Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents

6. Understanding the Battles of Literacy and Culture: Conflicts and Complexities

CHAPTER SIX Understanding the Battles of Literacy and Culture Conflicts and Complexities Culture now became a terrain inhabited by lived struggles and conflicting levels of determinacy. —Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition In the preceding chapters, I have presented multilayered hetereoglossic voices—the teachers’ and the parents’ different perspectives, different understandings, and different instructional approaches as well as the children’s different home and school experiences. All these different voices contribute to our understanding of the “battles” between the Canadian school and the Chinese families. In the description of the teachers’ and parents’ perspectives, I examined their different understandings of the social context, Chinese and English literacy education, and parental involvement at home and in school. With respect to the experiences of the four grade 1/2 students, I noted that the barriers to their learning were the result of school, home, and social factors, especially the different cultural beliefs between teachers and parents and misunderstanding of these differences . In the description of the grade 4/5 students’ experiences, I revealed that the children were subject to a greater cultural mismatch between school and home, and the cultural clashes were detrimental to their academic success. Thus, the battles not only shaped the teachers ’ instructional practices at school and the parents’ practices at 183 home, but also the interactions with and perceptions of each other’s practices. These different practices in turn resulted in the children’s distinct social realities at home and in school as early as first grade. In this sense, cultural conflicts had divided the home and the school into separate spheres and erected powerful barriers between them, with the parents and teachers hewing to their separate roles with only minimum contact with each other across the family-school boundary (Ryan & Adams, 1995). However, cultural conflicts were not the only battle between school and home. The teachers, parents, and students’ perspectives and experiences were also complicated by the “multivocal, multiaccented nature of human subjectivity and the genuinely polysemic nature of minority/majority relations in education and society” (McCarthy, 1993, p. 337). That is, the battles between the teachers’ and parents’ different perspectives and their consequences were not only cultural, but also sociopolitical. As Walsh (1991a) points out, “perspectives of and approaches to literacy are shaped by theoretical and ideological concerns which extend beyond the classroom walls. These concerns are related to beliefs and assumptions about the nature of knowledge, of people (i.e., teachers and students), and of experience and to the relations of power and of social and cultural control which these beliefs and assumptions both construct and incorporate” (p. 9). In this sense, the school and home had become “contradictory agencies engaged in specific forms of moral and political regulation” in which students were offered “selected representations, skills, social relations, and values that presuppose particular histories and ways of being in the world” (Giroux, 1991, p. xiii). In addition to the cultural and political differences, the battles between the Canadian teachers and the Chinese parents were also complicated by several social and linguistic factors. For the Chinese parents, these factors included the contexts of reception, their own proficiencies in English literacy, and their own immigrant status. For the teachers, these factors included dealing with a large number of students (and parents) with limited English language proficiency from one ethnic background. In this chapter, the meaning of these cultural conflicts and complexities is examined. I discuss the nature of different cultural values concerning literacy education, the underlying political nature of these cultural differences, social class and parental involvement, and the consequences of these differences and battles on the children’s school achievement. 184 Culturally Contested Pedagogy Cultural Differences and Literacy Education: Understanding the Battles between the School and the Parents As described in chapter 2, literacy is a sociocultural discourse. Because it is culturally laden, people of different cultures have different conceptions of what literacy is and how it should be taught. Looking at literacy as having this embedded and social nature, B. Street (1995) suggests that Western notions of literacy or school are just one form of literacy among many. As described in previous chapters, the two Euro-Canadian teachers’ notions of literacy and its instruction were fundamentally different from those of the Chinese parents, and underlying these differences, there were inherent power struggles between the two divergent cultural practices. Literacy and Literacy Instruction An analysis of the differences...