Culture: Socio-cultural Identity and the Context of Learning
A focus on socio-cultural identity is often seen as the primary route to achieving educational equity and excellence. Students come to school from a variety of cultural backgrounds; attending to those backgrounds is seen as a vital part of understanding what students can do and what they need to support their continued learning. Educational equity demands the acknowledgment of cultural diversity in deep and meaningful ways. Excellence is only achieved when all students – not just those who are of the privileged class – achieve at high levels.
Culturally relevant educational practice is much too rare. Widespread misunderstandings about student cultures – and the notion of culture itself – contribute to missteps by well-meaning or compliant educators. These misunderstandings, coupled with institutional racism, ensure that cultural barriers to educational equity and excellence remain.
A deeper analysis of culture would allow educators to better understand how to improve outcomes for all students. This analysis would:
- recognize that culture is produced through interactions between members of a culture group and those outside that group;
- acknowledge that cultural characteristics are not confined to a particular group: not all members of a group share particular cultural characteristics, and many outside the group also share such characteristics;
- look at classrooms themselves as cultures where individuals interact and produce educational outcomes – culture is not just something students bring with them from home;
- recognize that the way schools are organized and operate is, itself, a form of culture.
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Research Perspective
"In education we have a tendency to have what I call shallow conversationsabout culture – conversations that try to explain huge things like racial achievement gaps by looking at only one tiny piece of the puzzle. I’m suggesting a more thorough cultural analysis that considers all of the actors and factors that cumulatively add up to, for example, Latino high school dropout, as opposed to settling for a narrower explanation about what we think of as Latino child rearing. One place I focus on in my analysis of culture in education is the everyday behavior of the educator and how that plays a role in producing achievement outcomes."
Read a transcript of the interview:
A Deeper Analysis of "Culture" in Education [PDF: 11 pages]
