Re: What do you think ...
Graham Nuthall (G.Nuthall who-is-at educ.canterbury.ac.nz)
Thu, 21 Dec 1995 09:05:26 +1300
Jay's comment _that higher SES classrooms are about learning one's own
culture, and that lower SES ones are about learning an alien culture_ fits
our classroom observation data exactly. Some children are culturally at
home in the classroom. Everything they do fits easily within the activitiy
structures and implicit requirements of the classroom. Others struggle to
make sense of what is going on around them. It is extraordinarily sad to
watch a children trying very hard to do well, and simply not understanding
that everything they try to do gets them further away from success and
deeper into misunderstanding and failure that seems to them to be quite
arbitrary. Within the higher SES classroom, not only is the child easily
comfortable with the activities, but able to reprimand, politely, the
teacher for deviating from the expected behaviors.
We have found it very hard, from our own cultural, well-schooled
perspective to identify the occasions when cultural misfits occur. When I
was interviewing one child about the answers he had given on a test, I
suggested he might try to guess the answer to one question. He was
mystified by my suggestion and asked why would he want to guess.
Fortunately, I sensed how culturally loaded the idea of guessing on a test
was, and had an interesting discussion with him about what he thought
people did with tests: where they went, how they were marked, what answers
were for, etc. I learned a lot and had a sense of opening a tiny window on
another world, or going _through the looking glass_
I have ended up quite convinced that what we call, and sanctify as,
differences in ability between children, are the effects of cultural
disjunctions.
Graham
Graham Nuthall
Education Department
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch, New Zealand
Phone 64 03 3642255
Fax 64 03 3642418