Juanita Cole asked:
how can students' racial/ethnic culture be remote
from target disciplinary culture? This sounds
confusing especially when considering, for example,
Ancient Egyptians and "mathematical culture".
Juanita, this is a complicated question you ask.
My post to which you responded said:
I generally take the reference culture for enculturationist pedagogies to
be disciplinary cultures (e.g., mathematical culture, historiographical
culture, etc.) that are presumed to be specialized cultures remote from the
varied ethnic and racial cultures in which students' identities are vested.
Thus I'm not really making the claim that disciplinary cultures are remote
from ethnic and racial cultures--they're not!--, only that for the purposes
of enculturationist pedagogy they are treated as remote. My reasons--still
being formulated, and certainly subject to review--have to do with the
framework for pedagogical methods I'm constructing. The framework
articulates 6 pedagogical methods that constitute what I call the "learning
pedagogies" aimed at individual learning, to distinguish them from critical
and liberatory pedagogies aimed at social transformation.
In a previous post (which I've appended below), I outlined an
Enculturationist and an Acculturationist pedagogy each aiming to
enculturate students to disciplinary cultures. [take a moment to read this
post, or the following won't make sense.]
What's tricky is that critical pedagogies also make use of enculturationist
learning techniques. Generally critical pedagogies employ one (or a
combination) of the following approaches to influence the broader society:
(a) create a microcosm of a utopian society in the classroom, or (b) create
a subculture of resistance to mainstream culture. The first approach relies
on an enculturationist pedagogy, whereas the second relies on an
acculturationist pedagogy.
My strategy for distinguishing enculturationist/acculturationist critical
pedagogies from enculturationist/acculturationist learning pedagogies is
with respect to the target culture: critical pedagogies target utopian or
resistance cultures; learning pedagogies target disciplinary cultures
(e.g., mathematical culture, historiographical culture, scientific culture,
literary criticism culture...). My reason for adopting this strategy is
essentially traditionalist: disciplinary cultures are of transcendent value
to a society. A society has an obligation to reproduce disciplinary
cultures through institutions of public education so that all members of
the society have an opportunity to participate in the disciplines.
The fact that students' different cultural backgrounds may tend to locate
them differently with respect to disciplinary cultures shows that it is
almost always a bad idea to use acculturationist teaching strategies in
schools--such pedagogies build on students' cultural identification.
However, enculturationist strategies are the pedagogical vehicles par
excellence for bridging cultural gaps and creating equity of opportunity to
participate in the disciplines. In such a pedagogy, the teacher is focused
on supporting the evolution and consolidation of more sophisticated forms
of participation (dispositions) within the classroom microculture. This is
done by working to ensure that all individuals are active participants in
the classroom microculture, and by sanctioning increasingly sophisticated
practices. It's true that there may be systematic differences in the level
of contribution that students of different backgrounds make to the
evolutionary process. But because disciplinary cultures are highly
specialized, becoming enculturated will be a stretch for all students. It
is in this limited sense that the teacher can be said to exploit the
differential cultural resources that the students provide, while viewing
all of the students as entering a new or remote culture.
What I think is new in this analysis is the possibility of facilitating
cultural transformation in a way that does not coerce identity. Usually,
when we think about enculturationist pedagogy we think about a melding of
Enculturation and Acculturation. Thus a degree of coercion is assumed.
Indeed, by building on the students' current cultural location,
acculturationist pedagogies can really be pernicious w.r.t. magnifying
cultural advantages rather than reducing them. In fact, my tendency is to
want to discourage acculturationist pedagogies--to create an educational
ethic (at least a K-12 education ethic) against pedagogies that seek to
influence students' cultural location. However, this move would seriously
limit the possibilities for critical pedagogy. That's because critical
pedagogies seem to have to rely on acculturation to a much greater extent
than do learning pedagogies. The primary strategy of critical pedagogy is
(b), above. Creating a culture of resistance entails winning the students
over to a new cultural identification. Even in the case of (a), creating a
utopian microculture in the classroom doesn't seem like it provides an
effective means for social transformation unless the students identify
themselves with a utopian mission. Thus the framework of learning
pedagogies I'm formulating seem, potentially, to threaten or undermine the
projects of critical pedagogy. I'm going to be presenting these ideas at
the Bergamo curriculum theory conference this week, and am very grateful to
you, Juanita, Mike, and others, for encouraging me to articulate these,
still very tentative, thoughts.
David Kirshner
__________________________________________________
Previous Posting on Enculturationist and
Acculturationist Pedagogy
__________________________________________________
Enculturation
All of these pedagogical methods are conceived within the dominant
discourse focused on individual student learning. However, enculturationist
learning techniques also turn out to be central to critical pedagogies that
aim for social transformation. Thus, following is an introduction to this
learning metaphor and its associated learning pedagogies. Enculturation is
the process of acquiring cultural dispositions through enmeshment in a
cultural community. I interpret dispositions broadly as inclinations to
engage with people, problems, artifacts, or oneself in culturally
particular ways. Thus, for example, the NCTM’s (1991) objectives that
students come to “explore, conjecture, reason logically; to solve
non-routine problems; to communicate about and through mathematics ... [as
well as] personal self-confidence and a disposition to seek, evaluate, and
use quantitative and spatial information in solving problems and in making
decisions” (p. 1) all reflect an enculturationist learning agenda. (Recall
that the cognitive dispositions like critical thinking and problem solving
are understood as culturally located in the crossdisciplinary framework,
and hence are addressed through enculturationist/acculturationist
pedagogies.)
A paradigm example of enculturation is explored by social psychologists
under the rubric of proxemics (Hall, 1966; Li, 2001). Proxemics, or
personal space, is the tendency for members of different national cultures
to draw differing perimeters around their physical bodies for varying
social purposes. Thus, natives of France tend to prefer closer physical
proximity for conversation than do Americans (Remland, Jones, & Brinkman,
1991). I count coming to participate in this cultural norm a particularly
pure instance of enculturation because it is accomplished without
volitional participation. Generally people within a national culture
acquire proxemic dispositions through culture enmeshment without intending
it, and even without awareness of the cultural norm.
This pure form of enculturation is possible in a unitary culture in which
only a single dispositional variation is present. However, one also can
come to be enculturated into a subculture whose dispositional
characteristics are distinctive among a range of other subcultures’ (e.g.,
being a scientist, being a punk rocker, etc.). In such instances, inductees
often seek to actively acculturate themselves to a subculture, thereby
bringing volitional resources to the task of acquiring the subculture’s
dispositional characteristics. Acculturation is intentionally “fitting in”
to a cultural milieu by emulating the cultural dispositions displayed
therein. However, this process needs to be understood as supplementary to
the more basic unconscious processes of enculturation going on around it
all the time. A cultural milieu is constituted of innumerable cultural
dispositions, of which only a limited number can be consciously addressed
through strategies of acculturation.
Enculturationist Pedagogy: This distinction points to two pedagogical
strategies that can be discerned in the education literature. In
enculturationist (student centered) teaching, the teacher begins by
identifying a target culture and target dispositions within that culture.
The instructional focus is on the classroom microculture, which the teacher
works to shape so that it comes to more closely resemble the target culture
with respect to the target dispositions. In a pure enculturationist
pedagogy, students “learn” through their enmeshment in the cultural milieu
of the classroom rather than from motivated efforts at becoming
acculturated to some other cultural milieu for which the classroom
interaction is an entryway.
Often disciplinary cultures are targeted in enculturationist pedagogy. For
instance, Sexias (1993) sought to organize instruction to establish
“criteria for historical evidence, methods of determining historical
significance, and limits on interpretive license” (Windschitl, 2002, p.
149)–dispositions of historiographers. Similarly, Lampert (1990) and
Schoenfeld (1994) have worked to establish mathematical communities in
their classrooms so that students can acquire characteristically
mathematical modes of argumentation and problem solving, as well as other
mathematical dispositions. Yackel and Cobb (1996) most clearly articulate
an enculturationist pedagogical agenda in their discussion of
sociomathematical norms as the targeted dispositions of mathematical
culture (e.g., the preference for mathematically elegant solutions) that
come to be “interactively constituted by each classroom community” (p.
475). Implementing this kind of pedagogy requires sensitivity to the
current dispositional character of the classroom microculture relative to
the target dispositions, and the ability to work over an extended period of
time (the duration of a course) to nurture increasingly sophisticated
cultural norms.
Acculturationist Pedagogy: Often the enculturationist teacher helps develop
the dispositional character of the classroom by positioning her or himself
as a central participant in the evolving classroom microculture (for
example, by regularly signaling deep appreciation of student solutions that
tend toward mathematical elegance). However, the teacher need not signify
as a representative of the target culture for such cultural dispositions to
take root within the classroom microculture. Students are learning from
their enmeshment in the classroom microculture, not from their efforts to
acculturate to the disciplinary norms. This can be distinguished from
acculturationist pedagogy in which the teacher overtly models cultural
dispositions for the benefit of students who are culturally identified with
the target culture. For instance, a science teacher may stress the lab
procedures he/she is modeling are the authentic methods of science, so that
students who are self-identified as novice-scientists can have access to
these valued cultural practices to further their own scientific
acculturation. Or acculturationist pedagogies may seek to encourage
cultural identification, for instance by positioning students as experts on
a particular scientific topic and involving them in email collaboration
with actual scientists (Brown & Campione, 1996). Concern for “authentic
practice,” (e.g., in apprenticeship models of pedagogy inspired by situated
cognition theory, Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989, p. 34), is a hallmark of
an acculturationist agenda (though cognitive apprenticeship also employs
enculturationist strategies).
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