Exploring Culture: A Problem-Based Unit

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Students come to school from backgrounds representing diverse cultures.

"That is certainly an uncontroversial statement. But various guidelines and policies about teacher preparation contain statements regarding knowledge about the student's home culture as well as "culturally appropriate English" into account. The issue becomes quickly complicated once we need to start thinking about what exactly we mean by 'culture', and how to train educators and the community to be culturally knowledgeable and sensitive. With an emphasis on action research and inquiry in your classroom, this exercise is intended to deepen your analysis of culture."

Professor Kenji Hakuta

Broadly speaking, people have defined culture in ways such as:

  • a list of attributes
  • patterns of behavior and rituals
  • social structure
  • meanings and interpretations by members.

Our own bias is that culture is most definitively not a list of things, such as foods, clothes, dances, and folktales. Rather, culture is itself defined by multiple perspectives of its insiders and outsiders and the various ways in which social business is conducted. Language and literacy is also an integral part of cultural definition.

The assignment of this problem-based unit is to construct a web page that contains critical information about a specific cultural group. We encourage you to be creative in the contents of your webpage. The ultimate goal is to produce a page that would be useful to and audience of teachers in better understanding their students.

The following issues should be addressed:

  • What is your definition of culture?
  • Critical demographic, social, and historical information about the group;
  • Expectations that students and parents have about schooling and their community;
  • Factors about the group that have influenced its immigration to the U.S.;
  • Variability within the group;
  • Characterization of their language structure and discourse rules.

Some Quotes about Culture

(Click here to browse a web page on teacher preparation and certification for ELL students, put together by Stanford students George Bunch and Ken Romeo).

We have found a number of sites on the web that offer succinct, juicy, and sometimes confusing quotes about culture.

The culture of CULTURE Culture means different things to different people. Even among anthropologists there is no agreed upon definition of culture. Herve Varenne of the Programs in Anthropology and Education and Applied Anthropology Department of International and Transcultural Studies Teachers College, Columbia University offers several different classical definitions found in the anthropological literature.

Click here

 This link from the University of Minnesota's Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition offers additional definitions of culture, as well as provides references for supplemental readings on the topic.
Click here. Washington State University offers an "exploration of the concept of human culture."

Practical Guides to Defining Culture

While it is important for you as teachers to be able to reflect upon and articulate your thoughts about culture at a theoretical level, what is of utmost importance on a practical level is how to transform these abstract concepts into meaningful uses of culture in your classrooms. Below you will find links to several documents designed to guide you through the transition.

  • "Who are my students? What kinds of cultural influences shape their lives? How do they--and I, as their teacher--shape and construct this culture on an ongoing basis? What are my own cultural assumptions and how do they influence my teaching?" This educational practice report titled Personalizing Culture through Anthropological and Educational Perspectives looks at these difficult questions and offers suggestions to help teachers find answers specific to their situation. The report was published by CREDE, the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence. Click here.
  • This practical guide highlights for teachers the different stages (along with concrete examples) involved in attempting to transform curriculum from "mainstream" to multicultural. This guide is part of a larger "Multicultural Supersite" by McGraw-Hill. Click here.
  • The National Center for Bilingual Education's program information guide titled Multicultural Education: Strategies for Linguistically Diverse Schools and Classrooms answers typical questions teachers pose about the implementation of multicultural strategies in their classrooms and suggests an extensive list of questions for teachers to consider when attempting to develop a multicultural curriculum and supportive school environment. The guide closes with four lesson plans that model multicultural perspectives imbedded in the curriculum. An extensive reference list is included. Click here.

Specific Cultural Profiles

Below are links to web pages that provide cultural profiles of particular countries or racial/ethnic groups. These sites are intended to serve as information resources for the creation of your own web sites, as well as for discovering additional information about the cultural backgrounds of the students you teach.

  • This link to the Cultural Profiles Project of Citizenship and Immigration Canada provides an indexed overview of life and customs in nearly 100 countries. It was designed as a reference tool for Canadian volunteers who assist immigrant newcomers with adapting to life in Canada. Click here.
  • The Country Profiles from the World Factbook 2000 of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency contains information on the geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues of countries worldwide. Click here.
  • ABC News' Country Profiles provide information on the background, key indicators (inflation, interest, and unemployment rates), economy, global ties, and people of virtually every country in the world. Click here.
  • The Refugee Service Center of the Center for Applied Linguistics creates cultural monographs of different refugee groups to help service providers in the U.S. better understand new refugee populations. Examples of monographs available are those profiling Bosnians, Cubans, Haitians, Iraqi Kurds, Iraqis, and Somalis. Particularly useful are the sections on language, which note implications for ESL teachers through explaining the basics about the language(s) commonly spoken by the profiled ethnic group and highlighting potential areas in which these students might have English language difficulties. Click here.

Language Profiles

There are a number of sites that offer information about languages. The best list we found comes from the home page of the Ethnologue, which is a reference volume produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (they study linguistics with the main purpose of translating the Bible, but the group has had broad impact on the field of linguistics). Their home page is: http://www.ethnologue.com/

The Ethnologue has a great list of links of interest, which we have pasted below:

Links of Interest (from the Summer Institute of Linguistics)

SIL has published materials on only a fraction of all the world's languages. See the SIL Bibliography and the SIL Publications Catalog. The area pages in the Ethnologue have a section of links to external (non-SIL) resources related to countries and languages. Here are some of the primary resources:*

 

Area-specific resources

 

Other sites of interest

Language coding and standards

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Prepared by Kenji Hakuta with assistance from Michele Bousquet

This page was last updated April 2002