Culture

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

2 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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Culture, Teaching and
Learning
Educators with an understanding of culture that will help them to make more
effective connections between their students’ social lives and their learning in
3 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.

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
4 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).
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Getting to Know Culture: Meaning and Uses

Culture might refer to the idea of “Capital C” Culture: what is often

referred to as high culture, invoking associations with certain refined
1 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
2 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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 Anthropologists, for whom culture has been the central focus of their
3 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.

The concept of culture continues to change according to broader social,

4 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.

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 For educators, the question of what culture is can be particularly
challenging, since Most teacher training programs increasingly
5 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.

The majority of educators are introduced to the Culture concept through

6 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).
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 “Anthropology and its various concepts of culture are not primarily
oriented towards change, political mobilization, or cultural

7 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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 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.
8 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).

In fact, “culture matters because it shapes all aspects of daily living and activity.

9 [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).

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 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
10 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.

se nt ial
s Educators are in the unique position of being cultural brokers who cross
ery E
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
11 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).
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Early Origins in the Construct of
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
1 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.

Eurocentric View, there were civilized and primitive people. The civilized
2 were those who had developed higher levels of culture, while the primitives
had either little or no culture.

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Early Origins in the Construct of
Culture
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
3 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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 1 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.

2 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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 Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
3At 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.

4 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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 Culture as Transmission and Adaptation

5As 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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 Culture as Transmission and Adaptation

6Certain 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.

7All 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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 Culture as Transmission and Adaptation

8Cultural 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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 Culture as Transmission and Adaptation

9Cultural 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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 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).

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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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 Culture as Transmission and Adaptation
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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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“Quotations”