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CHAPTER SEVEN. THE CLASSROOM ECOLOGY OF CULTURE AND LANGUAGE
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CHAPTER SEVEN THE CLASSROOM ECOLOGY OF CULTURE AND LANGUAGE The culture into which an individual is born stresses the certainty of his potentialities and suppresses others, and it acts selectively, favoring the individuals who are best endowed with the potentialities preferred in the culture and discriminating against those with alien tendencies. In this way the culture standardizes the organization of the emotions of individuals. —Gregory Bateson, Naven A growing ethnographic research literature has identified instances of cultural incompatibility between dominant mainstream culture and the cultural set represented by urban African American children. Although this research has provided examples of cultural incompatibilities that depress academic achievement , the conception of cultural incompatibility is an insufficient explanation for formulating pedagogical theory that will reverse the negative educational outcomes for African American learners. What is needed, and that has been our purpose thus far in this book, is to create a theory of pedagogy which articulates culturally-responsive, developmentally-appropriate, and pedagogically powerful teaching and learning practices for African American children situated in urban public schools. In terms of culture and school practices, there is a question of balance that has to be resolved. That balance concerns what cultural resources from home and community can be productively incorporated with school practices to create a new culture of achievement and development. But effective practice does not lie in the bifurcation of, or balance between, African American culture versus mainstream culture. Rather, the ecology of cultural practices emerging from home, school, and heritages of people is the issue of balance to be resolved . The responsibilities and effectiveness of a teacher are defined, in part, by the pervasive influence of language and culture on classroom activities. How should we think about culture as it applies to the education of African American youngsters? As the work of C. A. Bowers and David Flinders (1990) has shown, thinking of the classroom as an ecology of language and cultural patterns is particularly important for effective work with African American children. Cultural patterns of communication from the Africanist tradition are important foundations upon which to build learning experiences for African American children. This chapter develops the African-centered pedagogical theory further and discusses the means by which teachers can develop and draw on their capacity to read these cultural patterns, and incorporate them into their instructional practices with African American children. In our earlier discussion of cultural values, I distinguished the Western tradition , with its valuation of a mind-body dualism, from an African-centered view of mind-body holism. Recall that the Euro-American value of dualism is the epistemological belief that a person’s ideas, beliefs, and intellect are autonomous of the body and essentially disconnected from that person’s lived experience , and, by default, from sociocultural context. This cultural value is the foundation upon which the traditions of both European and American education devalue lived experience of African American people. Witness the myriad of instances in education such as the “affective domain” and “cognitive” domain dichotomy in curriculum, and the division of rationality and affect in learning styles formulations and “brain research.” In this chapter I examine what it means to create a figured world of Black achievement by incorporating a new value system in a system of effective teaching that is also centered in the system of values and perspectives that already exist in school contexts. To do this, we need to recall the previously described three domains of meaning that are involved in this discussion of learning community: 1. The intrapersonal venue concerning what we see as important to the development of individuals on the microsystemic level; 2. The interpersonal realm concerning what we value for the development and sustenance of human systems (including the family, community and other social networks on the mesosystemic level; 3. The cultural symbolic venue incorporating the world of culturally and politically defined meanings of a people on the macrosystemic level. I appropriated the notions of figured world from Holland et. al. (1998) and community of practice from Lave (1988) for thinking about how these three domains of meaning come together in the construction of an Africancentered pedagogy. The notion of a community of practice is, as I have discussed earlier, a fairly specific theoretical framework proposed by Jean Lave 116 AFRICAN-CENTERED PEDAGOGY [3.239.57.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:45 GMT) and Etienne Wenger. The reader will recall from earlier discussion that the social learning theory and activity theory underlying the notion of community of practice...