Language, Culture, and Teaching

Critical Perspectives

Sonia Nieto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315465678
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Distinguished multiculturalist Sonia Nieto speaks directly to current and future teachers in this thoughtful integration of a selection of her key writings with creative pedagogical features. Offering information, insights, and motivation to teach students of diverse cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds, examples are included throughout to illustrate real-life dilemmas about diversity that teachers face in their own classrooms; ideas about how language, culture, and teaching are linked; and ways to engage with these ideas through reflection and collaborative inquiry. Designed for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level students and professional development courses, each chapter includes critical questions, classroom activities, and community activities suggesting projects beyond the classroom context.

Language, Culture, and Teaching

• explores how language and culture are connected to teaching and learning in educational settings;

• examines the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of language and culture to understand how these contexts may affect student learning and achievement;

• analyzes the implications of linguistic and cultural diversity for classroom practices, school reform, and educational equity;

• encourages practicing and preservice teachers to reflect critically on their classroom practices, as well as on larger institutional policies related to linguistic and cultural diversity based on the above understandings; and

• motivates teachers to understand their ethical and political responsibilities to work, together with their students, colleagues, and families, for more socially just classrooms, schools, and society.

Changes in the Third Edition:

This edition includes new and updated chapters, section introductions, critical questions, classroom and community activities, and resources, bringing it up-to-date in terms of recent educational policy issues and demographic changes in the U.S. and beyond. The new chapters reflect Nieto's current thinking about the profession and society, especially about changes in the teaching profession, both positive and negative, since the publication of the second edition of this text.

Part I
Setting the Groundwork

As you saw in the introductory chapter, a number of foundational elements are crucial to understanding the links among language, literacy, and culture. These include the learners’ status and experiences, the complex nature of identity, the role of the community as a necessary element in learning, and the sociopolitical context in which education takes place. Consequently, understanding education means learning to look at schooling in a broader way than has traditionally been the case.

The chapters that follow build on the theme of the interconnectedness of learning. Each chapter defines in more detail some of the basic elements generally alluded to in the Introduction. In Chapter 1, I reflect on the purpose of public schools in an era of rigid accountability and functionalism. I consider questions such as: What are the values and attitudes that should be at the heart of a public education? What are the implications of defining these values and attitudes? What is the link between public education and democracy?

Chapter 2 is from my book, Affirming Diversity, a text widely used in teacher education courses around the country and beyond. In this chapter, I offer a comprehensive definition of multicultural education that connects it with school reform, equity, and social justice. To steer clear of shallow understandings of multicultural education, I focus instead on structural and systemic considerations including racism and other disabling values and perspectives, as well as societal and school policies and practices.

In 2015, the National Academy of Education (NAEd) asked its members to contribute essays for a volume to commemorate its fifty years. As the premier learned society of education scholars and researchers in the nation, the NAEd has an important role to play in exploring and understanding education in our society. For this essay, reprinted here as Chapter 3, I revisit a journal article I had written for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Harvard Educational Review (2005). In that article, I suggested that the major educational project of the twentieth century was the expansion of rights and opportunities for a broader range of students. Specifically, I explored three movements that helped define this ideal: desegregation, multicultural education, and bilingual education.

1 What Is the Purpose of Schools?

Reflections on Education in an Age of Functionalism

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. educational system has been focused on issues of accountability like never before. This chapter suggests that we may have lost our way in terms of how we define education. Instead of emphasizing rubrics and test scores, this chapter considers not only what is taught, but how, under what conditions, and, in the end, why we teach at all. In doing so, the chapter asks readers to think about the very purpose of schools in a democratic society, a purpose that must be based on social justice if we are to fulfill our promise of equal and quality education for all students, regardless of station or rank. Five implications for teaching with a social justice perspective are described.

Writing about the purpose of schools at a time when accountability, standardization, and privatization are the common discourse seems almost a frill, a throwback to an old-fashioned and romantic time when public education was a topic dominated by talk of democracy and equality. It brings us back to when people spoke of education as serving the common good, and when schools were defined as “the great equalizer” (Mann, 1868). Even though schools never did realize that ideal, it was at least an ideal worth believing in.

Who talks about such things anymore? The conventional talk these days is much more functional, even mean-spirited: It is about adequate yearly progress (ayp) and ubiquitous high-stakes tests for children; about multiplying the roadblocks for those wishing to teach; about vouchers and charter schools; and about deregulating the teaching profession and eliminating schools and colleges of education. Public education, in essence, has been hijacked by a corporate, market-driven agenda, and many of us who disagree with this agenda are left to wonder what happened to the nobler goals of education.

What should the purpose of schools be in the current climate? Let me set the framework for what follows by quoting from the words of an educator who said far more eloquently than I what must be the basic educational goal of a democracy:

The education that I propose includes all that is proper for all men and it is one which all … who are born into this world should share. … Our first wish is that all … be educated fully into full humanity, not any one individual, not a few, not even many, but all … together and singly, young and old, rich and poor, of high and lowly birth, men and women—in a world whose fate it is to be born human beings, so that at least the whole of the human race become educated men of all ages, all conditions, both sexes and all nations.

(Comenius, 1968)

These words are remarkable because they were written not by Horace Mann or John Dewey (although they certainly could have been), but by John Amos Comenius in The Great Didactic, first published in 1657. I begin with them for two reasons. First, they make clear that the goal of an equitable and high quality education for all students is neither a modern invention nor a strictly American one. It has been a cherished ideal (and an elusive reality) for many generations in many societies, our own included. Second, I do not wish to be thought of as a naïve, “pie-in-the-sky” optimist with no understanding of the reality of our schools today, characterized as they are by racism, other manifestations of inequality, violence, bureaucracy, and apathy. These conditions are as clear to me as they are to anyone else. But I want to place myself squarely in the company of those who, in spite of these conditions, envision a world in which education can be exciting, empowering, and safe.

In considering the purpose of schools, we need to begin with the vision we have for our youth and society in this new millennium. What should we teach? Why? What knowledge, skills, attitudes, and aptitudes do students need to develop? But before we say what we want students to know and become, we need to first ask ourselves what we think they are capable of knowing and becoming. As we attempt to answer the age-old curriculum question of “What knowledge is of most worth?”, we need to also ask Paulo Freire’s (1970) fundamental question about whose interests we are serving through the curriculum we select. As we determine what schools are for, we also need to ask what role we think young people should have in improving, and not simply replicating, our society.

The vision that I am proposing is predicated not on a list of facts that will somehow miraculously transform youngsters into literate and intelligent beings, but on a broader conception of learning. Lists of “cultural literacy” items (Hirsch, 1987) notwithstanding, we know too well that there is no magic curriculum that will make young people truly educated (Provenzo, 2005). There are only what Deborah Meier has called “habits of mind” (Meier, 1995) that we can try to promote. These habits of mind can help young people become critical thinkers in the true sense of the word: to understand that knowledge is never neutral but always reflects a particular point of view; to learn where and how to get information and how best to use it; to practice reflection and critique; and to discover how to create and transform knowledge for the betterment and benefit of others. Conversely, in the United States, historically, and even recently, we have witnessed many examples of capable and talented individuals engaging in morally repugnant actions: using unwitting African American inmates as guinea pigs for syphilis experiments near the beginning of the twentieth century; subjecting unsuspecting victims to plutonium from the 1940s to the 1970s; robbing people of their hard-earned savings through massive fraud; and too many others to name. These are chilling reminders that one can be technically and scientifically brilliant but ethically bankrupt. Therefore, simply assuring that all students graduate from high school with high levels of scientific or mathematical literacy, for example, is not enough.

If I had to come up with a list of suggestions for the kind of content that students should be taught, I would probably include broad-based literacy, the advanced sciences, a heavy dose of the arts, the full range of mathematics, technology, and vocational skills for all students (not just those going on to a trade), intensive health and physical education, practical skills for living in an advanced technological society and safeguarding our environment, and at least a second language for all students. I would also urge that these be taught with a multicultural perspective that is more reflective of our reality than the current largely monocultural curriculum. I would want to assure that assessment processes are intimately connected to real and consequential knowledge, not to minutiae or biased procedures that further discourage and punish the most educationally disadvantaged youth and penalize the most creative teachers by reducing them to test givers.

But focusing on content alone is a losing proposition because knowledge is always changing, always in flux. What should not change are the kinds of attitudes and values about learning at the heart of the purpose of public education. To the extent that we consider the question of curriculum content without an equally rigorous exploration of the context of education—that is, the organizational structures and practices and policies that can either enhance or limit educational achievement—it will be an incomplete and ultimately frustrating exercise. For example, without tackling the central but far more difficult and sensitive issues of stratification and inequity in funding, educational organization, and educators’ perceptions of and interactions with students and communities, we are missing a crucial opportunity to rethink not only what we teach and learn, but under what conditions, and how and why we do so.

We need to consider questions such as whether our schools are currently organized based on a Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest. Do they have rigid ability grouping that dooms some students while overly benefiting others, often for their entire academic lives? How do schools organize learning, and are these organizational decisions based on the assumption that all learning can take place in 50-minute time blocks? Is the funding that schools receive commensurate with the needs of students? Do students’ race and social class too often predict the quality of the education they receive? Do disciplinary policies unfairly favor some students over others? Are tests accurate indicators of learning, or do they sometimes serve simply as convenient barriers to higher education and enhanced life options? Are some students considered to have exceptional gene pools and others to be culturally deprived? Are poverty and speaking a native language other than English thought to be insurmountable obstacles to high levels of learning?

I have taught students and teachers for many years, and in that time I have given a great deal of thought to what schools should be about. I have come to the conclusion that no program, set of guidelines, instructional strategies, curriculum, or even educational philosophy is worthwhile unless it takes into account two primary goals:

• to provide all students of all backgrounds the opportunity to learn through an equitable and high quality education;

• to help students become critical and productive members of our democratic society.

In the remainder of this chapter, I address five specific implications that derive from these goals.

In order to provide all students with an equal and high quality education, we need to begin with the belief that all students are capable and worthy of learning to high levels of achievement.

Many young people cope on a daily basis with complex and pressing institutionalized barriers to an excellent education and a good quality of life. These include poverty, violence, racism, abuse, families in stress, and lack of health care and proper housing, among others. In addition, increasing numbers of young people live in female-headed households, have limited proficiency in English, and arrive at the schoolhouse door without basic academic skills. It is the responsibility of schools to teach them all because in our society schools have historically been charged with providing an equal education to all students, not just to those who happen to be middle-class and English-speaking, and who live with two parents. In the current mean-spirited discourse surrounding public education, the conditions in which poor students come to school often become a rationale for not having high expectations of them. In too many cases, rather than provide those students who most need it with a rigorous and exciting curriculum, they are instead tested yearly to see how well they have learned the conventions of test taking and the basic structure of the five-paragraph essay. These may be necessary skills for them to learn, but they are certainly not enough.

What often stands in the way of learning are the attitudes concerning what children living in difficult conditions are capable of doing: If they do not speak English, it’s as if they do not speak at all; if they live in poverty, they are treated as if their minds are also impoverished; and the darker their skin, the lower their intelligence is thought to be. Numerous research studies, on the other hand, have reaffirmed that what teachers know and do, and what they believe their students are capable of learning, make a difference (Haberman, 1995; National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1...