Education In Modern Society
Provenzo Chapter Two:
Schools as Cultural Institutions
“
A person should be just cultured
enough to be able to look with
suspicion upon culture
.”
Schools: cultural institutions
• Culture
:
(T.S. Eliot):All the
Cultural eras:
Modern:
• European male social
and cultural tradition
Postmodern:
• Direct challenge to narrow
Western definition of
High culture:
Popular culture:
• Rock music, hamburgers,
Schools attempt to
introduce students to:
• most noble, meaningful of
human creation
• to respect culture
• to become functioning members of society
Evidence: high school mission statements:
“preparation for responsible living . . .”
Emile Durkheim observed:
• Education:
“Systematic
socialization
of young
Culture question:
• Whose culture is being passed on by schools?
Historically, the U.S. has been:
• Racist,
sexist,
discriminatory
Cultural capital:
• Curriculum reflects the realities of power and
influence within our culture.
Cultural capital
• The language
teachers use,
• the curricula they
employ,
Cultural capital
(Education distributes and legitimates certain forms of:
• knowledge • language • practices • values
• ways of talking • acting,
• moving, • dressing, • socializing.
Schools: not merely instructional sites,
Cultural capital
• Teachers: 85% Caucasian
• Students: 33% self report as “of color”
Education:
• Embodies specific values and
purposes.
• Not neutral or apolitical.
• Increased empowerment of under-represented groups has
characterized U.S. society over the last forty years.
Cultural conservatives
• Argue for a model of
literacy that focuses the
attention of children on a
common western cultural
heritage.
• E.D. Hirsch:
What Your
First (Second, Sixth
Cultural Conservatives argue:
• Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for the marginalized.
Western cannon:
• valuable body of knowledge
• not the only body of cultural
knowledge children need to
know
• Many of its assumptions need to
be challenged if we are to
Critical multiculturalists:
• Respect earlier insight.
Formal curriculum:
Hidden curriculum:
• Unintended outcomes, subtle
influences, and outcomes of
school.
• The many things which are
taught in school besides the
formal subject matter.
Null curriculum:
• The curriculum that does not exist
• Did not make the cut
• The hole in the middle of the doughnut
• Something that is there but does not exist
• What schools do not teach may be as important as what they do teach.
• Ignorance is not simply a neutral void;
• It has an important effect on the kinds of options one is able to consider, the alternatives one can examine, and the
perspectives from which one can view a situation or problem. • If one of the purposes of schooling is to foster wisdom,
• “On the rare occasion that someone introduced
another (non-Western) tradition, I dismissed it
as secondary—as not holding up to the
substance of the works of the Western cannon.
Much of what I
understood
about the world
was the result of what I had not been taught.”
Resistance theory and learning:
• Students rejecting the traditional curriculum • not because they are not
smart enough to succeed in the work,
• but because they see this education as not
representing their family or cultural values.
• For many disadvantaged students, success in school means a type of forced
Critical pedagogy:
• (from pedagogy—the work or function of a teacher)
• Understanding the role of education in the culture in which it functions;
• Concerned with the realities of what goes on in the classroom;
• The connections between the school and the society, media, families, and the society education serves.
• A pedagogy that rejects the notion of culture as an artifact immobilized in the image of a storehouse.
• What is taught more often than not reflects traditions of power, authority, and domination in the culture.
• Effective teaching must take into account the fact that education,
pedagogy, teaching, and instruction are cultural and political acts.
Critical pedagogy:
• Developing pedagogical practices informed by an
ethical stance that contests racism, sexism, class
exploitation, and other dehumanizing and
Critical pedagogy:
• related to border crossing
• to promote pedagogical practices that offer the possibilities for schools to become places students and teachers can become engaged in critical thinking and ethical reflection about what it
means to bring a wider variety of
cultures into dialogue with each other, to theorize about cultures in the plural, within, rather than outside antagonistic relations of domination and
• Who creates knowledge? • Who is empowered by it?
• How are different groups subordinated, marginalized, and excluded in U.S. education and culture?
• What are the possibilities for resistance?
• What are the possibilities for achieving a more just and equitable society through the act of teaching (and
learning)?
Discussion questions
:
Can you think of examples of cultures
competing with each other in your
community?
Discussion questions
:
Discussion questions
: CPS
discussion
J. What are the good things about
Discussion questions
: CPS
definition, then discussion
Your CPS responder
• Registering online
• Uses for our class
• Piloting this for
course
Interstate New Teacher Assessment
and Support Consortium (INTASC)
• Ten standards or principles
• Ten entries assigned for the entire semester • Compiled in a professional portfolio
• Handed in one week before final
• Create one entry for each standard or principle
• You may start with any principle which interests you from your reading
• Samples available for reviewing: describe, analyze, reflect
• Mnemonic devices for memorizing these—test
