Who is being taught what?
Unpacking culture, curriculum and context
Rohit Kumar
During my interaction with educators, I am often asked, “how can a positive culture in school and classrooms be built? How can we create a culture of growth and learning?”
In the past ten years, I have worked with children from low income households to economically upper class families, from extremely traditional families to those who consider themselves modern families, from children who have never stepped out of their neighbourhoods to children who have travelled around the world. In my interactions with these young people and their educators, I am inspired to re-examine myself for my own responses to questions such as what’s the purpose of education? What should education do?
Education, and more specifically formalized schooling, should and does fulfill different needs for different pupils. But more often than not, it marginalizes those who are already on the margins and privileges those who are already privileged. Our institutions must engage with the fundamental questions of education, such as ‘What is being taught? Why are we teaching that? For whom? By whom? When, Where, and How?’ And when we ask these questions, we cannot avoid engaging with matters of culture.
“Culture” can be a loaded word. It can mean so many things to so many people. Some may see it as softer aspects of a school and hence not engage in any meaningful conversation around it. Others may talk about it but still remain on the periphery of the conversation, talking about the arts and music and dance, often reducing the conversation to tokenism.
Academically, it has been defined differently by different scholars over the time in history. For the purpose of this article, I refer to the following definitions1:
- Culture is a set of shared and enduring meaning, values, and beliefs that characterize national, ethnic, or other groups and orient their behaviour (Mulholland 1991).
- “Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another” (Hofstede, G. (1984). National cultures and corporate cultures. In L.A. Samovar & R.E. Porter (Eds.), Communication Between Cultures. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.)
These definitions inform my understanding that culture has its own multilayered understanding that not only defines one’s positioning within a culture but also one’s interactions with those from another culture.
Now one may ask, so what does the classroom and the school have to do with culture? Consider these questions – How can we create a culture that reflects the values we would like to live by? How does the teacher build a classroom culture that is respectful, collaborative, joyous, participative, and honest? How does the school environment nurture a sense of aesthetics and an appreciation of beauty in all its forms? Do these questions ring a bell? As educators, we have been asking these questions for a while. However, if we go back to the definitions, all these questions bring in their subjectivity of what respective or collaborative may mean, or what aesthetics or beauty may mean. Hence, in my mind, when we talk about culture and schools, we must ask another question – whose culture?
When we ask this question, the onion starts peeling off; the multilayered realities of cross-cultural interactions start opening. We don’t walk into school as empty vessels, as people without culture who will just be enculturated into a certain kind of culture that the institution may wish for us to adapt. We walk in as multi-cultural beings. And we are multi-cultural beings not only as adults, but also when we are the four-year-old walking into a kindergarten classroom. Emily J. Style, founding co-director of National SEED Project, writes, “Half the curriculum walks in the room with the students, in the textbooks of their lives.2” When students walk into school, they bring in their lives, their stories, their customs, traditions, beliefs, hopes and aspirations. If a school says that there’s only one way to grow, it will have a culture that defines that. Now one must ask, whose culture should a school assume then? In my view, it’s for those people in power to define whose cultural values and understanding of life will take precedence. But what if there’s more than one way? The culture that a girl from an economically rich Muslim family brings in is different from what a boy from an economically poor household brings. The way a homosexual or bisexual student looks at the world is different from how a heterosexual student sees it. The belief about life that a child who is differently abled brings in may be different from that of an able-bodied person.
In today’s world, human beings, especially in a diverse country like India, are not monocultural people. We are multicultural beings, our values, beliefs and mindsets inspired by diverse lenses of our identity. How are we going to fit all this in one template if we are really keen on engaging with students? If a school cares for students’ well-being and growth, can we really refrain from engaging with their multicultural selves? “All students deserve a curriculum which mirrors their own experience back to them, upon occasion – thus validating it in the public world of the school. But curriculum must also insist upon the fresh air of windows into the experience of others – who also need and deserve the public validation of the school curriculum.3” What if the “curriculum of their lives” our students bring in doesn’t fit into the “culture” of the school? What is the responsibility of schools to renegotiate their culture to make space for the culture that students bring?
To answer this, I think, we need to change our question. Cultures are not created by individuals. They evolve; with individuals’ influence, contribution and engagement. In hope for a collective growth – of students, teachers, principals, peons, helpers and everyone else in the school community – we will have to engage with their full, multicultural selves. We can’t just create a school that focuses on students’ growth regardless of who they are or what they bring to our classrooms. It has to focus on growth that is mindful of who each student is. This mindfulness will lead to all students having lived examples of their adults learning and growing, and hence inspire them in their own learning and growing.
So, how do we do it? In my experience, here are some ways to engage with this work:
Offer “windows and mirrors (Emily J. Style)” in curriculum, infrastructure, policies and processes: Create spaces for meaningful dialogue to share and listen to everyone’s multicultural experience and learn from each other. Include multiple perspectives and life stories different from what is typically offered in textbooks. For example, for how long can we keep talking about a family as comprising mother-father-son-daughter? What about single-parent families? Joint or extended families? Same-sex coupled families? Inter-religion families?
Have an ongoing long-term professional development for educators: Create safe (and brave) spaces for teachers to engage in full-fledged professional development around cross-cultural/intercultural competence. In his book, Social Character of Learning4, Prof. Krishna Kumar, writes about the dilemma of a boy from a tribal community to a teacher’s question on tantrism taught from the textbook. If the student gives the answer, he accepts the backwardness of his own cultural history. If he doesn’t, he ironically ‘proves’ that that history is true. One might think, what should the student do? But the more important question is, what should the teacher have done? “In the interaction reported earlier, the teacher uses her power to place the tribal boy in a situation where he acknowledges ignorance. His silence represents no denial of the validity of the knowledge he is being offered, whereas the teacher’s articulateness represents the assertion of her knowledge (based on the textbook) as valid learning and of her power to make students accept it, There is no conflict between her authority and the tribal boy’s expression of ignorance. Her authority is used to prove to the boy and to the rest of the class that he is ignorant,” writes Krishna Kumar.
If the teacher knew the sociocultural context of her students as well as her own positioning in that context, this lesson, despite the problematic textbook could have been delivered differently. For example, in my observation and following conversation with Greta Lopes, a Grade 4 social studies teacher in Mumbai, she narrates a classroom experience that she had while teaching from the state board textbook. She says, “History mostly covers the achievements and grandiose of men as emperors and rulers. This was pointed out by my girl students, asking why only one sentence gets dedicated to an emperor’s wife? That too, a sentence with the name and her marital privilege of being his wife! My class also has a good mix of Hindu and Muslim kids. In the recent social conversations around Indian rulers, one may get an impression that it was always a Hindus versus Muslim fight. Muslims as plunderers and Hindu rulers as avengers of wounded pride where the male emperors again emerge as the sole heroes. This layer if not unpacked, may leave students with a very different narrative, keeping the current religious discourses in mind.”
Now, can this teacher be expected to “divert” from prescribed content? How can a teacher, where there are both girls and boys from Hindu and Muslim families, teach this? What impact will this have on those young minds if not engaged with the multiple discourses flowing out of the given text? Especially when students constantly make meaning keeping their own multicultural realities in the centre of their understanding? By keeping their multicultural selves in the context of the content, this teacher invested class time in those divergent yet necessary conversations and through this modelling, she provides us opportunities to see what’s possible. What she did isn’t exceptional. All teachers can do this, provided adequate development and ongoing support is given.
Create inclusive policies: If your school or class is not engaging with the diversity of students in particular and people in general, your kids are losing5. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the diversity of a school directly contributes to the quality of its students’ education. Exposed to a variety of perspectives, students learn to think critically, to challenge their assumptions, and to explore alternative approaches and solutions to real-world problems. So bring children from a diverse sociocultural background into your school and create a safe space for them to engage with their diverse experiences. If your school is serving a specific population, then create opportunities for them to engage meaningfully with other communities.
These are only some illustrative examples of what is possible. I think, within one’s teaching and learning communities, with dedicated time to further examine the school policies and practices, one can see many new opportunities to engage with students in meaningful ways. If the purpose of education is to offer opportunities for holistic growth, a multicultural educational space offers that space where growth can be aspired and achieved for all.
References
1. h t t p : / / c a r l a . u m n . e d u / c u l t u r e /definitions.html
2. Curriculum as Encounter: Selves and Shelves, Emily J. Style
3. Curriculum As Windows and Mirrors, 1988, Emily J. Style
4. Social Character of Learning, Krishna Kumar
5. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED562839.pdf, https://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/docs/Benefits_Challenges.pdf, https://www.aaup.org/NR/, rdonlyres/97003B7B-055F-4318-B14A-5336321FB742/0/DIVREP.PDF
The author is a co-founder of Khoj Community School, Mumbai. Khoj Community School is built on the core principles of concept-based curriculum, multicultural education and community development. He also works as community and social responsibility coordinator at American School of Bombay, Mumbai and is a consulting staff at National SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) housed at Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College, USA. As a SEED facilitator, he conducts workshops for educators on matters of diversity, equity and multicultural education. He can be reached at rohit.2093@gmail.com.
