Ethnography and Multiculturalism in Education   Term Paper ID:41900 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: How ethnographic and social capital theories have influenced theories of pedagogy of multicultural students ...... More...

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Paper Abstract: How ethnographic and social capital theories have influenced theories of pedagogy of multicultural students and the methods of classroom management of teachers who may be from mainstream cultures. Paper Introduction: In the traditional approach to anthropology scholars from highlyliterate societies would betake themselves to some remote enclave or otherand proceed to study the ways and habits of were held to be primitivepeoples An important result was to privilege Western culture and itsattributes what was rational systematic and logical In more recentdecades anthropology has extended itself because its practitioners began as it were looking inward or engaging in self-scrutiny They tookthemselves or their own cultures as subject Thus Western contexts becamethe venues of Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. That is, teachers can model self-efficacy as astarting-point for conveying and transmitting cultural cues and culturalmastery to a variety of students from a variety of cultures. Meanwhile, ad Tatum argues, they seeno benefit in academic success, with the result that they may becomedisaffected altogether. The modeling is useful, but the pointis that it connects with the notion of finding ways toward culturalinclusion rather than obdurate institutional insistence on multiculturalacculturation into the mainstream. Thus Western contexts becamethe venues of exploration, and actors in those contexts became objects ofoften critical scrutiny. C. His experience in one case helps illustrate the point. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Lindsey, Roberts, and CampbellJones (2 5) take the process a stepfurther, seeking to institutionalize helping strategies for culturallydiverse students, teachers, and families. The answer,to Davis, lies in culture, and she cites research showing that (1)children's perception that they are being stereotyped affects theirperformance and (2) having an opportunity to vent their fears in informalrather than formal settings can ameliorate their performance anxiety (p.2 ). Koyama (Eds.), School connections: U.S. The infamous book The Bell Curve sought to explain it geneticallyand biologically, contending that blacks are just not as smart as whites.Behind the fact that this contention being discredited by the undoubtedachievement of some African Americans is the issue of how culture inparticular influences African American males' academic experience.According to Tatum (2 7), mainstream American culture fears and loathesadolescent black males as predators, some of whom return the favor viacriminal behavior. Massively imperfect pedagogy in early years translates into illiteracyfor many black males, with the result that by the time they becomeadolescents they are still illiterate but are expected to function as ifthey had had every academic advantage. That approachalso accustoms teachers to recognizing important social and cultural cuesfrom students, which sets up a positive situation in which culturesmutually feed and are fed by each other. Social capital among working-class minority students. A. While Tatum's focus is almost exclusively on exploiting the teacher'saccretion of knowledge about the realities of "black experience" in Americain order to achieve pedagogical goals, Davis takes as her subject the(probably mainstream-culture) teacher whose students are quite likely tocome from a variety of nonmainstream cultures. To some degree, such an approach to anthropology arguably verges onthe territory of sociology. 17). 5) of any given culture and sees as part of the teacher's role that offacilitator to clarifying for students what those rules are while alsoremaining sensitive to the cultural norms from which the studentsthemselves are operating. One aspect of that is t recognizerecognizing that social capital networks are going to be exploited in anycase, even though currently they are more likely to consist of socialrelationships, such as peer groups, than institutions (p. ReferencesDavis, B. S. 78). 18-2 ) to become the repository of whatsocial capital theory espouses. Retrieved September 14, 2 8, from http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume6/number14/Stanton-Salazar, R. Thus Tatum advocates giving "explicit attentionto academic excellence as well as cultural competence" (2 7, p. Gandara, & J. It is therefore incumbent on the institutional community tofacilitate its power (2 4, pp. That is the argument of Hoy, who wants teachers todevelop a sense of "self-efficacy" at managing cultural encounters that areincreasingly unavoidable, especially in the urban context. In the traditional approach to anthropology, scholars from highlyliterate societies would betake themselves to some remote enclave or otherand proceed to study the ways and habits of were held to be primitivepeoples. Educational psychology (1 th ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.Tatum, A. Davis.Lindsey, R. That is, their social competencies and culturalbackgrounds do not matter. The ethnographic workof Robert Rueda is illustrative of how the discipline of anthropology isoperationalized in the urban context, for Rueda frequently takes as hissubject immigrant families, particularly from Latin America, who mustconfront the myriad differences between the culture they left and the onethat they and their children are obliged to negotiate. Like Davis'sbook, this one is interactive in that it encourages readers to articulatetheir concerns about the cultural wild card typical of urban schoolsettings. It is an approach fraught with hazard,particularly the danger of seeing minority children through a lens ofstereotypical expectations and conveying that in the classroom. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Teaching reading to black adolescent males: Closing the achievement gap. 3). Social capital,or the resources of adaptation, argues Stanton-Salazar, is what minoritiesrequire, and the institutions are either unable or unwilling to make itavailable. And Ibelieve that this is the great thing to understand: that awareness per se--by and of itself--can be curative" (Perls, 1969, p. Academic instrumental knowledge: Deconstructing cultural capital theory for strategic intervention approaches. That theoretical point has beenrepeatedly confirmed by experience in the field--and by the way, one neednot deal with immigrant families to understand the point. This work has beenundertaken not only by Rueda but also by Stanton-Salazar, who notes thatthe "ability" standard of academic success is a pernicious standard forstudents who must breach the cultural gap of knowledge about the schoolsetting, whether via language, class, or culture, before they can comeclose to addressing the content of academic work seriously. An important result was to privilege Western culture and itsattributes: what was rational, systematic, and logical. In more recentdecades, anthropology has extended itself because its practitioners began,as it were, looking inward, or engaging in self-scrutiny. It is in that context that ethnography in contemporary socialenvironments, including (or perhaps especially) the complex urbanenvironments of American culture, becomes relevant. M., & CampbellJones, F. The workbook format, which encourages teacher-readers to write down the specifics of their own feelings, is a useful toolof the book of that regard. The specifics of the ethnographic profiles developed by Rueda, et al.(2 3) are less important than what the experience of decoding the evidenceof the profiles reveals: that cultural influences on the mechanisms forcoping with or indeed mastering a new culture are difficult to overestimateand that educational institutions are well advised to get ahead of thecurve rather than resisting or ignoring it. They also bring in the idea of thelearning organization as a structural model toward which culturallysensitive organizations might aspire. How to teach students who don't look like you: Culturally relevant teaching strategies. To the degree educational advice books build on the ethnographicresearch of such experts as Rueda and Stanton-Salizar, they operate aspractical handbooks in the art of multicultural competence. That may seem self-evident until it is realized that most schools are structured so as tooblige students to accommodate the (supposed) reality of the idealizedsocial context; in fact, black males' experience of that context is one ofcontinual turmoil and failure, especially in fast-paced urban settings,where failure is not accommodated and where the cultural cues received byminority groups seem deliberately geared toward their socialmarginalization. 18- 38). 19). For example,Rueda, Monzo, and Arzubiaga (2 3) are critical of the opacity ofinstitutional norms to immigrants' all-too-often ineffectual desire fortheir children's success in school. The role of culturalsensitivity in building or destroying children's perceptions of themselvesin an academic environment is simply too important to ignore, they argue.It more or less outranks the importance of attempting to impose a sense ofthe importance of the school's or even the society's cultural norms onchildren who may lack the capacity to acculturate and who in any case mayroutinely receive cues of nonacculturation from families who may be havingtheir own problems accommodating themselves to the cultural and linguistichegemon that is America. The argument is that some version ofpositive cultural acceptance by institutional actors such as teachers andadministrators will have the effect of lending cultural mastery to studentsand sensitizing institutions to the multiple ways in which such mastery maybe arrived at. (2 6). Gestalt therapy verbatim. (2 3). As animmediate goal in that regard, Rueda, et al., call for institutions toenable academic instrumental knowledge via proactive outreach to culturallydiverse families, but based on their ethnographic observations they cautionthat acceptance of outreach advice--say, for one program of bilingualeducation over another--by an individual family may have as much to do withthe social affinity of the family with the advisor as with the objectivebenefits of a given program. (2 5). He faults early teaching methods that have the effect ofsocially marginalizing black males, which in turn academically marginalizesthem, and calls for new "concepts of literacy instruction, curriculumorientation, and culturally responsive pedagogy" (p. Moreimportant, says Hoy, is the teacher's sense of self that is brought intothe classroom and that therefore is capable of addressing multiculturalneeds and expectations. Davis usefully refers to the "hidden rules" (2 6,p. One of the mostintractable educational issues of the 2 th century, which has carried overto the 21st, is that of the academic achievement gap between whites andblacks. Individualexperience feeds into and is fed by the behavior of social groups bothfamiliar and alien to such experience, and delineating the lines of suchexperience with a view toward illuminating its reality within the socialcontext that it must operate is the ethnographer's objective. public schoolsystem. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.Woolfolk, A. The problem is that institutionalactors seek to co-opt the culture of origin of the children and encourageassimilation, which does nothing to much as alienate or isolate thechildren. . (2 4). Rather, they encourage institutions to acknowledge their tendencyto artificially construct social experience and social inequality forimmigrant children and instead help construct social capital for them, or,as they put it, foster "new hybrid practices that balance the diversevalues, beliefs, resources and constraints of families with the structureof schooling" (n.p.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.Perls, F. Their objective is ambitious,although it can be described at its simplest level as an attempt toimplement a the schoolwide level the advice given to teachers to attempt tofoster cultural competencies across cultures in the classroom. New York: Bantam Books.Rueda, R., Monzo, L., & Arzubiaga, A. Mexican youth, peers, and school achievement (pp. However, as a mechanism of more closelyunderstanding the human factor of the social environment, theanthropological discipline of ethnography has emerged. . That is to bedistinguished from effectiveness, which has a clinical, institutionalaspect about it and which is in any case meant to be measured. (1969). P. Tatum's view is that teachers who acknowledge thesestudents' social and cultural reality and who hold out the possibility thatliteracy can help them cope and thrive within it are most likely to havesuccess with remediating black males' academic issues. . Consider an a slightly different context a psychiatrist'scomment about dealing with neurosis: "[We] simply consider the organism asa system that is in balance and that has to function properly. M. In particular, Rueda has studied the coping mechanisms such familiesadopt as their children navigate the vagaries of the U.S. The culturally proficient school: An implementation guide for school leaders. M. B., Roberts, L. The reason seems to be that the record of attempting toinstitutionalize cross-cultural sensitivities has all too often degeneratedinto meetings at which name calling and accusations of special pleading arehurled, with the result that little is accomplished. (2 7). The basis for such advocacy is the practice of constructingethnographies in Latino families that reveal how little the culturalcapital of the culture of origin is valued institutionally and theobstacles facing those who need to acquire social capital that willfacilitate their encounter with American institutions. They tookthemselves or their own cultures as subject. Bonnie M. In part suchcompetence is simply a function of psychological maturity--not so much ofstudents as of teachers. The principal caution--again cultural--is against teachers' bringinginto the classroom situation their biases and conveying them there, or,alternatively, in favor of having clarity about their own biases with aview toward mitigating them. Gibson, P. They model prospectivediversity conversations that are productive rather than destructive, andthey suggest content for in-service professional-development and leadership-development pedagogy for teachers. Thedifference in approach may seem slight, but in fact it is loaded withimplication. (2 7). Current Issues in Education, 6(14). If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.