Dear David and everybody-
David, can you elaborate on your statement, "What I think is new in this
analysis is the possibility of facilitating cultural transformation in a way
that does not coerce identity", please? I'm not sure I understand what you
mean by "in a way that does not coerce identity" (of students, I assume?).
Also, what do you mean by "facilitating cultural transformation"? Can you
give examples please so I can visualize the terms, please?
I feel that what you are talking about is very important for me but I need
more clarity. I teach future teachers and I hate (traditional?) schooling.
Using a binary language, I teach future oppressors-oppressed and I'm their
current oppressor*. My intentions are often (not always) good but my deeds
are not. I'm a part of the system (but maybe not a very good citizen of it
or it can be one of my illusions). My students and I are "thrown" into
semester by institutional impersonal forces. We impose our "projects" on
each other (using Heidegger's terms).
Now, where is in this picture "facilitating cultural transformation"? And
why should I be concerned with not coercing students' (and my own?)
identities? Please help.
Eugene
* My simplistic "test" on oppression is very simple: students are not
oppressed if they come to class and do work for the class because they
freely choose to do that. I doubt that my classes can pass this test.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David H Kirshner [mailto:dkirsh@lsu.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 2:26 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: [Fwd: ethnicity and pedagogy?]
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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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