S.

Self

LD5151-Annotated Bibliography

Aikenhead, G. (2001). Integrating Western and Aboriginal sciences: Cross-cultural science teaching. Research in Science Education, 31(3), 337355. A professor of science education at the University of Saskatchewan, the author presents a critique of what is termed scientism: the ethnocentric enshrining of Western ideas about the objectivity and universality of science as the only valid way of knowledge and a dogma that is communicated as a kind of hidden curriculum during the teaching of science in Western classrooms. For students from foreign, especially non-Western, cultures, this enculturation through science education poses great problems. For Aboriginal students separated from school science curricula by their worldviews, identities, and mother tongues, the traditional Western approach to science education leads to alienation. When schooling functions to enshrine one culture over others, it becomes an instrument of power to perpetuate social and racial iniquity in society. Students must be allowed to develop personally constructed understandings of the text through dialogic interchange. Aikenhead urges a cultural approach to science education that treats learning science for Aboriginals as a cross-cultural event. The teacher must be a culture-brokering teacher who makes that border-crossing explicit and possible. The author initiated an R&D project to explore how to make this idea feasible, producing teaching materials for science curricula for Aboriginals with the input of Aboriginal elders. Since the notion of a unifying spirituality characterizes Aboriginal epistemology, the science classroom in this model cannot adhere to the traditional separation of science from spirituality that so often accompanies Western science curricula. NB: For the author, the term Aboriginal denotes all tribal peoples indigenous to their areas throughout the world. The article provides a useful exploration of an uncommon perspective on education that could be seen by many as a form of political correctness. Aikenhead, G. S. (1997). Toward a First Nations cross-cultural science and technology curriculum. Science Education, 81(2), 217 238. Aikenhead presents many of the same ideas as in the 2001 article. Here, he concentrates initially on presenting Western science as a subculture with characteristics that contrast significantly with the cultural perspectives of Native Americans. At base, Aboriginal knowledge of nature emphasizes a subjective experience that celebrates mystery over and against the Western perspective that enthrones reductionism and demystification as the prime desiderata. The Western science classroom serves as the locus for dissemination of both the subculture of science and the majority culture of the country in which it is located. This can be disruptive for Aboriginal students. In the model Aikenhead proposes, one way in which the instructor would make border crossings explicit for students is to consciously point out the ways in which Western science has mischaracterized native ways of knowledge. Aikenhead believes this new approach and perspective can benefit Western learners as well from the new insight comparison of the Western ways of knowledge with the Aboriginal ways would bring about. The article poses significant questions for the degree to which our cultural values are tied up in our thought processes and bodies of knowledge. Chinchen, D. (1997). The return of the fourth R to education: Relationships. Missiology, 25(3), 321335. A missionary for 20 years in Africa where he taught in and directed the African Bible Colleges in Malawi and Liberia, the author maintains that what is, to appearances, a Western formal educational system in Africa is a veneer over a traditional, informal, collectivist system. The principles and values of the native culture invade Western schools and colleges in nonWestern settings. One of the chief areas of disconnect between the two ideologies is collectivism versus individualism. Crosscultural educators must thus negotiate the sometimes turbulent border area between them. One of the key ways in which the two approaches differ is in the student-teacher relationship. Traditional African societies tend to map the parent-child relationship onto many other social relations: for instance, teacher-student, governor-governed. Individuals coming from such a setting often have a relational cognitive style in that they seek to involve others, including the teacher, in their learning. They place great emphasis on the role of the teacher to nurture them and bring them along as a kind of fictive kinship. Thus the relationship is characterized by both dependency and reciprocity. One significant danger the teacher must negotiate in engaging in the collectivist system is the avoidance of paternalism. Paternalism prevents effective growth in the students and enslaves them in a state of permanent dependence on the teacher. Perhaps the characterization of African culture is overly reductionist and essentializing, though the author clearly speaks from personal experience. He offers very practical advice. Gutirrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher, 32(5), 1925. Professors of Education and Psychology in the University of California system, the authors explore the basic problem of how to characterize commonalities of learning approaches of individuals who are members of ethnic groups that historically have been underserved in U.S. schools. Rather than concentrating on all the ways in which members of these groups do not measure up to imposed standards, we should look at the cultural styles of learning such students may exhibit that differ from those of the dominant culture by whose standards they are judged less adequate. However, this cultural styles approach has, in the past, been implemented in ways that are too static and attempt to pigeonhole students into categories rather than treating the individual as an individual. The problem has generally been the reification of minority learning styles that were assumed to remain constant over time and exist independently of context. There has also been a great deal of essentialism and reductionism in overgeneralizing group traits and abstracting them away from real individual behaviors. The authors urge a cultural-historical approach that tries to understand individuals history of involvement in different communities; individual development must be understood in a cultural and historical context. The focus is on the repertoires individuals have recourse

S. Self

LD5151-Annotated Bibliography

to in terms of language and ways of dealing with the world and on helping them select from their repertoires approaches to specific circumstances that are appropriate. This article provides a helpful warning against allowing intellectual constructs to eclipse the importance of individual variation. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American educational research journal, 32(3), 465 491. A professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin, the author proposes a culturally relevant theory of education. This approach arises out of the attempt to make teaching match the home and community cultures of students better, particularly those of minority students. Part of the approach is to bridge the cultu ral divide between the students home/community lives and those in the classroom by including aspects of their cultural environment in the instruction within the classroom. Many studies of cultural appropriateness have focused on microsocial explanations advocated by sociolinguists on the basis of research within small-scale communities. The other main approach has been the macrosocial perspective of cultural ecologists who situate African-American students struggle in education in the long history of race relations in this nation. The author advocates consideration of both micro- and macro-analyses to formulate pedagogical practice that seeks to help students affirm their cultural identity while still developing critical perspectives on social issues. After discussing the impossibility of a theoretical research and the conundrum of participant observation, the author describes a study in which she closely followed a group of eight teachers of predominantly African-American students in an economically underprivileged area in California for two years. One of the chief commonalities of approach in the teachers practice was to become a part of the students communities and to develop relationships. The three key aspects of the culturally relevant pedagogy argued for are: 1. Ability to develop students academically 2. Willingness to support cultural competence 3. Development of a sociopolitical or critical consciousness The author usefully discloses her bias as an African-American feminist and takes a viewpoint similar to the historian Howard Zinn on the notion of having the right kind of subjectivity. Li, J. (2002). Learning models in different cultures. New directions for child and adolescent development, 2002(96), 4564. A professor of education and human development at Brown University, the author contends that recent research on culture and learning shows that people from different cultures think about learning and achievement in fundamentally different ways. Different cultures define intelligence differently, placing emphasis on distinct aspects of competence important within each culture. Different cultures also emphasize different motivations for learning and attach importance to different measures of success. The author critiques past approaches to learning and achievement as being too etic and overly grounded in the Western cultural perspective. The author undertook a study to uncover cultural learning models among American and Chinese adults. She went about this by having bilinguals translate terms for learning between English and Chinese and then having other individuals free associate on those terms to create lists of terms related to learning. Cultural learning models are systems of meaning that cannot be reduced to simple or dichotomous notions of ability versus effort, success versus failure. The methodology of this study seems a little simplistic, though the table at the end summarizing the differences in terminology between English and Chinese is illuminating. Nagler, A., & Marton, F. (1996). Views on learning in different cultures. Comparing patterns in China and Uruguay. Anales de psicologa, 12(2), 123132. Written by three international scholars, this article reports the findings of two independent studies based on interview data trying to get at conceptions of learning among Chinese and Uruguayan students. The results showed that Chinese students emphasized learning as on-going, involving both mechanical and meaningful memorization which is itself a conscious act to secure what you have learned. Uruguayan students tended to see mental retention as a byproduct of learning and memorization as an impediment to understanding. This study dovetails nicely with Li (2002) and corroborates her characterization of the Chinese view of learning and education. Stankiewcz, K., & Zurek, A. (2009). Polish language course as a place to meet different cultures: Integration of language skills development with intercultural learning. In E. Czerka & M. Mechlinska-Pauli (Eds.), Teaching and learning in different cultures (pp. 196211). Gdansk, Poland: Gdansk Higher School of Humanities Press. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&ved=0CFIQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fw ww.urbanschools.org%2Fpdf%2Fcultural.identity.LETTER.pdf&ei=g9SaUJ3HBO6U0QX6IHwDw&usg=AFQjCNFdIpDG5nGTOV4CDRA_XjxYE-_Gyg&sig2=WNK39yQZYjP0X7aynUmHaw (accessed 7 November 2012). Written by two Polish scholars who specialize in language pedagogy, this article begins by noting that research into the experiences of foreign learners of Polish in Poland have shown that such students report feeling isolated during their studies and stays in Poland. The authors urge integrating intercultural education into courses of Polish language study. The approach assumes that part of developing communicative competence is developing cultural competence. They advocate active teaching methods involving role play, acting, discussion, and biographical learning. One goal is to transform the role of the native-speaker teacher from that of expert to facilitator/moderator and discussion partner. The authors share a list of game activities they have used in such approaches in the past with detailed information on how to implement and use them. Though the writing is a obviously that of non-native English speakers and, consequently, strikes the native English-speaking reader as odd at times, the

S. Self

LD5151-Annotated Bibliography

descriptions of the game activities are interesting and provide rich source material to draw on for communicative language teaching. Vasilomanolakis, K. (2009). Teaching and learning through storytelling in Greece. In E. Czerka & M. Mechlinska-Pauli (Eds.), Teaching and learning in different cultures (pp. 97113). Gdansk, Poland: Gdansk Higher School of Humanities Press.
Retrieved from http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&ved=0CFIQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.urbanschools.org%2Fpdf%2 Fcultural.identity.LETTER.pdf&ei=g9SaUJ3HBO6U0QX6-IHwDw&usg=AFQjCNFdIpDG5nGTOV4CDRA_XjxYE-_Gyg&sig2=WNK39yQZYjP0X7aynUmHaw (accessed 7 November 2012).

A trainer and teacher of English in Greece, the author relates the theoretical approaches behind and highlights from a series of workshops on storytelling in teaching English. Learning through storytelling situates students in a community of practice and encourages reflection on personal experience and background. There is a five-step approach to learning through story-telling: 1. Noticing = story-finding 2. Making sense = story-telling 3. Making meaning = story-expanding 4. Working with meaning = story-processing 5. Transformative learning = story-reconstructing The authors interest in and allegiance to storytelling as a learning technique is grounded in the Greek cultural heritage, especially that of Crete. He uses tales of exotic travels in Africa as a young man to excite his pupils and help them to integrate grammatical forms like correct use of tenses and passive voice into their growing English repertoires. He advocates the role of educator as storyteller and facilitator of student stories. The style of this book section is fairly informal, and the author writes with a typically Greek gusto, but the involvement of multiple generations and concentration on community story-telling provide an inspiring model. The five-step approach is especially nice. Vita, G. D. (2001). Learning styles, culture and inclusive instruction in the multicultural classroom: A business and management perspective. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 38(2), 165174. Written by a British professor of International Business Economics, this study uses Felder and Soloman s Index of Learning Styles to examine learning styles among students in a multicultural undergraduate class of international business management (43 of 68 students were international, representing 20 different nationalities). The study involved the students filling out the ILS questionnaire form during the first week of their term. The questionnaire seeks to identify the students preferred style of learning, whether active-reflective, sensing-intuitive, visual-verbal, or sequential-global. The results showed greater variation in learning styles among the international students than the British ones. The international students, for whom English is a second or third language, also showed marked preference for visual over verbal input as opposed to native students, who favored verbal input. The evidence makes a case for a multistyle teaching approach especially in multicultural educational settings. The author presents a model for inclusive instruction based on congruent customization where accounting for learning style variation is balanced against considerate mismatches between learning style and teaching styles so as to encourage students to gradually expand their individual learning style portfolio. This article provides hard data to support a fairly commonsense conclusion.