GOALS OF MULTICULTURAL

EDUCATION

PREPARED BY: JENNILYN M. CADELIÑA, LPT

Creating Culture: Cultural Transmission and Education

• Cultural transmission-
the passing on of basic
cultural knowledge and
values across the
generations.

Culture of the majority

Culture of the minority

 Dominant
School culture
culture
Enculturated

• 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.
• Cultural capital represents the “views, standards and
cultural forms” (Ferguson, 2001)
• Acculturation- refers to the processes
through which individuals from
different cultures come into contact
with each other.
• Dissonant acculturation” as the
growing gap between the children and
parents of recent immigrant families
(Qin, 2006)
• Parallel dual frames of reference-
immigrant parents tend to compare
their child’s behavior with cultural
norms of behavior.
• 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).
 Cultural Deficit Model

• In the late 1950s, the

anthropologist Oscar Lewis Culture of poverty
(1959) argued that membership
in a group that has been poor for Cultural Deficit Models
generations constituted a separate
culture, a “culture of poverty.”

Poor and minority students - viewed through a lens of

deficiency and were considered substandard in their
culture.
Misuses of the Concept of Culture in Education

• Misunderstanding that culture is composed of a set of

static and bounded traits and values evenly attributable
to all members of the group.
• The fact that the cultural deficit model is actually used
to explain the educational failure of poor and/or minority
students.
• Subtractive schooling- describe how educational
policies and practices require the loss or subtraction of
crucial aspects of students’ cultural and linguistic
identities in order for them to be academically successful.
Ø English-only legislation for Mexican American students
Ø legislation (HB 2281) that banned ethnic studies from an
Arizona school district
Cultural Difference Model and Mismatch Hypothesis

• Anthropologists during the

1970s and 1980s refuted the
deficit-driven approach and
posited that the consistent
educational failure of certain
groups of students was due to a
mismatch between the culture
of home and community and
that of schools (Heath, 1983;
Levinson et al., 1996).
 Evolutionist VS Anthropological
Racism Relativism

• Cultural Relativism- Cultures differ, so that a cultural trait,

act or idea has no meaning or function by itself but has
meaning only within its cultural setting.
• Heath (1983) looked at the home literacy practices
o f t h r e e d i ff e r e n t c o m m u n i t i e s i n a S o u t h
Carolina town:
1. a working-class African American community
2. a working-class White community
3. a middle-class White community
• Cultural difference model or mismatch
hypothesis-educators should seek to know and
appreciate the culture of their students.
 Putting Culture to Work: Culture and Learning
in the 21st Century
• Culturally responsive- teaching is
a matter of providing instruction
that reflects the traits of a certain
cultural groups.
• Cultural styles approach-
depends on the idea that
differences in learning styles
reflect the traits of cultural groups
(Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003).
References:

• Banks, J., & Mcgee Banks, C. (2016). Multicultural

Education Issues and Perspective (Ninth Edition).
Lightning Source Inc.
• Panopio, I., Cordero-MacDonald, F., & Raymundo, A.
(1994). Sociology Focus on the Philippines (Third Edition).
Ken Incorporated.