Читать книгу The Multicultural Classroom: Learning from Australian First Nations Perspectives - Jasmin Peskoller - Страница 12

Since it is “a far-reaching dynamic concept and an elaborate, ever-changing phenomenon” (Wintergerst & McVeigh 2011, 3) an abundance of understandings and definitions of the concept of culture exists. Despite it being one of the most frequently used expressions in the social sciences and humanities, culture is also one of the most underdetermined concepts in everyday language use, connoting different phenomena in different contexts and fields of research (Surkamp 2017, 179). Accordingly, Baker (2015, 46) elucidates that “our definitions of culture will always be partial and open to revision and change.” Despite the complexity of the field, this chapter includes and discusses select efforts at a definition of both culture and multiculturalism and illustrates the understanding of culture underpinning the study.

To start with, Brown (2007, 132) outlines that “[c]ulture is a way of life. It is the context within which we exist, think, feel, and relate to others.” In contrast, Hollins (2015, 20) regards culture as emerging from people’s experience and acquired understanding “about how to live together as a community, how to interact with the physical environment, and knowledge or beliefs about their relationships or positions within the universe.” Adopting a comparative intercultural perspective, Hofstede and McCrae frame their operating definition of culture as

[t]he collective programming of the mind that distinguishes one group or category of people from another. This stresses that culture is (a) a collective, not individual, attribute; (b) not directly visible but manifested in behaviors; and (c) common to some but not all people. (Hofstede & McCrae 2004, 58)

This approach exhibits similarities to the two central meanings of culture identified by Throsby (2001). On the one hand, culture is used to “describe attitudes, beliefs, mores, customs, values and practices which are common to or shared by any group.” This group “may be defined in terms of politics, geography, religion, ethnicity or some other characteristic” (Throsby 2001, 4) ensuring a sense of identity. On the other hand, culture also “has a more functional orientation, denoting certain activities that are undertaken by people, and the products of those activities, which have to do with the intellectual, moral and artistic aspects of human life” (ibid., 4). In relation to these perspectives, Baker and Wright (2017, 426) define culture as “the set of shared meanings, beliefs, attitudes, customs, everyday behavior and social understandings of a particular group, community or society.”

What can be perceived based on these preliminary elaborations is the great diversity of definitions of the concept of culture, which virtually unanimously appear to involve processes of grouping people together according to seemingly shared features and identifying dimensions that distinguish them from others (Dockery 2010, 318). While such approaches may provide comprehensible outlines of the concept, they have been criticized for adopting a simplified, static, and homogeneous understanding of culture, which, in light of the globally increasing scope of diversity in societies and classrooms, has been deemed inappropriate.

On the contrary, as “culture is constantly changing and adapting” (Yunkaporta 2020, 61), authors have advocated for the adoption of an understanding of culture as a complex and dynamic entity including a “multiple, fragmented and hybrid nature of identity” (Baker 2015, 111). In this context, Kramsch (2009, 225–226) pleads for a movement towards a late modernist approach, which abandons a focus on nations and borders, and regards culture as a “dynamic process, constructed and reconstructed in various ways by individuals engaged in struggles for symbolic meaning and for the control of identities, subjectivities and interpretations of history.” Based on this understanding, Ladson-Billings (2017, 143) also outlines that

it is important to emphasize the dynamic and fluid nature of culture that is much more than lists of “central tendencies” or worse, “cultural stereotypes.” From an anthropological perspective, culture encompasses worldview, thought patterns, epistemological stances, ethics, and ways of being along with the tangible and readily identifiable components.

Thus, Aboriginal scholar Yunkaporta (2020, 242) concludes that it is “the cultural lens that we carry everywhere with us. […] Your culture is not what your hands touch or make—it’s what moves your hands.”

As with the criticism raised in connection with the concept of culture, the definitions of bi- or multiculturalism reveal similar predicaments due to the simplifying undertone that afflicts many of them. In the Encyclopaedia of Bilingual Education, for instance, the concept of biculturalism is defined as

the ability to effectively navigate day-to-day life in two different social groups and to do so with the anticipated result of being accepted by the cultural group that is not one’s own. […] [The term] refers to the necessary knowledge, skills, and beliefs that individuals can access to participate within their own and another cultural group. (Smith 2008, 65)

Similarly, Baker and Wright (2017, 431) have recently defined multiculturalism as “[a]dopting the cultural practices associated with more than one cultural or ethnic group.” In this context, Australian linguist Eades (2013) relates the term biculturalism to the previously discussed concept of multilingualism claiming that “[m]any people are bicultural, having the ability to participate in two or more sociocultural groups—just as bilingual people can speak two or more languages, and bidialectal people can speak two or more dialects” (Eades 2013, 13).

In summary, while various definitions of the concept of culture have been suggested, this book regards culture as an open, complex, dynamic, and highly individual construct. Based on this late modernist understanding (Kramsch 2009), the term multicultural is used to describe classroom settings which are characterized by increasingly diverse ways of knowing, being, and doing. In addition, the terms bicultural as well as the plural derivative cultures are occasionally used with the same inclusive reference in order to accentuate the pluralistic, heterogeneous, and dynamic nature of culture and to emphasize the cultural diversity existing within Indigenous Australia.