Rethinking Culture

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Rethinking Culture

• Kris D. Gutiérrez
• UCLA

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Most theories of literacy and learning do not
account for culture
Sociocultural or cultural historical activity
theoretic psychological perspective (CHAT)
Culture is not treated as a variable as
something apart from cognition
Culture is central to this view of learning and
human development and is said to mediate human
activity
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Human beings (students) interact with their
worlds primarily through mediational means e.g.,
cultural artifacts, tools, and symbols (including
language)
Cultural-historical theory helps us better
understand what it is to be human and how to
improve the human situation
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Individual maturation social/material
environment is always changing we must see
individual development in the context of the
history of the social event, and consider the
history of the social group
Vygotskys theory of development is
simultaneously a theory of education theory of
potential learning
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Culture
Human beings organize life for new generations
to rediscover and appropriate mediating
artifacts through the process of enculturation
older persons arrange for younger ones to acquire
the accumulated artifacts of their social group
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Culture is our sociocultural past
Culture over time accumulates, transforms, draws
from or sets aside various tools or resources we
use resources outside and inside our head
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Culture is not made up of well-integrated
cohesive entities whose values are shared by all
members of particular group.
Culture is dynamic, not static
We espouse a non-normative, non-integrated view
of culture
That means that there is more variance within
groups than there is across groups.
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Culture consists of a variety of settings, each
allowing or demanding particular forms of
expertise multiple viewpoints, voices, practices
Communitywe usually hold an imagined notion of
community a general normative notion of
community e.g., school community, the underclass,
Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc.
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Cultural practices are activities with particular
features, routines, acted out or endorsed by all
or most of the group (cultural aspect) part of
individual or groups identity.
Cultural scripts develop over time as people
participate in the everyday practices of their
community
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Culture is not benign
Culture is both a resource and a constraint
Institutions (schools and households) are
artificial settings in that they are culturally
constructed, historical in origin, and social in
context
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National Culture- Single or monolithic culture
usually ascribed to nationality
Culture is not the same as race/ethnicity
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Classrooms
Classrooms are micro-cultures
These settings also develop cultural scripts that
participants in classrooms create over time.
Scripts are patterns of doing and being-talk
(patterns-talk), forms of participation, spatial
arrangement, social relationships of participants
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Some of these scripts have long histories in the
classroom but are nevertheless always recreated,
transformed, resisted, etc.
These scripts can also serve as resources or
constraints and thus have different affordances
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I Initiation
R Response
E Evaluation
Classrooms are particular settings with
particular norms that call for some particular
forms of competence
Competence highlighted by a cultural perspective
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Of interest to educators should be that ones
competence is always situated that is, it is
always linked to the settings in which it is
developed and the demands of those settings
Our practices are always mediated by culture.
Even when we work alone, we work on tasks
structured by others