Abstract
This chapter introduces a culturally pragmatic approach to reducing the Black-White achievement gap, which marries Hirsch Jr.’s cultural literacy with Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy. This approach offers African American students the taken-for-granted knowledge required to succeed academically and navigate mainstream society while simultaneously utilizing and validating African American culture in the classroom. In addition, it seeks to encourage students to view the world with a critical consciousness, which questions and challenges the sociopolitical order. The chapter starts by examining the strengths and weaknesses of Hirsch’s approach through a comparative analysis with the ideas of Bourdieu and Freire. Next, the need for a pragmatic approach to the education of African American students, that is free of dogmatic and political constraints, is discussed. The chapter then turns its attention to examining how the culturally pragmatic model, by combining cultural literacy with culturally relevant pedagogy, is able to create synergy between the two approaches and also have each make up for the educational blind spots of the other. The chapter ends by exploring an alternative explanation for the motivating factors that engender oppositional culture among Black American students. Rather than an adaptation to pessimism about African Americans’ prospects on the job market, oppositional culture is presented as a strategy to protect the self-concept in response to an uneven educational playing field, for which culturally pragmatic education is presented as a possible remedy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Ainsworth-Darnell, J., & Downey, D. (1998). Assessing the oppositional culture explanation for racial/ethnic differences in school performance. American Sociological Review, 63, 536–553.
Bell-Robinson, V. (2016). E.d. Hirsch: Friend or Foe. In T. S. Poetter, K. Waldrop, C. Bolyard, & V. Bell-Robinson (Eds.), Curriculum windows to tomorrow: What curriculum theorists of the 1970s can teach us about schools and society today (pp. 15–27). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.
Bereiter, C., & Engleman, S. (1966). Teaching disadvantaged children in preschool. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In J. Karabel, & A. Halsey (Eds.), Power and ideology in education (pp. 487–511). New York: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power (trans: Clough, L.). Oxford: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society, and culture. London/Beverly Hills: Sage.
Brunson, R. K. (2007). “Police don’t like black people”: African-American young men’s accumulated police experiences. Criminology & Public Policy, 6, 71–101.
Burchinal, M., McCartney, K., Steinberg, L., Crosnoe, R., Friedman, S. L., McLoyd, V., & The NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2011). Examining the black–white achievement gap among low-income children using the NICHD study of early child care and youth development. Child Development, 82, 1404–1420.
Cazden, C., & Leggett, E. (1981). Culturally responsive education: Recommendations for achieving Lau remedies II. In H. Trueba, G. Guthrie, & K. Au (Eds.), Culture and the bilingual classroom: Studies in classroom ethnography (pp. 69–86). Rowley: Newbury.
Chen, H., & Volpe, R. P. (1998). An analysis of personal financial literacy among college students. Financial Services Review, 7(2), 107–128.
Deutsch, M. (1963). The disadvantaged child and the learning process. In A. H. Passow (Ed.), Education in depressed areas (pp. 163–179). New York: New York Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.
Downey, D. B. (2008). Black/white differences in school performance: The oppositional culture explanation. Annual Review of Sociology, 34, 107–126.
Fordham, S., & Ogbu, J. (1986). Black students’ school success: Coping with the burden of “acting white”. The Urban Review, 18, 176–206.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group. (Original work published 1970).
Fryer, R. G., & Levitt, S. D. (2004a). Falling behind: As children move through school, the black-white achievement gap expands. Education Next, 4(4), 64–72.
Fryer, R. G., & Levitt, S. D. (2004b). Understanding the black-white test score gap in the first two years of school. Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(2), 447–464.
Haney-Lopez, I. (2010). Post-racial racism: Racial stratification and mass incarceration in the age of Obama. California Law Review, 98, 101–148.
Harris, A. L. (2006). I (Don’t) Hate School: Revisiting Oppositional Culture Theory of Blacks’ Resistance to Schooling. Social Forces, 85(2), 797–834.
Harris, A. L., & Robinson, K. (2007). Schooling behaviors or prior skills? A cautionary tale of omitted variable Bias within oppositional culture theory. Sociology of Education, 80(2), 139–157.
Hess, R. D., & Shipman, V. C. (1965). Early experience and socialization of cognitive modes in children. Child Development, 36, 869–886.
Hirsch, E. D. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hirsch, E. D. (1999). The schools we need: And why we don’t have them [Kindle fire version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com.
Hirsch, E. D. (2016). Why knowledge matters: Rescuing our children from failed educational theories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
Hirsch, E. D., Kett, J. F., & Trefil, J. S. (1993). The dictionary of cultural literacy (2nd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Horvat, E. M., & Lewis, K. S. (2003). Reassessing the “Burden of ‘acting White’”: The importance of peer groups in managing academic success. Sociology of Education, 76, 265–280.
Hubbard, L. (2005). The role of gender in academic achievement. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 18(5), 605–623.
Jordan, C. (1985). Translating culture: From ethnographic information to educational program. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 16, 105–123.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34, 159–165.
Lareau, A., & Weininger, E. B. (2003). Cultural capital in educational research: A critical assessment. Theory and Society, 32(5–6), 567–606.
Martin, J. R., Wignell, P., Eggins, S., & Rothery, J. (1988). Secret English: Discourse technology in a junior secondary school. In L. Gerot, J. Oldenberg, & T. Van Leeuwen (Eds.), Language and socialisation: Home and school.Proceedings from the Working Conference on Language in Education (pp. 143–173). Sydney: Macquarie University.
McKown, C., & Weinstein, R. S. (2008). Teacher expectations, classroom context, and the achievement gap. Journal of School Psychology, 46, 235–261.
Mohatt, G., & Erickson, F. (1981). Cultural differences in teaching styles in an Odawa school: A sociolinguistic approach. In H. Trueba, G. Guthrie, & K. Au (Eds.), Culture and the bilingual classroom: Studies in classroom ethnography (pp. 105–119). Rowley: Newbury.
Ogbu, J. (1978). Minority education and caste: The American system in cross-cultural perspective. New York: Academic.
Ogbu, J. (2003). Black American students in an affluent suburb: A study of academic disengagement. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Ogbu, J., & Simons, H. (1998). Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implications for Education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 29(2), 155–188.
Provenzo, E., Jr. (2005). Critical literacy: What every American ought to know. Boulder: Paradigm.
Rist, R. (1970). Student social class and teacher expectations: The self-fulfilling prophecy in ghetto schools. Harvard Educational Review, 40, 411–450.
Tyson, K., Darity, W., Jr., & Castellino, D. (2005). It’s not “a Black thing”: Understanding the burden of acting White and other dilemmas of high achievement. American Sociological Review, 70, 582–605.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Dahir, M. (2020). Between Cultural Literacy and Cultural Relevance. In: Trifonas, P. (eds) Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural Studies and Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01426-1_22-2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01426-1_22-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01426-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01426-1
eBook Packages: Springer Reference EducationReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Education
Publish with us
Chapter history
-
Latest
Between Cultural Literacy and Cultural Relevance- Published:
- 21 January 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01426-1_22-2
-
Original
Between Cultural Literacy and Cultural Relevance- Published:
- 31 October 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01426-1_22-1