Howard (2003) gives an excellent rubric for educators to explore their own cultural influences and prejudices, asking them to reflect upon five points:
- Their own interactions with different cultural (and particularly racial) groups growing up
- The primary influences upon their perspective
- If they harbor any prejudices against people because of race
- How those prejudices might affect a member of said racial background
- If they create negative profiles of others, based on assumptions of their race or culture
He outlines this as a necessary step to both valuing and creating an effective and culturally sensitive pedagogy, with which I absolutely agree. However, I wish his discussion had been rounded beyond this rubric; once an educator has openly analyzed their own prejudices, how do they apply that knowledge?
Howard lays out a foundation for educators to neither diminish cultural influences, nor to normalize them, which led me to linger on situations where cultural traditions may diminish a learner’s success; in particular, I was struck by some of the factors beyond race that Howard mentions in passing, such as gender. Is it ever acceptable to “normalize” a cultural behavior to “middle-class, European American cultural values” (pp. 198), and how does an educator recognize, prioritize and navigate that situation?
As an example: Ennis (1999) gives the case study of a physical education class in an urban high school where female students were largely disengaged. In interviews, they noted being bullied or scapegoated by male students in team activities:
“I used to like to play sports with the boys…Now, in high school, they’re like maniacs or something…They throw the ball so hard you can’t catch it.”
“They call us lame. They say we’re not trying, but we are.”
“I don’t need boys yelling at me when I make a mistake.” (Ennis 1999, pp. 33)
A program called “Sport for Peace” was instituted in the classroom; this program intentionally avoided many of the tensions that rose in the traditional “team sports” model by creating teams of equally skilled students, focusing less upon rewarding skills and more upon conflict negotiation beyond force or violence.
This example illustrates the normalizing of two culturally influenced behaviors, attacking the expectations of women to be delicate and unathletic, and of men to be forceful or violent. However, this is done in the service of creating more equal opportunities for learners of both genders. A simplistic reading may equate this to a prioritization of the normative cultural expectation–that learners are equal in ability, regardless of their gender–over the prevalent cultural norm. However, this case study and its curricular solution represent a more complicated methodology and conclusion. With its emphasis on consensus building and peaceful reconciliation, “Sport for Peace” is a textbook example of his rubric in action. It gives students the opportunity to reflect upon their own cultural biases, as well as the influences of their community growing up; it allows students to examine prejudices of others they may be carrying based upon gender, and how those prejudices impact their targets. Additionally, if gives the students an agency of which Bourdieu would approve. In order to recognize your own power within a social structure, you must be able to recognize the structure itself, and this program gives learners an extraordinary power to discover and mediate cultural biases independently. And while it might not directly answer the question of priotizing conflicting cultural influences in a classroom, it does answer that the process of self-reflection, as Howard outlined, can lead to unexpected rewards for learners and educators alike.
Sources
Bourdieu, P. (1978). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In R. Brown (Ed.), Knowledge, Education and Cultural Changes (56-69). London: Harper & Row.
Ennis, C.D. (1999). Creating a culturally relevant curriculum for disengaged girls. Sports, Education and Society, 4, 31-49.
Howard, T. (2003). Relevant pedagogy: Ingredients for critical teacher reflection. Theory into Practice, 42(3), 195-202.
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