Culture Matters
The benefits of integrating culture in the education system
Multi-cultural Education
What does culture do for us and our students?
- It imposes order and meaning on all our experiences.
- It provides a world view that includes values, ideas, beliefs, and assumptions about the nature of the world, and the way it works.
- It provides a perceptual lens through which experiences are filtered and knowledge and meaning are made.
- It allows us to predict how others from our group will behave in certain situations, but it is not effective at providing us ways of predicting how people from other groups may behave.
- It provides us a language and imagery for talking about and explaining our world.
Culturally Responsive Teaching & Learning
Culturally Relevant Teaching
Lev Vygotsky
Diane Ravitch
James A. Banks
promote social inclusion, in addition to prejudice reduction, so that both teaching practices and school climates foster relationships that build across differences so that all students will develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function as effective citizens in our diverse, complex, and troubled world.
(Banks, J. A., 2006)
How?
- Culturally Mediated Activities: the use of symbols, thoughts, and mental process derived from an individual's culture
- Scaffolding: promotes social interaction and development of multicultural competencies
- Trusting relationships: the core of building a community of learners
- Codes of power: translating mainstream social behavior into understandable contexts
(Jones, E. B., Pang, V. O., & Rodriguez, J. L., 2001)
TEACHERS and future teachers
(Keengwe, J., 2010)
References
Banks, J. A. (2006). Improving Race Relations in Schools: From Theory and Research to Practice. Journal of Social Issues J Social Issues, 62(3), 607-614. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.2006.00476.x
Gindis, B. (1995). The social/cultural implication of disability: Vygotsky's paradigm for special education. Educational Psychologist, 30(2), 77.
Jones, E. B., Pang, V. O., & Rodriguez, J. L. (2001). Social Studies in the Elementary Classroom: Culture Matters. Theory Into Practice, 40(1), 35.
Keengwe, J. (2010). Fostering Cross Cultural Competence in Preservice Teachers Through Multicultural Education Experiences. Early Childhood Education Journal, 38(3), 197-204.
Ovando, C. J., & Combs, M. C. (2012). Bilingual and ESL classrooms: Teaching in multicultural contexts. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.