Culture and Education
By this point in the volume, the need for dialogue in public spaces may seem obvious. But having this conversation occur in shared, respect- ful, and productive ways is not easy in diverse, pluralistic settings. It may be even more difficult in those settings where differences in race, gender, sexual orientation, and language are awarded pride of place or position. In this chapter Sonia Nieto advances the conversation about the educational implications of some of the ideas we grappled with in Part Two: if democracy involves people creating common and uncommon worlds in order to define themselves and live together, what are some of the hori- zons of significance available for this kind of education? Nieto captures the challenge as how to live together and thrive amidst what seems inevitable interracial misunderstanding and conflict explained by differences in ethnicity, color, language—often referred to as cultural differences.
Nieto reminds us that culture is not a given, but a human creation, dependent on particular geographical, temporal, and sociopolitical con- texts and therefore vulnerable to issues of power and control. She unpacks some of the features that follow from this understanding—culture as dynamic, multifaceted, embedded in context, influenced by social, economic, and political factors, socially constructed, learned, and dialectical—often drawing on her personal experience to illustrate her points.
Sonia Nieto is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy, and Culture in the School of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her books include Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (5th edition, 2008, with Patty Bode), What Keeps Teachers Going? (2003), and the edited volumes Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), Why We Teach (Teachers College Press, 2005), and Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare Teach (Paradigm Publishers, 2008). She has taught at the elemen- tary grades through graduate school and continues to speak and write on multicultural education, teacher preparation, and the educa- tion of Latinos and other culturally and linguistically diverse student populations.
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Culture and Education1
sonia nieto
[We] are not simply bearers of cultures, languages, and histories, with a duty to reproduce them. We are the products of linguistic-cultural circumstances, actors with a capacity to resynthesize what we have been socialized into and to solve new and emerging problems of existence. We are not duty-bound to conserve ancestral characteristics which are not structurally useful. We are both socially determined and creators of human futures.2
The term culture can be problematic because it can mean different things to different people in different contexts. For instance, culture is sometimes used as if it pertained only to those with formal education and privileged social status, implying activities such as attending the opera once a month. In the present day, it generally is acknowledged that culture is not just what an elite group of people may do in their spare time, but there are still various and conflicting ideas of what it actually means in everyday life. Among many Whites in the United States, for instance, culture is thought to be held exclusively by those different from them. As a consequence, it is not unusual to hear people, especially those of European background, lament that they do not “have” culture in the same way that African Americans, Asian Ameri- cans, Native Americans, or other groups visibly different from the dominant group “have” it. In other cases, culture is used interchange- ably with ethnicity as if both simply were passed down constant and eternal from one generation to the next. At still other times, culture can mean the traditions one celebrates within the family, in which case it is reduced to foods, dances, and holidays. Less often is culture thought of as the values one holds dear, or the way one looks at and interacts with the world.
In this chapter, I will explore the complex relationship between culture and education. First, I will define culture through a number of interrelated characteristics that make it clear that culture is more than artifacts, rituals, and traditions. In fact, it is becoming increasingly indisputable that culture and cultural differences, including language, play a discernible role in power relationships and how children identify
Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. From Sonia Nieto, The Light In Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities, New York: Teachers College Press, © 1999 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved.
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with their schools. I will consider how culture and language influence the quest for culturally democratic learning environments by looking at some of the cultural discontinuities between school and home expecta- tions of students from various backgrounds.