Deculturalization

1. Deculturalization How and Why?

2. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana

3. Manifest Destiny • A belief that the new nation, the United States, would expand its borders to the Pacific Ocean. • Manifest Destiny was justified by beliefs in the superiority of the culture, political institutions, and morality of the new nation.

4. Dominated Cultures Cultures that others have attempted to: • Change • Control • Eliminate

5. Government Strategies • The United States Government used two formal strategies to control dominated cultures: • Deculturalization • Segregation These strategies became part of the dominant cultural fabric of the United States

6. Deculturalization • Is the process of stripping away the culture of a people: • Enslavement and exclusion of African-Americans • Displacement and boarding schools for Native Americans • Eurocentric curriculum • English only laws

7. Segregation Segregation: • Primarily occurs in situations of economic exploitation • Creates a sense of inferiority among members of the minority cultures • Creates a feeling of superiority among the members of the dominant culture

8. THINK AND SHAREPrejudice and discrimination • Think of an example in our nation’s history where some minority group has been treated by: • Extermination – genocide, ethnic cleansing • Domination/enslavement • Expulsion • Segregation/apartheid • Assimilation/integration • Pluralism/multiculturalism

9. Schooling and Children from Underrepresented Groups

10. The Achievement Gap The United States has large numbers of minority groups • Some groups have developed reputations for high achievement in school • Chinese Americans • Other groups have developed reputations for low achievement in school • African Americans

11. Background (Continued) Researcher John Ogbu (1983) studied Chinese Americans and African Americans in Stockton, CA between 1968-70 and found that: • Although the two groups experienced similar discrimination and came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, Chinese Americans achieved in school and African Americans did not Ogbu developed a conceptual framework to help explain the pattern

12. Typology of Minorities • Autonomous • Immigrants • Castelike or Involuntary

13. Autonomous Minorities • May be victims of prejudice, but are not dominated in subordinated groups politically, economically, or in a rigid caste system • Often such groups have a cultural frame of reference that encourages and demonstrates success • Not characterized by disproportionate and persistent school failure

14. Examples of Autonomous Minorities • Amish • Mormons • Jews

15. Immigrants • Groups of people who have moved more or less voluntarily to the US • Their reference group is the population "back home" or the peers in their neighborhood • Not characterized by disproportionate and persistent school failure

16. Examples of Immigrants • Chinese • Filipinos • Japanese • Koreans • Caribbeans

17. Castelike Minorities • Have been involuntarily incorporated into the dominant society as a subordinate group • Have little or no political power and are economically subordinate • Their disproportionate representation in menial jobs is used by majority culture to argue that low status is appropriate • Are characterized by disproportionate and persistent school failure

18. Examples of Castelike Minorities • Native Americans • African Americans • Mexican Americans • Puerto Ricans

19. Conceptual Framework This conceptual framework can help to explain minority group performance in different cultures: • The Buraku people are castelike minorities in Japan who experience persistent, disproportionate school failure there • Buraku immigrants in the US do as well as other Japanese Americans in school

20. School, Work, & Status Mobility • Ogbu argued that schools play an important role in an economy and fulfill this crucial role in three ways: • Teaching children beliefs, values, and attitudes which support the economic system • Teaching skills and competencies required to make the system work • Credentialing them to enter the work force • During their education, children develop cognitive maps or shared knowledge about how the economic and status-mobility systems work

21. Cognitive Maps 1. Structured inequality • unequal power relationship permits the dominant group to control minority access to education and jobs 2. Artificial job ceilings • Limitations on the upward mobility of castelike minorities

22. Cognitive Maps (continued) • These two factors define different realities for the dominant group, castelike minorities, and immigrants • Circumstances can change over time

23. Immigrant Cognitive Map • Many members of immigrant minorities believe that if they accommodate to the majority they will achieve greater rewards than they could achieve if they were "back home".

24. Castelike Cognitive Map • Castelike minorities may tend to see most of their problems in terms of systemic discrimination • Many members of castelike minorities do not believe that effort will achieve objectives or that objectives achieved will lead to rewards • Locus of Control and Expectancy theory

25. Locus of Control Many children from low SES groups have been found to have an external locus of control • Perceive that they are powerless • Credit other sources for what occurs –including personal successes and failures

26. Expectancy Theory • These cognitive maps have major implications for student and teacher motivation given the expectancy theory of motivation. This theory rests on two assumptions: • People make decisions about their behavior based on reasoning and anticipation of future events • People subjectively and intuitively evaluate the expected outcomes of behavior and then choose how to behave

28. Coping/Survival Strategies • Collective Struggle --Civil Rights Movement • Clientship --Go along to get along; passive resistance • Alienation --Creation of a "Black Culture" which is defined by its opposition to much of what is espoused by the dominant culture • Internalized racism • Norms against "acting White" • Acceptance of alternative economy for status mobility, even if illegal.

29. Coping/Survival Strategies • Assimilation --Adapting to and fitting in with the dominant culture • Accommodation --Operating according to established rules of the dominant culture while maintaining positive cultural identity

30. Accomodation Kao and Tienda (1995) reported that parental contributions to the academic achievement of children from voluntary immigrant families include: • Accommodation without assimilation • Optimism

31. What About Language? In the US, how important is the use of standard English to: • School success? • Career success? • Economic success? • Political success? • Social success?

32. Questions • Bilingual Education and Ebonics have been controversial issues in education • What are the controversies and concerns? • What are your opinions on these matters and what, if anything, should be done in education to address these issues?