Re: culture in/of classrooms
Judy (diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu)
Sat, 23 Dec 1995 18:33:48 -0500
I think studies of classroom culture go back to Sue Philips's
Warm Springs study (the dissertation), which introduced the term
"participation structures" and was the first I know about
to raise the question of "clash" between communication styles
at home & school. Erickson & Mohatt then built on her work
to show that Indian and White teachers
respectively shifted the "interactional ethic" of classrooms
populated by Indian students and that Indian students
participated more under conditions of "cultural congruence"
(in _Doing the Ethnography of Schooling_). For a formal discussion
of "culture" re: classrooms, Fred Erickson, in
the 1986 AERA Handbook of Res. on Teaching discusses the
"microculture" of classrooms, which is influenced by non-local
culture - the analyst infers the
latter from attention to the former - but this is to
describe a program of "interpretive research" on teaching.
Except for Dyson's work, I don't know of any studies that
pay attention to both the evolution of shared meanings in a
classroom and to the cultural orientations of particular students.
- Judy
Judy Diamondstone
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Rutgers University