Culture, Relevance, and Schooling: Exploring Uncommon Ground

177 Pages·2011·3.348 MB·English

by  Lisa Scherff, Karen Spector, Dorothy E. Aguilera-Black Bear, Carolyn Albright, Angela Calabrese Barton, Corey Drake, Miguel Manter, Kenan Metzger, Joshua I. Newman, Nadjwa E. L. Norton, Alfred Tatum, Ryan King-White, Charnita V. West, Kristien Zenkov

Culture, Relevance,
and Schooling
Exploring Uncommon Ground
Edited by Lisa Scherff
and Karen Spector
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD EDUCATION
A division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham (cid:129) New York (cid:129) Toronto (cid:129) Plymouth, UK
99778811660077009988888811__pprriinntt..iinnddbb ii 11//1177//1111 77::0044 AAMM
Published by Rowman & Littlefield Education
A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
http://www.rowmaneducation.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2011 by Lisa Scherff and Karen Spector
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scherff, Lisa, 1968-
Culture, relevance, and schooling : exploring uncommon ground / Lisa Scherff and
Karen Spector.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60709-888-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60709-889-8 (pbk. : alk.
paper) — ISBN 978-1-60709-890-4 (electronic)
1. Education—Social aspects—United States. 2. Education—Parent participation—
United States. 3. Critical pedagogy—United States. I. Spector, Karen. II. Title.
LC191.4.S34 2011
306.430973—dc22 2010043443
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Foreword The Legitimacy of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy:
Resolved or Unresolved v
Alfred W. Tatum
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction Spatial, Discursive, and Embodied Borders 1
Karen Spector and Lisa Scherff
Vignette Making Culture Visible through Experience
and Understanding 5
Kenan L. Metzger
1 Collective Cultural Relevancy through Hybrid
Communities of Practice 11
Angela Calabrese Barton and Corey Drake
2 Seeing Relevance: Using Photography to Understand How
School, Curricula, and Pedagogies Matter to Urban Youth 39
Kristien Zenkov
3 Expanding Notions of Culturally Responsive Education with
Urban Native Youth: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy for
Equity and Social Justice 65
Dorothy E. Aguilera-Black Bear
4 Weaving Spiritualities into Culturally Responsive Pedagogies 85
Nadjwa E. L. Norton
5 Staying Fat: Moving Past the Exercise-Industrial-Complex 103
Joshua I. Newman, Carolyn Albright, and Ryan King-White
iii
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iv Contents
6 Putting “Culturally Relevant” into Professional Development 125
Charnita V. West
7 Overcoming (Under)Lying Assumptions: Approaching
Language Education from a Freirean Perspective 141
Miguel Mantero
Index 151
About the Editors 157
About the Contributors 159
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Foreword
The Legitimacy of Culturally Relevant
Pedagogy: Resolved or Unresolved
Alfred W. Tatum, University of Illinois at Chicago
I penned the following poem on a Sunday evening following a dinner con-
versation during which I was asked to generate an oral script to convince
teachers that having students write for their lives is a legitimate educational
practice. I refused to provide a script devoid of urgency and connected to the
status quo. Instead, I wrote
Its odd shape stared at me
Seeming bothered by my troubled stance
And strange position
In a place reserved for rocks and losers
I was out of place for sure
Not knowing exactly how I ended up here
But the rock tempted me to talk
Sharing a conversation reserved for a gOD
I had long since abandoned
Silly I know, but the rock opened its mouth
And asked, “What?”
I kneeled beside it and whispered my most sacred thoughts
“I am scared to go on.”
“Too weak to surrender.”
“Can you help me?”
That damn rock just stared at me
For six hours and fourteen minutes
Until the sun went down
I walked out of the desert never to return
With a rock that forced me to listen to my own voice
Renewed with a vision to find all that was lost
(“The Desert Rock”)
v
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vi Foreword
Reading the chapters in this volume reminded me of this poem and the
need for an unwavering commitment to protect the rights of children and
expand the vision of educators to embrace some form of pedagogy that yields
the most promising outcomes and addresses the nation’s most urgent needs.
What is less clear are the conversations and necessary action steps required
to move these pedagogies from the margins to a deep anchoring that governs
teaching, professional development, school/parent/community relationships,
and other educational-related practices.
Particularly striking was the breadth of the issues in this volume and
their associated framings within culturally relevant practices. Topics of
discussion include culturally relevant, “border” kinesiology, theoretical
forms of culturally relevant pedagogy, the relevance of spirituality, the
use of visual media, culturally relevant professional development, hybrid
communities of practice where “collective culturally relevant pedagogy” is
performed by teachers and parents, and responsive education with urban,
native youth.
While some chapters seem more urgent than others in terms of the im-
mediate need to address socially important issues, other chapters seem to
argue against a “pedagogical paralysis” that traps schooling within age-old
practices or modern-day limitations propagated by policy dictates.
Briefly, I want to address three broad questions that emerged as I read the
chapters:
1. What is the legitimacy of culturally relevant pedagogy?
2. What are the challenges and dilemmas of culturally relevant pedagogy?
3. What remains elusive about culturally relevant pedagogy?
It is important to note that I have framed my research and advocacy over
the past 14 years on instructional, curricular, and cultural-ecological variables
that speak to the educational needs of students from multiple contexts (Tatum
2000, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009).
More recently, I have become concerned about feelings of learned pow-
erlessness by administrators and teachers who are responsible for providing
a high-quality education to students of color, namely the students struggling
to navigate schools, and in some cases, struggling to navigate tenuous life
experiences precipitated by a wide range of factors that include, but are not
limited to, poverty, community destabilization, limited English proficiency
in predominantly English-speaking environments, and single-parent rearing.
These feelings of learned powerlessness, as I have stated elsewhere (Tatum
2009), are connected to the following:
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Foreword vii
1. E ducators not fully understanding the continually shifting experiences of
students of color in the United States and how to respond to these shifts
within schools ruled by stifling educational mandates and age-old tradi-
tions of curriculum.
2. E ducators not understanding or accepting historical forces and the residual
effects of race-based disenfranchisement and oppression and the inten-
tional suppression of identities of people of color perpetuated by White
hegemonic practices inside and outside of schools.
3. E ducators not understanding shifting educational policy mandates and the
resulting destabilization of many urban and rural centers.
4. E ducators not being aware of educational practices that have been, and
continue to be, effective with students of color.
As a result, many attempts by educators to advance the educational needs
of students of color have taken the “usual path,” that is, using pedagogical
practices that have failed to close the gaps between academic high perfor-
mance and academic low performance on standardized and informal mea-
sures. In short, educational practices have been woefully inadequate for many
students of color and White students.
The inadequacies are painfully clear when examining disparities in ACT
and SAT scores, the attainment of bachelor’s degrees from U.S. colleges and
universities among the ethnic groups, housing patterns, high school drop-
out rates, poverty rates, and incarceration rates among African Americans,
American Indians, Latinos, and other ethnic groups.
The usual path’s approach, although well intentioned, has suffered from
underestimation and oversimplification in at least three major areas:
1. Pedagogy is rooted in the idea that all children are the same with a failure
to accept that all children are not the same and do not receive the same
treatment in schools.
2. U ndergraduate and graduate education programs do not sufficiently pre-
pare administrators and teachers to understand the interdisciplinary nature
of providing a legitimate education for students of color with the peda-
gogical know-how to avoid failing larger numbers of students of color.
3. T he language used to discuss the education of students of color often ig-
nores the broader context of their lives. For example, the field of reading
is trapped behind productive catchphrases that function as politically ex-
pedient clarion calls. Phrases such as “every teacher is a reading teacher,”
“close the racial reading achievement gap,” and “no child left behind”
are often used; however, pessimism related to teaching many students of
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viii Foreword
color, namely African American and Latino children—the largest sub-
groups of students of color in U.S. schools—continues to grow despite the
prevalent use of these catchphrases.
LAYING OUT THE LANDSCAPE
Three major trends shape the landscape for a needed culturally relevant
pedagogy (CRP). They are (1) the rapidly and continually shifting demo-
graphics in the United States, (2) an ahistorical approach to education that
fails to pay attention to the rich historical precedent that exists for educating
peoples of color, and (3) the difficulties of penetrating educational policy
in ways that yield serious, systematic efforts for advancing the education of
students of color who enter schools wrapped in their cultural and linguistic
cloths.
The outcome of not addressing these trends is an educational system in the
United States that remains steeped in a Westernized tradition and an over-
reliance of scholarship conducted and informed by a Westernized tradition.
This steeping and overreliance contribute to a de-racialized, de-languaged,
de-ethnicized, de-genderized, de-sexualized, and a de-legitimate view of edu-
cation for students who enter educational spaces with their multiple identities.
The demography of the United States continues to change. We now live
in a nation with more than 29 million foreign-born citizens. In 2006, 12.5
percent of the U.S. population was foreign born compared to 6.2 percent in
1980. Eighteen states have a population of more than 10 percent of foreign-
born citizens. This compares to only five states in 1990.
California, the state with the largest foreign-born population, is at 27 per-
cent, with more than 9.9 million foreign-born residents. Hispanics and Lati-
nos continue to be the fastest growing population. The Hispanic and Latino
population grew 53 percent between 1980 and 1990 and another 58 percent
between 2000 and 2009. Between 1980 and 2006, the number of Hispanics
nearly tripledgrowing from 14.6 million to 43.2 million. African Americans

and Latinos are now 27.9 percent of the U.S. population representing more
than one-quarter of the total population.
With more than 55 million students enrolled in public and private schools
in the United States and 3.3 million teachers, it is inconceivable that any ap-
proach to education that fails to account for cultural, historical, linguistic,
sociological, and psychological factors of the students will be effective. A
failure to become astute about these factors and how they impact educational
outcomes becomes inimical not only to students of color, but to the nation and
our national imagination as a whole.
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Foreword ix
THE LEGITIMACY OF CULTURAL RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY
What makes pedagogy legitimate? To answer this question, I borrow from Hill-
iard (1998), who characterizes a legitimate education as one in which teachers
1. Expect and demand excellence from children.
2. Conceptualize education as an indispensable prerequisite for liberation.
3. Engage students in a reawakening that focuses on deep thought.
4. S hape an agenda for transformation, self-acceptance, and self-determination.
These historical orientations of a legitimate education, in this case for
children of African descent, stand in stark contrast to modern-day iterations
of educational outcomes that focus on efficiency characterized by meeting
national norms or education standards devoid of cultural significance and
meaning. Efficiency (cid:2) legitimacy. Many traditional educators question ef-
ficiency whereas culturally relevant educators question legitimacy.
The authors of the manuscripts provide strong foundational knowledge and
theoretical knowledge for CRP. It becomes clear from the chapters that
1. Learners view themselves as powerful or powerless according to how they
are positioned in the classrooms by the instructors and their peers.
2. Teachers’ beliefs and approaches distinctly shape the identities of students.
3. I dentities of students come to life as they are involved in meaning-driven
discourse in authentic contexts.
4. Using students’ and families’ sociocultural histories and cultural resources
will empower them to negotiate educational contexts.
5. F ocusing on a critical social consciousness will lead students to see the
importance of traditional academic achievement.
One of the major challenges for proponents of culturally relevant pedagogy is
providing more illustrative examples to penetrate the educational discourse and
interrupt the status quo. These chapters make a positive step in that direction.
CHALLENGES AND DILEMMAS OF
CULTURALLY RELEVANT PEDAGOGY
The authors provide a host of challenges for a culturally relevant pedagogy.
The challenges, writ large, are ones that require some form of reconciliation,
both practical and intellectual. It becomes clear from reading the chapters that
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