Rethinking culture in the pedagogy and practices of preservice teachers

Abstract

In this article, the author considers questions about culture and cultural identity which surfaced as student teachers in their full-time practicum in elementary classrooms engaged in efforts to learn about the communities of their students and to use culture in the classroom. This author argues that, in elementary classrooms, conceptions of culture can be limited to celebrations of holidays, heroes, ethnic festivals and food fairs which obscure the controversies and complexities about how cultural knowledge is formed and to what ends it is used. Drawing upon the work of cultural and literary critics as well as scholars writing about multicultural and anti-racist pedagogy, this author expands upon conceptions of culture to consider the ways that cultural forms expressed in music, literature, art, and the social sciences inform and are informed by relations of power, and that these cultural forms and characteristics can be the sites through which power operates as they both set the boundaries and provide the resources through which group members come to identify themselves. Returning to the work and words of student teachers, this author illustrates how culture can be used in the classroom to frame and limit children, and how the classroom might be a space in which culture and cultural identity is explored, challenged, and recreated.