly transmitted and produced (Erickson, 2012).
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13. Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
Culture refers to the symbolic meanings by which the members of a group or
society communicate with and understand themselves, each other, and the world
around them. Human beings are, above all, great symbol‐makers and
manipulators. Unlike most other animals, our instinctual repertoire is quite
limited. The behavior needed to survive, with which most other animals are
genetically hard‐wired, we must acquire through learning and knowledge
acquisition.
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We are probably the only species to regularly use symbols in this learning
process and the only species to systematically transmit the rules of symbol use
to succeeding generations. we seemingly recreate the entire evolutionary
process through which human beings learn to create, communicate, interpret,
and use symbols. In fact, this is a workable definition of education.
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14. Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
At heart, education is the transmission and acquisition of symbolic
knowledge for understanding, controlling, and transforming the world. Of
course, education is much broader than schooling, which is an institution of
more recent historical invention.
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Education was probably a seamless part of every-day life, taking place
through the productive and ritual activities characterizing a society’s way of life.
A school, on the other hand, is typically an age‐graded, hierarchical setting
where, as Judith Friedman Hansen (1979) puts it, “learners learn vicariously, in
roles and environments defined as distinct from those in which the learning will
eventually be applied”.
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15. Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
As human societies have grown more differentiated, biological and
cultural adaptation to the physical environment have become more highly
mediated by complex traditions and institutions. Intensive agriculture,
urbanization, and industrialization have led to occupational and class
stratification as well as large‐scale political formations, such as empires
or nation‐states. The concerns of the nation‐state as a large‐scale human
group, for instance, must not be confused with the concerns of those groups
that constitute any given nation‐state.
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16. Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
Certain kinds of educational processes, such as the teaching of an ethic of
competitive individualism, may be adaptive in relation to the economic
foundations of a capitalist nation, but not in relation to a self‐sufficient
community or, ultimately, in relation to the well‐being of the Earth’s biosphere.
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All of this explains why we cannot view education as benefiting all
individuals and groups in a given society or as providing a means of adaptation
in some simple functional sense. Education can just as likely serve as the
vehicle for domination of one group over another in the pursuit of its own
interests.
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17. Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
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Cultural Transmission—the passing on of basic cultural knowledge and
values across the generations. Contemporary schools and classrooms are
replete with examples of cultural transmission; for example, traditional
classroom management teaches dominant cultural communication patterns,
like raising hands for turn‐taking.
Enculturation-refers to the basic process of cultural transmission by
which individuals come to acquire the crucial meanings and understandings of
their primary culture, usually the local community or kin group (the related
sociological term socialization). school culture typically reflects the dominant
culture. Consequently, students who are enculturated in the dominant culture—
White, middle to upper‐middle class—possess greater cultural capital.
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18. Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
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Cultural Capital-represents the “views, standards and cultural
forms” (Ferguson, 2001, p. 50)—the physical characteristics, gestures,
behavioral traits, styles of talking, and so on—that are specific to the
varied classes in a capitalist society. Since school structures and practices
tend to exemplify the cultural capital of the dominant class, those students
who possess the cultural capital of the dominant class have a significant
advantage in terms of school success over those whose cultural capital does
not match that of the schools (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977).
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19. Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
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Schools privilege the cultural capital of students from dominant
groups by bestowing on them greater legitimacy. This in turn provides them
with superior academic credentials and the necessary “Symbolic Currency”
to access greater economic opportunities once they finish schooling.
Conversely, those students who do not possess sanctioned cultural capital
experience “symbolic violence”, wherein their cultural and social resources
are devalued by schooling (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 4; see also
Fordham, 1996).
Since schools typically legitimize only the traits of the dominant
group’s cultural capital, subordinated groups do not receive the resources,
validation, or opportunities needed to alter their social position; thus, schools
may often serve to reproduce class structures and inequalities (Levinson,
Foley, & Holland, 1996).
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20. Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
Acculturation refers to the processes through which individuals from
different cultures come into contact with each other. For example, children
frequently make friends with peers from different cultures in the context of the
classroom or other learning contexts, such as camp, neighborhood, church,
mosque, temple, or after‐school programs. As a result of the contact, each
individual’s cultural ways of being are influenced and to some degree changed.
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“Dissonant Acculturation” as the growing gap between the children
and parents of recent immigrant families due to the fact that most school‐age
children from these families learn how to speak English and participate in U.S.
culture more quickly than do their parents.
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21. “Quotations”