Exploring Culture: A Problem-Based Unit

Prepared by Kenji Hakuta with assistance from Michele Bousquet

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Students come to school from backgrounds representing diverse cultures. That is certainly an uncontroversial statement. But various guidelines and policies about teacher preparation contain statements regarding knowledge about the student's home culture as well as "culturally appropriate English" into account. (Click here to browse a web page on teacher preparation and certification for ELL students, put together by Stanford students George Bunch and Ken Romeo). The issue becomes quickly complicated once we need to start thinking about what exactly we mean by "culture", and how to train educators and the community to be culturally knowledgeable and sensitive. This exercise is intended to familiarize you with the beginnings of the analysis of culture.

Broadly speaking, people have defined culture in ways such as:

• a list of attributes
• patterns of behavior and rituals
• social structure
• meanings and interpretations by members.

Our own bias is that culture is most definitively not a list of things, such as foods, clothes, dances, and folktales. Rather, culture is itself defined by multiple perspectives of its insiders and outsiders and the various ways in which social business is conducted. Language and literacy is also an integral part of cultural definition.

The assignment of this problem-based unit is to construct a web page that contains critical information about a specific cultural group. We encourage you to be creative in the contents of your webpage. The ultimate goal is to produce a page that would be useful to teachers in better understanding their students. However, the following issues should be addressed:

• What is your definition of culture?
• Critical demographic, social, and historical information about the group;
• Expectations that students and parents have about schooling and their community;
• Factors about the group that have influenced its immigration to the U.S.;
• Variability within the group;
• Characterization of their language structure and discourse rules.

Some Quotes about Culture

For starters, we point you to a number of randomly selected pages we have found on the web that offer succinct, juicy, and sometimes confusing quotes about culture:

• Culture means different things to different people. Even among anthropologists there is no agreed upon definition of culture. This link from Herve Varenne of the Programs in Anthropology and Education and Applied Anthropology
  Department of International and Transcultural Studies Teachers College, Columbia University offers several different classical definitions found in the anthropological literature. Click here.
• This link from the University of Minnesota's Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition offers additional definitions of culture, as well as provides references for supplemental readings on the topic. Click here.
• Washington State University offers an "exploration of the concept of human culture." Click here.

Practical Guides to Defining Culture

While it is important for you as teachers to be able to reflect upon and articulate your thoughts about culture at a theoretical level, what is of utmost importance on a practical level is how to transform these abstract concepts into meaningful uses of culture in your classrooms. Below you will find links to several documents designed to guide you through the transition.

• "Who are my students? What kinds of cultural influences shape their lives? How do they--and I, as their teacher--shape and construct this culture on an ongoing basis? What are my own cultural assumptions and how do they influence my teaching?" This educational practice report titled Personalizing Culture through Anthropological and Educational Perspectives looks at these difficult questions and offers suggestions to help teachers find answers specific to their situation. The report was published by CREDE, the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence. Click here.

• This practical guide highlights for teachers the different stages (along with concrete examples) involved in attempting to transform curriculum from "mainstream" to multicultural. This guide is part of a larger "Multicultural Supersite" by McGraw-Hill. Click here.

• The National Center for Bilingual Education's program information guide titled Multicultural Education: Strategies for Linguistically Diverse Schools and Classrooms answers typical questions teachers pose about the implementation of multicultural strategies in their classrooms and suggests an extensive list of questions for teachers to consider when attempting to develop a multicultural curriculum and supportive school environment. The guide closes with four lesson plans that model multicultural perspectives imbedded in the curriculum. An extensive reference list is included. Click here.

Specific Cultural Profiles

Below are links to web pages that provide cultural profiles of particular countries or racial/ethnic groups. These sites are intended to serve as information resources for the creation of your own web sites, as well as for discovering additional information about the cultural backgrounds of the students you teach.

• This link to the Cultural Profiles Project of Citizenship and Immigration Canada provides an indexed overview of life and customs in nearly 100 countries. It was designed as a reference tool for Canadian volunteers who assist immigrant newcomers with adapting to life in Canada. Click here.

• The Country Profiles from the World Factbook 2000 of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency contains information on the geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues of countries worldwide. Click here.

• ABC News' Country Profiles provide information on the background, key indicators (inflation, interest, and unemployment rates), economy, global ties, and people of virtually every country in the world. Click here.

• The Refugee Service Center of the Center for Applied Linguistics creates cultural monographs of different refugee groups to help service providers in the U.S. better understand new refugee populations. Examples of monographs available are those profiling Bosnians, Cubans, Haitians, Iraqi Kurds, Iraqis, and Somalis. Particularly useful are the sections on language, which note implications for ESL teachers through explaining the basics about the language(s) commonly spoken by the profiled ethnic group and highlighting potential areas in which these students might have English language difficulties. Click here.

Language Profiles

There are a number of sites that offer information about languages. The best list we found comes from the home page of the Ethnologue, which is a reference volume produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (they study linguistics with the main purpose of translating the Bible, but the group has had broad impact on the field of linguistics). Their home page is: http://www.ethnologue.com/

The Ethnologue has a great list of links of interest, which we have pasted below:

Links of Interest (from the Summer Institute of Linguistics)

SIL has published materials on only a fraction of all the world's languages. See the SIL Bibliography and the SIL Publications Catalog. The area pages in the Ethnologue have a section of links to external (non-SIL) resources related to countries and languages. Here are some of the primary resources:*

• Library of Congress: Country Studies
• United Nations Population Information Network; see especially Population of all countries in 1999 and 2000
• Indigenous Studies WWW Virtual Library
• iLoveLanguages (former The Human-Languages Page)
• Yamada Language Guides
• Foreign Language Resources on the Web
• The Language Hub
• Online language resources
• The Creolist Archives
• Electronic Texts, Dictionaries and Data
• A Web of On-line Dictionaries and Grammars
• Online Language Dictionaries and Translators
• List of Dictionaries
• Free Online Language Courses
• American Sign Language Browser
• Animated American Sign Language Dictionary
• European Centre for Minority Issues
• For a different approach to language classification look at The Linguasphere.
• TerraLingua Language Endangerment, Survival, and Revitalization

 

Area-specific resources

• Americas
  • Latin American Studies WWW Virtual Library
  • Indigenous Resources for Central America, South America, Caribbean
  • For information on dictionaries and other learning aids for some of the languages of North America, see The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
  • Native American Language Resources on the Internet
• Africa
  • Africa Online
  • African Studies WWW (U. Penn))
  • Africa: Languages and Software
  • Africa Research Central, A clearinghouse of African primary sources
  • Africa South of the Sahara
  • The Electronic African Bookworm
  • Indigenous Resources for Africa
  • Electronic Journal for African Bibliography
• Europe
  • Russian and East European Studies WWW Virtual Library
  • Indigenous Resources for Europe
  • European minority languages
  • Central Europe Online
• Asia
  • Asiaco the Asia search engine
  • Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library
  • Middle Eastern Studies WWW Virtual Library
  • Indigenous Resources for Asia and the Middle East
  • European Association of Sinological Librarians (EASL), online resources related to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea
• Pacific
  • Pacific Studies WWW Virtual Library
  • Aboriginal Studies WWW Virtual Library
  • Australian Indigenous Languages
  • Indigenous Resources for the Pacific

 

Other sites of interest

• Geographic distribution of living languages
• Altavista translations
• Numbers from 1 to 10 in Over 4,500 Languages
• Words and phrases in various languages
• More links to phrases in various languages
• Genealogy sites on the Internet
• USC Center for Multilingual, Multicultural Research
• International Resources on Countries

Language coding and standards

• The official site of the ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee
• Registration authority for ISO 639-2 (three-letter codes)
• ISO 639-2 Alpha-3 codes (also includes the normative text of the standard)
• Changes to ISO 639-x codes
• RFC 1766: IETF protocol for language identifiers on the Internet
• Current set of tags registered per RFC1766

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This page was last updated April 2002