Invisible Culture Discussion Question

"Even well meaning, dedicated teachers can make it difficult for students to learn if they don't know who their students are and the cultures of their students' communities." If the previous statement is true, does it follow that only teachers from within the community should teach children of that community?

I agree with the above statement. However, I don't think that only teachers from within the community would be effective in reaching out to at-risk students. Bilingual or multilingual teachers, for instance, could also be successful in enabling students' literacy development and socialization. Those teachers may be more sensitive to cultural differences than their monolingual counterparts (of course, there may be exceptions...).
That being said, I think schools should promote diversity in their hiring practices.

How could teachers facilitate students' learning and success?

Regardless of the teacher's linguistic and ethnic background, she should be "willing" to work with disadvantaged students. How, you might ask?

She should be open-minded and make a conscious effort to learn about other cultures. She should learn a foreign language and visit the country of the target language.

She should hold one-on-one conferences with her students (and the parents, maybe) in an attempt to understand "why" those students are having difficulty in school.

She should also encourage students to write personal stories, which may be used as a means of getting to know the students and creating in-class discussions.

She should also create an environment in which students feel free to discuss and write about their home literacies, their lived experiences in their communities, and their future goals. I think it is important that classroom assignments be meaningful so that students can participate in such activities.

Reformulating Identities in the face of fluid modernity, by Castanheira et al.

As I was reading this article, I thought about poststructuralist approaches to understanding identity and how they very much agree with Castanheira et al's "concept of multiple identities, or identities as constructed and mutable" (p. 173). Post-structuralists conceive identity as an unstable, multilayered entity, which is constructed and reconstructed by social structures (such as family, friends, classroom, schools, etc.)

Similarly, the study conducted by the authors revealed the ways in which "ethnolinguistically" "diverse 5th graders in a small southern California town learned to become students in a local group, both in the class and in the school community as a whole". This is significant as it demonstrates how different circumstances may require individuals to take up different roles, which are constructed "in and through" individuals' interaction with their social environment.

What this means is that identity is not something individuals create on their own. As pointed out by the authors, "individual-collective relationships are central to constructing an identity within a local group...and [as such] identity is a social construct that is negotiated for and by the members of the group" (p. 175).

The authors also point to "the pattern of action developed by the teacher--inviting students to use their prior knowledge and experiences to participate in classroom activities, which help define ways of being in that classroom."

Ways with Words, Epilogue

"Academic success beyond readiness depends on becoming a contextualist who can predict and maneuver the scenes and situations by understanding the relatedness of parts to the outcome or the identity of the whole" (p. 352).

1) Do you think standardized tests help achieve this goal? Why? Why not?

2) Do you think standardized test scores are indicative of a student's potential for success in school? Should there be an alternative to such tests? What would that be?

3) What specific methods would you consider using in helping a child whose skills do not meet the criteria set forth by the school system?

4) Think about your experiences as a high school student, especially your teachers' expectations and the types of assignments you had to do. What kinds of tacit messages were being sent to you by your school? How did they agree with or contradict the hidden norms established by the administration at your work place?

5) What is the purpose of schooling? Is the primary aim to teach basic skills or to foster critical thinking? Is it to prepare citizens for future careers or to inspire academic achievement?

6) Apple (1979), Giroux (1980), and Pinar (1974) noted that schools reproduce social inequality by creating a divide between students who come from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Do you agree with this statement? Why? Why not?

7) Assume that you are a curriculum specialist who has been assigned the task of creating a new curriculum for the children of townspeople, Roadville, and Trackton residents. They will all be attending a small liberal arts college in the Piedmont Carolinas. What skills would you teach them? What would be the rationale for your decision to teach those skills? What factors would you take into consideration in designing this curriculum? What problems do you envision yourself encountering? How would you implement that curriculum in the classroom?

Ways With Words, Chapter 5

Story Telling in Roadville

Topics for women's and men's stories are gender-based.

A good story must include direct quotations and be factual, detailed, and free of any exaggeration.

A true story is didactic: it has a "lesson with a meaning for the life of all" (p. 155), which usually derives from a rigid Christian norm from the Bible.

Stories help establish "group membership and behavioral norms" (p. 184).

Always tell the truth: emphasis on conformity to "expected" norms and doing "the right thing"

Parents read stories to preschool children; emphasis on recitation and memorization"

Fictive stories...are not accepted as stories, but as lies, without a piece of truth" (p. 158)

Story Telling in Trackton

"A good story is "junk, which "includes exaggeration and creatively fictionalized details surrounding the real event and the outcome may not even resemble what indeed happened" (p. 166).

"Stories often do not have a point; they may go on as long as the audience enjoys the story teller's entertainment" (p. 186).

Adults do not read to young children. Stories help build "individual strengths and powers" (p. 184)

Story tellers use "gestures, dialogue, sound effects, and emotional evaluations" (p. 172).

Questions for Discussion

1) How much of Heath's recount of the literacy practices of Roadville and Trackton residents is representative of your perception, or observation, of the literacy practices of ethnically and linguistically diverse students in your teaching environment today?

2) In what ways might differences in the literacy practices between the two communities lead to problems in a classroom setting?

3) What can schools and educators do to negotiate or resolve such conflicts?

On Ethnography, Chapter 5

Key issues:

Language Socialization:

1) Oral language--"particularly in terms of lexical, syntactic, and generic productive skills"-and written language--"both its interpretation and and production" are interdependent and they should both be the focus of ethnographic research. For instance, students coming from multicultural and multilingual environments may be accostomed to using a variety of linguistic forms in their speech. Such syntactic forms might be at odds with linguistic norms and standards established by educational institutions, although, as Heath and Street state, "all language learners can understand language more complex than that which they may produce."

2) The linguistic features of teacher talk vs. student talk, as well as the "nature and extent of verbal interactions between children and caregivers" and how these conversations help enrich students' vocabulary and diversify their sentences.

3) "Familiarity with language socialization literature" is also important as it helps the ethnographer to modify or revise his or her research question.

4) "The success of individuals in academic achievement, professional employment, and civic life tends to correlate with fluency in a wide repertoire of language structures, uses, and modes"

Social Theories of Literacy:

This ideology attempts to understand the social and political factors that influence literacy practices, mainly the ways in which schools perpetuate the divide between at-risk students' beliefs, attitudes, and linguistic background and those set forth by schools.


Question: What can educators do to help at-risk students, those coming from linguistically and socioeconomically disadvantaged bacgrounds, to succeed academically? What types of intervention strategies can be implemented so that those students continue their education? How can tutors and teachers work together to facilitate those students' language and academic socialization?

Ways With Words, Chapters 1-3

Sometimes I think empirical research can be too limited or simplistic in its approach as it tends to draw conclusions based on explicit, quantifiable data. However, ethnographic research brings into light the invisible, the unknown, and the unique--one that cannot be generalized across a larger population.

This is indeed an important aspect of Heath's ethnographic research, as it focuses on literacy practices and events in regional or local settings as opposed to literacy in general. This is what makes her work "unique" because it gives the reader an insight into the "particular" ways in which members of Trackton and Roadville tell stories, read, write, and talk about texts.

Heath's work, as an ethnographic study of literacy practices of two different communities, enables us--doctoral candidates--to see the importance of cultural factors in shaping literacy practices of a group of people.

Heath's ethnographic research localizes and particularizes literacy events and, as such, helps us see how differences in the ways in which members of Trackton and Roadville participate in literacy events are cultural, rather than cognitive. In other words, the particular ways in which the locals tell stories are specific to that culture; they serve the needs of the inhabitants. They should not be attributed to individual differences in understanding and learning about literacy.

I found her writing very accessable and her description--narrative--of literacy events vivid.

Questions:

1) How would Heath's narrative look like if she conducted the same ethnographic research today?
What would she include and exclude? How different would her interpretations be and how would they compare to a narrative of another researcher who conducted the same study?

2) How much do our literacy practices at home compare to those in institutions? How does social class play a role in the divide between our home and institutional literacies? How can we negotiate the two?

On Ethnography, Chapter 3

Key Issues:

1) Ethnography involves a continuous interaction between field notes and literature review. It is also "dialogic between existing explanations and judgments (held by scholars, outsiders, or insiders) and ongoing data collection and analysis."

2) Ethnographic fieldwork "involves a series of choices" ranging from surveys and focus groups to spatial maps and network analysis.

3) Literature reviews should "ensure that current work builds from existing knowledge" and they usually require the ethnographer to do a comprehensive and "interdisciplinary" reading of and synthesizing various sources relevant to the topic under study. In a literature review "never cite references that you have only found in someone else's bibliography."

4) Ethnographers "do not begin their research with a clearly defined research question or ...hypothesis."

Question: How does this concept fit in with the the authors' statement that "we study something because we know something"?

Equally important is defining unknown terminology in an ethnographic study. For instance, as stated by the authors, "any study examining bilingual and multilingual speakers should clarify what is meant by terms such as translation and interpretation."

Reflection and Question:

As I was reading this quote, I could not help but think about ESL speakers and bilinguals in this country and how some native speakers of English erroneously, or perhaps intentionally, use both terms interchangeably, not realizing that they are not synonymous with each other. They refer to bilinguals as ESL speakers or visa versa. This issue ties in with Kumaravadivelu's statement about the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese "all thrown into a single cultural basket labeled Asian."

How would native speakers of English react to being referred to as Catholic when in fact they are Protestant?

Agar's "Who are you to do this?"

Key Issues:

1) The ethnographer's cultural and personal identity influence his interactions with the group being studied. The informants' "expectations of what the ethnographer wants to learn--and their decisions about what should be told--will derive partly from their sense of who he or she is."

2) The ethnographer's background "is the initial framework against which similarities and differences in the studied group are assessed."

3) The ethnographer's "attitude toward his or her own culture conditions the evaluative description of the studied group. The less the ethnographer likes his or her own culture, the more favorably the alternatives may be viewed."

4) "In increasing numbers, the "natives" are becoming ethnographers."
Question: How would an ethnographic study undertaken by an indigeneous person reassure our concerns about the overall objectivity and validity of the results? How would a native's subjectivity be factored into the findings?

5) "Whether it is your personality, your rules of social interaction, your cultural bias toward significant topics, your professional training, or something else, you do not go into the field as a passive recorder of objective data.

6) Culture shock "comes from the sudden immersion in the lifeways of a group different from yourself." In order to adapt to culture shock, the ethnographer "adapts to the stranger role" and becomes "an autonomous man, one with a higher tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty."
One of the characteristics of an ethnographer is his "detached involvement."

How is it possible to be a member of the community you are observing and yet step back and reflect upon the situation without allowing your involvement to affect your judgment?

On Ethnography, Chapter 4

Key Issues:

1) One of the purposes of taking fieldnotes is to ultimately transform them into a research proposal or grant application.
2) Fieldnotes should be turned into "conceptual memos that keep track of what the fieldworker learns from week to week."
3) Every ethnographer should "use columns for separating straight data from his comments and reflections as he records events."

4) Ethnographers should ask a "critical friend" to review and "comment on research questions, validity of the approach, feasibility of actually 'finding out'" what is happening.
Question: How is this going to work? Would this strategy not complicate the already existent problems pertaining to conducting ethnographic research?

5) Ethnographers should aim at moving beyond or breaking the barrier between formal and informal.
Question: How is this possible, especially when the ethnographer, no matter how she tries to remain neutral, may in one way or another fall prey to her cultural values, personality, upbringing and educational background and allow them to guide her in her selection and interpretation of details?

On Ethnography, Chapter 2

Key issues:

1) Nothing is certain in ethnographic undertaking as the ethnographer continuously strives for discovering "what is happening in the field site(s) s/he has chosen."
2) Ethnography differs from qualitative research in that the former "relies on anthropology and linguistics," whereas the latter uses epistemological methods such as interviewing. The former is "constructed through detailed systematic observing, recording, and analyzing of human behavior in specifiable spaces and interactions."
3) Ethnography "makes public the private..." by "entering into the life of the individual, group, or institutional life of the 'other' "
4) Ethnographic research has been equated with "making the familiar strange."
5) "Remember always that we study something because we already know something."
6) The "constant comparative perspective" [I think] refers to the "multiple ways or directions" the ethnographer takes into account in observing individuals in relation to contextual or institutional factors, for instance.
7) The ethnographer uses a discursive method in that s/he continuously shifts back and forth between observing, noting, reading, thinking, observing, and noting.
8) The fieldworker, or the participant observer, is interested in "co-occurrences, that is, patterns that lie outside either the consciousness or the concern of locals, who often view as self-evident and foolish the work that ethnographers undertake to unravel patterns of behavior and their contexts"

Discussion Questions:
1) If all ethnographic research is "inherently interpretive and subjective," how can we rely on the results of an ethnographic study? How reliable and valid are the results? How consistent are the results across similar groups?
2) How can an individual's behavior be representative of institutional norms or policies?
3) If "we study something [it is because] we know something," then why are we doing research?

My Ethnographic Research Topic

For this project I would like to examine the extent to which the cultural background of ESL students influence their source attribution in academic writing. Particularly, I will be exploring the the cultural variations in understanding plagiarism and documentation.

Plagiarism is a problem I usually encounter in my teaching, so I would like to research this topic as it applies to nonnative speakers of English.

Kumaravadivelu's "Problematizing Cultural Stereotypes in TESOL"

The author provides an overview of cultural stereotypes attributed to Asian students: They are "obedient to authority , lack critical thinking skills, and do not participate in classroom interaction."

The author challenges these perceptions by arguing that these characteristics that are considered specific to Asian students only can be "seen among mainstream North American students"especially when they are in a foreign language class.

The author also cites authorities to show that Indian and Chinese cultures have proverbs and philosophers that encourage the learner not to accept the teacher's view as the norm and to always question it.

However, do these quotes actually change the "reality" in the second language classroom or in a graduate study in a foreign language? Why do these students remain quiet in the classroom? Is the teacher not creating a welcoming environment? Could L2 learners' passivity in class be attributed to their possible fear of the teacher's comments or corrections? To their lack of proficiency in the target language? To the fact that their views or thoughts have not been considered as valid as their native speaker counterparts?

There are so many variables and factors that may be affecting what is actually preventing nonnative speakers of English from participating in classroom discussions. I don't think it is as simple as the author puts it.

On Connor's "New Directions in Contrastive Rhetoric"

Key issues:

1) Contrastive rhetoric "examines differences and similarities in writing across cultures."
2) "Different cultures have different rhetorical tendencies; the linguistic patterns and rhetorical conventions of the L1 often transfer to writing in ESL and thus cause interference."
3) The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis is based on the idea that "different languages affect perception and thought in different ways: a) language influences thought; b) language controls thought and perception."
4) Linguistic text analysis is "a tool to describe the conventions of writing in English and to provide analytical techniques with which to compare writing in students L1 and L2.

One of the things I found interesting in this article is the ambiguity or absence of attribution of sources in Chinese writing: "it is not obvious which portions of the text are attributed to whom."

This is a problem I encounter in my teaching. My ESL students often do not feel the need to cite sources, perhaps because in their country knowledge is shared. As teachers, we should try to explain to them the importance of documentation and respecting intellectual property.

Hanuer's article "Focus-On-Cultural Understanding: Literary Reading in the Second Language Classroom"

To my understanding, this article is based on the idea that much of second language teaching involves teaching culture. Therefore, Hanauer argues that teachers should incorporate literary texts on controversial, debatable topics in their teaching of the target language.

Learning ways to interpret such texts helps familiarize students with certain cultural understandings of the foreign culture. This method also enables L2 learners to construct meaning based on an "insider's (or expert's) perspective" and their own interpretation of the text. As Hanuer states, "incorporation of literary reading tasks in the language classroom provides language learners access to cultural knowledge of the target language community." This approach welcomes multiple interpretative methods and encourages students to draw upon their own ways to construct meaning.

Hanuer also makes a distinction between referential and linguistic knowledge. The former, also known as cultural knowledge, "enables understanding," whereas the latter aids communication as it requires the learner to know how to construct a meaningful sentence in English.

I think this is a very innovative approach to teaching a foreign language. My question is: What about individual differences? Students with learning disabilities? What level of ESL students are we talking about here? Beginner? Intermediate? Advanced?

On McDermott and Verenne's article "Reconstructing Culture in Educational Research"

This article made me think of the following expression: Instead of blaming the one who is victimized, blame the one who or that which creates the problem.

Thus, the success/failure rates in American schools should not be attributed to the individual, but rather to the institutions, organizations, and the culture of which he/she is a part. We should not try to change our students but our culture and education system, our methods of tracking and categorizing students, and our ways to label them as low-achievers and high-achievers.

"Why should kids be the focus of change when it is the rest of us--the culture that is acquiring them--that arranges their trouble? ", state the authors. Therefore, we, as teachers and researchers, should analyze culture itself, that is, the educational institutions, their administrative and instructional policies, as well as their historical backgrounds. When we identify the root of the problem, we should find aim at "transforming and tampering with" those policies that marginalize students on the basis of social class, gender and race.

Cultural analysis, "like school reform, requires we take persons seriously while analytically looking through them ...to the world with which they are struggling," the authors argue. In other words, we try to see the world around us through the lens of the marginalized, the oppressed, in an effort to find ways to create a better, more democratic world.

This is a very idealistic model, I should say, one that I agree with, and yet a task that is not easy to achieve. We are talking about opportunity for all, social change, social justice, and academic equality. If we continue to have an educational system that favors white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant views and imposes them on linguistically and ethnically diverse student population, the outcome is a monolingual, monocultural world.

Americans shoud aim at familiarizing themselves both linguistically and culturally with other nations, their customs, traditions, and views. They should acknowledge and respect foreign scholars' research and their contribution to existing knowledge. They should perhaps try to learn a foreign language and travel to the country where the target language is spoken. Only then can they perhaps understand the difficulties the "other" is encountering in America.

Reflections on Erickson's "Culture in Society and Educational Practices"

Key Issues:

1) Culture is habitual and our habits become for the most part invisible to us. Thus, culture shifts in and outside our reflective awareness.

2) Culture shapes and is ashaped by eduaction.

3) Everybody, not just the dominant, is cultural.

My understanding here is that culture embraces everyone, regardless of their linguistic or ethnic background. Without such embracement or integration, there will be no culture???

4) Culture is a tool for the human activity.
This concept made me think of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, also known as activity
theory (??), in which an individual's cognitive development is dependent upon his communicative interaction in social contexts and utilization of tools. In this view, individuals' use of artifacts or tools, such as language, charts, art, numbers, and music facilitates their cognitive development.

5) Everybody is multicultural. Every person and every human group possesses both culture and cultural diversity.

One of the things I found interesting in this article is the distinction made between visible and invisible culture in educational settings. The former one refers to "explicit aspects of culture, such as language, dress, food habits, religion, and aesthetic conventions," whereas the former one refers to implicit or hidden aspects of culture, such as "being impolite and experiencing emotional pain."

Surrounded by a linguistically and ethnically diverse student population in our classroom, we should teach multiculturally and emrace both visible and invisible culture. Instead of adopting a skill-based teching methodoology, we should create a safe classroom environment that enables students to construct knowledge.

On Ethnography, Chapter 1: Culture as a Verb

Ethnographers studying language and literacy delve into three types of learning environments:

1)Individuals striving to become expert in something
2)Groups in identity-making
3)Institutions of formal education

One of the things I found interesting in this chapter was how multimodal literacies, a term used by the authors to refer to "systems of representation that include written forms that are combined with oral, visual, or gestural modes," has changed the way we traditionally view "literacy" as a singular term that refers only to written representations.

This concept ties in with globalization, I think, and with multiple languages and multilingualism, whereby the world in which we live has come to embrace different languages and forms of communication. Such nontraditional modes of literacy are a reality in our continously changing, dynamic world.

I have to admit that I have never thought of culture as a verb. Yes, we usually refer to culture as a way of doing something, but we also use the term broadly to describe customs, traditions, beliefs, and values that separate members of a society from those of different cultures.

Ethnographers who view culture as a verb adopt the notion that "gradations of change in habits and beliefs ...correlate with shifts in structures and uses of language and multimodal literacies."

This, I believe, is true because the world that sorrounds us is not static. We might have a theoretical or conceptual framework today, but the same ideology may not hold true tomorrow, simply because the world is constantly changing and people are migrating, relocating, etc.

Therefore, as researchers we have to be open to different, perhaps nontraditional, less rigid methods and be willing to change our thinking habits based on the realities of the world.

Heath's "Ethnography in Education: Defining the Essential"

Ethnography derives from anthropology because it studies "human behavior in cross-cultural perspective" (33).

What are the essentials of ethnograhpy? It "describes the ways of living of a social group." This concept coincides with Egan-Robertson and Willet's description of the goal of ethnography.

"By becoming a participant in the social group, an ethnographer attempts to record and describe the overt, manifest, and explicit behaviors and values and tangible items of culture," state Heath.

My question is: If the goal is to be a non-judgmental researcher, how can an ethnographer possibly be objective in his/her description, selection, and interpretation of data? How can we as humans refrain from bringing in our own value systems into our understanding of a group's way of doing things? How is that possible?

Another point Heath makes is that "culture is holistic and ethnographers place their descriptions in the context of larger purposes" (34).

Yes, but how can a local communitiy's way of living or doing things be a representation of an entire culture? What about cultures within a culture? Subcultures within a community?

My Reflections on Egan-Robertson and Willet's article "Students as Ethnographers, Thinking, and Doing Ethnography"

How is ethnographic research related to sociolinguistic inquiry?

Sociolinguistic studies look into the ways in which people use language in a variety of social contexts, as well different variations of a language, such as African American English, and examine the ways in which such dialects are considered inferior and improper to use compared to Standard American English. Sociolinguistic research has shown that "nondominant
dialects are rule-governed, systematic" (4).

Sociolinguistic ethnography is a term for the ethnography of communication.

Some key issues of this article are as follows:

Ethnography has three goals: 1) "to describe in detail and interpret the cultural life of particular social groups; 2) to contribute to our general knowledge about the kinds of life-worlds humans create and the nature of the cultural processes operating to create these worlds, and 3) to help people imagine and create better worlds"

Ethography has three characteristics: 1) "it is holistic, contextual, and comparative; 2) it is systematic, but uses multiple, nonstandard, and recursive methods; and 3) it elicits the group member view of reality."

My question is: How does a group member's view of reality can be a true representation of what reality actually is?

My Thoughts on Agar's Ethnography Description

I found Agar's description of ethnography quite interesting and enlightening actually, perhaps because I have never thought of ethnography as a discipline that relies on observing "local particulars" (4858). Does this mean that an ethnographer observes a community or specific group of people and then applies the findings to a broader domain or society of which the observed community is a part?

How do the cultural practices of a marginalized group fit in with our understanding of a culture as a unified entity?

My understanding of ethnography was that of a social science that studies different cultures as a whole. Prior to reading this article, I thought ethnography was a branch of traditional science, involving both qualitative and quantitative research, dependent and independent variables, and controlled, or structured, environments, null hypotheses.

Some of the key issues that I thought were important for laying a foundation for ethnographic research as a separate and valid methodology were perhaps the differences between ethnography and traditional science. The former, as Agar states, is an adaptable research process, dynamic, and continuously changing, whereas traditional science is more structured and rigid, linear, and relies on universal laws.

Another aspect of Ethnography is that it is "both a science and a humanity. It is related to the humanities, such as philosophy, history, journalism, and second-language learning. Yet it also deals with issues related to social sciences, such as sociology, psychology, economics, and political science" (4858).