I've taken the opportunity to read the articles Mike is speaking about.
They are in the Carol D. Lee guest-edited "Theme Issue: Reconceptualizing
Race and Ethnicity in Educational Research" in the current June-July 2003
on-line issue of Educational Research. I found them all very rewarding and
encouraging examples of the viability of sociocultural social science.
They are all written from a cultural-historical point of view; they all
describe lessons and experiences from the research of the authors, and make
valuable suggestions for directions educational research should take.
Here are some of the features of each article that struck me.
The Editor's Introduction, "Why We Need to Re-Think Race and Ethnicity in
Educational Research" by Carol D. Lee introduces the authors and their
articles. In most cases she helped create teams of researchers that had
not written together before. One theme that ties these articles together,
as Lee emphasizes, is criticism of the pervasive practice of using
European-Americans as "examplars of the range of normative psychosocial and
cognitive development" by which other populations are compared. Lee also
explains her choice of the term "race and ethnicity" in the title.
"Ethnicity" alone might not imply African-Americans; "People of color"
would probably not imply "Whites," etc.
In the spirit of Lee's excellent reasoning, to make an aside comment,
personally I like the term European-American better (as Rogoff and
Gutierrez use it) than the capitalized term "White" - although just "white"
with no caps seems to work well, too. Yet, as I think about this - Lee
raises such good questions in her introduction - I prefer to see "Black"
capitalized for the same reason I would capitalize "African-American" -
"Black" to my ears acknowledges not just race, but also ethnicity, whereas
I am not so sure there is or at least that I belong to a "White" ethnicity,
since I cannot imagine North American culture, my ethnic origins, without
African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc. etc., the countless varieties of
peoples and cultures and origins and histories that make up the U.S.
population. Of course, this multi-ethnic and multi-racial North American
culture is just as present for everyone else, so if I am not of a "White"
ethnicity, what am I of? The term "European-American" does describe
something true about my origins. It is a relatively new term for me to use
in place of "white", but it seems to work, in part because it is
symmetrical with "African-American," "Asian-American," etc. I identify
factually with the term "white" because that is what my skin color is
usually called, but not the term "White" because it does not capture my
sense of my own ethnicity - the matrix of cultures I have grown up around
and lived in and feel like I belong to. But the problem of description
isn't really fully solved with the X-Americans formula, of course.
White-skinned, black-skinned, and people of all the colors of skin come
from all the continents - including families that go back many centuries -
so identification by continental origin can be misleading about color. All
these differences and nuances and problems with terms indicate the exact
point Lee makes - we (that is, contemporary culture) use *both* racial and
ethnic criteria in distinguishing groups, so to include all groups in the
human family, as she did in her title for the issue, "Reconceptualizing
Race and Ethnicity in Educational Research," we must speak of both race and
ethnicity. An interesting application of this is this way Lee in her
introduction identifies each and every author by race and ethnicity, as
well as gender (if the first name is not a sufficient indicator). I found
it helped me get to know and identify with the authors - the information
did mediate my reading of their texts. Identity is a key theme in all the
articles, and the unified and various ways the concept is handled and
explored in the texts - clearly under Lee's excellent leadership - along
with the many suggestions made for research methods - are strong indicators
to me of the strength of cultural-historical social theory.
" “Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep”: Studying How People Live Culturally", by
Carol D. Lee, Margaret Beale Spencer, and Vinay Harpalani, explores two
research models. Cultural Modeling Framework was developed by Lee out of
her research into similarities between young African-American use and
interpretation of rap lyrics and what expert readers do as they study
formal literary genres. Lee's Cultural Modeling Framework is designed to
be applied to classroom situations to mobilize the cultural resources of
students to more productively study formal school subjects. The Algebra
Project developed by civil rights activist and mathematician Robert Moses
("Radical equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights", 2001) is cited as an
example of this kind of approach. Striking images from the Algebra Project
include the use of African drumming to teach ratio and proportion, rooting
math problems in community experience, teaching younger students, and
engaging in political activity in the schools.
Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) is a model of
identity development and coping strategies. PVEST draws on five aspects of
cultural socialization: (1) net vulnerability (risks, protections); (2)
net stress (challenges, supports); (3) reactive coping strategies
(adaptive, maladaptive); (4) emergent identities, or stable coping
responses (positive, negative); and (5) coping outcomes (productive,
unproductive). PVEST represents, according to the authors, a synthesis of
at least a dozen theories of human development. It can be used to help
understand self-image, dynamics over a life-span, and the broader social
and cultural contexts.
"Ethnic and Academic Identities: A Cultural Practice Perspective on
Emerging Tensions
and Their Management in the Lives of Minority Students", by Na’ilah Suad
Nasir and Geoffrey B. Saxe, explores three strands of analysis to the
important question of how minority students manage tensions between these
potentially conflicting identities. A recorded spontaneous dialogue
between an African-American medical student and medical school
administrator of like heritage is used as an example; the student had been
playing dominos with school blue-collar employees (all African-American) in
a school courtyard, and the administrator teased the student about needing
to get to his studies, not playing dominos. The authors describe three
strands of analysis to interpret this kind of tension. "Positioning in
local interactions" focuses on face-to-face interactions. "Positioning
over developmental time" captures change that occurs in individuals over
their history. "Positioning and social history" highlights the role of
practices, such as domino playing among working class African-Americans, in
their cultural and historical context.
"Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice"
by Kris D. Gutiérrez and Barbara Rogoff argues against conceptualizing
commonalities of learning approaches and cultural differences in general as
results of individual traits. In doing so, the specific characteristics of
individual learners can become abstracted into generalizations about how
people of that cultural group respond. Instead, the authors encourage
thinking in terms of repertoires that individuals learn in their cultural
environments, and to encourage dexterity in the use of various repertoires.
Along the lines of critiquing the individual trait approach, the term
"diverse" gets a sharp blast in a footnote:
"The practice of trying to locate cultural difference within individuals
leads to commonplace but ludicrous statements such as referring to
individuals as diverse (e.g., "The class has a large proportion of diverse
students") - referring to students from educationally underserved
populations as diverse with the implication that the others are the
standard - thus, normalizing the dominant group. Differences cannot be
attributed to a single side of a contrast."
Other suggestions by the authors include speaking of findings in the past
tense to avoid timeless overgeneralizations; use ethnic and demographic
labels as cultural descriptors - not causes; view backgrounds of
individuals as clusters - not isolatable independent variables; and be sure
to avoid making overgeneralizations from limited data, such as test
findings - doing otherwise can imply statements about future potential.
"Cultural Diversity Research on Learning and Development: Conceptual,
Methodological, and Strategic Considerations" by Marjorie Faulstich
Orellana and Phillip Bowman critiques the treatment of social categories as
fixed entities and highlights some of their lines of research. In harmony
with central ideas on the Rogoff/Guitierrez article, and the whole series
of articles, the authors point out "We suggest that new research should
treat culture as dynamic toolkits (A. Swidler "Talk of Love: How Culture
Matters," 2001) that people cultivate through various sets of experiences."
Orellana's research has centered on Hispanic youth that are
"para-phrasers," (a deliberate double-entendre using Spanish "para" (for),
and the English word paraphrase), children that translate linguistically
and culturally for their parents and others, and how this mediates their
sense of identity, their experience with schooling, etc. Bowman's research
includes the study of "culture retainers," especially in African-Americans
- how parents convey cultural messages to their children, and how these
messages, when they are retained, influences student "role strain" and
"adaption" in their life course.
- Steve Gabosch, Seattle
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