Culture in School Learning

Book excerpt: Challenging educators to better understand themselves and their students, this text presents a powerful process for developing a teaching perspective that embraces the centrality of culture in school learning. The six-part process covers examining culture, personalizing culture, inquiring about students' cultures and communities, applying knowledge about culture to teaching, formulating theory or a conceptual framework linking culture and school learning, and transforming professional practice to better meet the needs of students from different cultural and experiential backgrounds. All aspects of the process are interrelated and interdependent. Two basic procedures employed in this process are presented: constructing an operational definition of culture that reveals its deep meaning in cognition and learning, and applying the reflective-interpretive-inquiry (RIQ) approach to making linkages between students' cultural and experiential backgrounds and classroom instruction. Pedagogical features in each chapter include Focus Questions; Chapter Summaries; Suggested Learning Experiences, Critical Reading lists. A Companion Website, new for the Third Edition (www.routledge.com/cw/Hollins), provides additional student resources.