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Beyond responsiveness to identity badges: future research onculture in disability and implications for Response to Intervention
Alfredo J. Artiles*
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
I critique in this article the construct of culture because of its centrality in creat-ing the notion of difference, which has been commonly applied to marginalizedpopulations. I examine critically how the notion of culture has been theorized ineducational research as a means to obtain theoretical clarity in research designand reporting, as well as inform future policy and reform efforts. I reframe theidea of culture to transcend the favored focus on background markers andinclude institutional and social practices to expand the unit of analysis beyondstereotyped groups or individuals. This perspective will enable us to understandhow the constructs of learning, ability, and culture get increasingly intertwinedwith damaging consequences that perpetuate historical injustices. I illustrate theframework with a critique of Response to Intervention (RTI) by outlining theways in which the idea of culture has been taken up in this research. The pro-posed standpoint empowers us to rely on a view of culture that honors itsdynamic, historical, and dialectical nature.
Keywords: construct of culture; Response to Intervention (RTI); disability
Learning, ability, and culture. These are notions educational researchers, practitio-ners, and policy-makers grapple with in this time of differences often described withvarious keywords that range from post-racial age to the globalization era. Unprece-dented trends characterize this time of difference that include overwhelming popula-tion flows across national borders, unparalleled compression of time and space,deepening inequalities, and extraordinary access to technological tools (Artiles andDyson 2005; Suarez-Orozco 2001). These trends continue to converge at an incalcu-lable speed, thus creating conditions for multiple populations that differ along socio-economic, linguistic, gender, religious, national origin, racial, and ethnic lines comeinto proximal/distal and prolonged contact in ways never seen in the histories ofdeveloped nations. The ideas of culture and difference are generally used to describesizable segments of these populations (Artiles 1998; Rosaldo 1993). Thus, the glob-alization age has reaffirmed the age-old idea that difference is indexed in culturalothers; a concomitant assumption is that these groups differ in their ways of learningand (often) their ability levels (Valencia 2010). The problem with this logic is thatthe designation of difference comes with consequences for those groups that impingeupon educational and other key opportunities; in short, being different heightensone’s vulnerability to injustices. An enduring example of these entanglements of dif-ference is found at the historical intersections of race, disability, social class, and
*Email: [email protected]
© 2014 Educational Review
Educational Review, 2014http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2014.934322
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gender (Stiker 2009). In this vein, Baynton (2001) concluded that, “not only has itbeen considered justifiable to treat disabled people unequally, but the concept of dis-ability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing dis-ability to them” (33, emphasis in original).
Given the historical sedimentations of these intersections of difference, it is notsurprising that a number of what Foucault (1986) called “dividing practices” in edu-cational systems blend their meanings, thus producing different populations in whichlow educational performance, race, social class, gender, language background, cul-tural habits, and impairments overlap in intricate ways, depending on the lenses andmeasures used. This phenomenon is an illustration of a recognition/de-recognitionstrategy to make race visible “(i.e. the racial identities of particular bodies) in orderto de-recognize or not see race (i.e. a structural system of group-based privilegesand disadvantages produced by socio-historical forces)” (Harris 2001, 1758). Theuse of this strategy in legal and policy practices likely contributes to the engravingof educational inequities in the experiences of these populations. This state of affairscreates a significant challenge for researchers, namely to explain how the constructsof learning, ability, and culture are increasingly intertwined with harmful conse-quences that perpetuate historical injustices (Artiles 2011).
I focus this article on the construct of culture because of its centrality in con-structing the notion of difference, which is commonly applied to populations – i.e. aproxy for race or ethnicity (Harris 2001). However, as I will argue, the construct ofculture transcends population traits and it has deep connections to views of learning,race, and disability. For instance, scholarship from the social sciences suggests thatthe notion of culture travels across research, policy, and practice landscapes in unex-pected and sometimes problematic ways (Lee 2009; Rosaldo 1993). Culture and dis-ability, for example, are often intertwined as reflected in the high disabilityprevalence among students of color, and moreover, alternative (even contradictory)visions of culture permeate explanations and studies on this problem (Artiles et al.2010). To complicate matters, cultural and ability differences in educational policyhave been regarded as ontologically distinct since cultural considerations purportedlywarrant exclusion from a disability diagnosis (Artiles et al. 2011).
Another example of the ways in which culture contributes to the construction ofdifference across contexts is through the mediation of policies across scales, whichultimately shapes local practices. Through these processes, it is possible that policiesand laws created to address inequities end up reifying the status quo. I documented,for instance, how the convergence of multiple contemporary education policies,including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act’s (IDEA) regulations tomonitor and fix racial inequities in special education, perpetuates educational inequi-ties for underserved students (Artiles 2011). As mentioned earlier, this is achievedthrough “[m]echanisms such as transposition … Understandings of race and disabil-ity as being wholly detached from one another enable a sleight of hand within thepolicy that serves the dominant interest of maintaining the inequality” (Beratan2008, 349). I argue that transposition rests on cultural strategies and processes thatinclude, among others, a biopolitical paradigm and categorical alignment (Epstein2007). Briefly stated, racial and disability groups embrace political representationagendas that ensure access to resources and entitlements, though these groups’ “defi-nitions are partly embedded in assumptions about identity purportedly framed bybiological differences” (Artiles 2011, 436). A potential consequence of this para-digm is that groups are essentialized, and thus, identity intersections fade away. In
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addition, “administrative, sociohistorical, and scientific [racial or disability] catego-ries come to be overlaid as if they had the same meanings” (Artiles 2011, 436).Hence, categorical alignment erases historical nuance and baggage, complexity, andthe longstanding interweavings of contested categories such as race and disability.Categorical alignment, therefore, might be at work in narrow explanations of the ra-cialization of disability that focus exclusively on technical aspects of the problem(e.g. definitional and measurement issues), at the expense of accounting for socio-historical influences and their attendant administrative practices.
Finally, the notion of culture has been summoned to fix some of these predica-ments through ideas such as cultural learning styles and culturally responsive peda-gogy. The underlying assumption in these efforts is that culture can be used forintervention purposes because it is bounded within groups and has a direct effect onpeople’s thinking and behavior. The role of culture to reproduce group beliefs andpractices is stressed, at the expense of people’s production of culture. The premiseof traditional interventionist uses of culture is that if we identify a group’s culturalcode, interventions can be designed to respond to its culture. Problems arise whenschools or teachers attempt to apply this logic in contexts in which multiple culturalgroups coexist. Furthermore, this perspective does not acknowledge diversity withincultural groups and the mechanisms through which culture mediates learning or abil-ity differences are not specified (Artiles et al. 2010). Despite such substantial limita-tions, this is a favored perspective in educational research, policy, and practice.
The preceding discussion should make apparent that the notion of culture hasmyriad meanings and morphs across contexts. Thus, the idea of culture functions asa conceptual pivot around which difference markers such as race, learning, and abil-ity get entangled. A problematic consequence of this state of affairs is that the semi-otic uses, misuses, and conflations of the idea of culture may end up reifyingassumptions about difference that can have negative consequences for vulnerablepopulations, such as racial minority and disabled groups. The purpose of this article,therefore, is to reframe the idea of culture to transcend the favored focus on individ-uals and groups, often with negative overtones, that have contributed to deficitimages of entire populations (Tuck 2009; Valencia 2010). I anchor this manuscriptin the context of the US education field because it is the setting in which I work,with a particular emphasis on how the idea of culture is used to reinscribe differ-ences, while it is recruited to change educational inequities that affect so-called cul-turally different students. I target non-dominant1 students by virtue of racial andability differences as a case in point. Due to the multidimensional nature of theseconstructs and the complexities of the issues involved, I rely on an interdisciplinaryperspective. Next, I set the context for the problem space of this article.
Forging consequential differences in the time of global normingGlobalization2 and other contemporary forces are molding the landscape of inequi-ties in the United States, particularly as these influences intersect with the idea ofculture and its associated proxies (e.g. racial, social class, and language differences).For instance, the massive immigration flows of the last three decades are posingunprecedented demands and challenges to cities and school systems – in the UnitedStates, these population movements have produced a substantial shift in the demo-graphics of student populations; to wit: “one-quarter of all youth are of immigrantorigin (more than 16.6 million in 2010), and it is projected that by 2020, one in
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three of all children will be growing up in immigrant households” (Suárez-Orozcoet al. 2011, 313). Poverty, undocumented status, and segregated and transnationallives characterize the experiences of these children and youth, which complicatetheir education (Suárez-Orozco et al. 2011).
In addition to population flows across national borders, parallel changes in thesocial and economic conditions of developed nations have deepened inequalities.For example, the Center for American Progress recently reported that [e]conomicsecurity and losses during the recession and recovery exacerbated the already weaksituation for African Americans. They experienced declining employment rates, ris-ing poverty rates, falling home-ownership rates, decreasing health insurance andretirement coverage during the last business cycle from 2001 to 2007. The recessionthat followed made a bad situation much worse (as cited in Bobo 2011, 19). Anenduring indicator of inequity in the United States is the White-Black wealthinequality; Oliver and Shapiro (1995) reported that the wealth gap between AfricanAmerican and White individuals was ten to one. The incarceration rate is anotherunsettling contemporary sign of injustice for “cultural others” – e.g. Bobo (2011)reported that one in nine African Americans (ages 20–34) was in jail or prison in2007. Racial attitudes and stereotyping data also reflect a dismal situation – in the1990s, “more than 60 percent of whites rated whites as more likely to be hardwork-ing than blacks, and just under 60 percent rated blacks as less intelligent” (Bobo2011, 27). Despite progress made, these attitudinal leanings hold at the time of writ-ing this article.
Compounding these trends are many negative educational outcomes affectingcultural others. To illustrate, African American high school dropout rate doubles therate of Whites, and higher education completion rate is about 50% lower than Whitestudents (Bobo 2011). “Culturally different” and disabled students trail behind theirnon-minority and non-disabled peers on various key educational performance indica-tors, and racial minority learners are disproportionately diagnosed as having highincidence disabilities – i.e. learning disabilities (LDs), emotional/behavioral disabili-ties (E/BDs), or intellectual disabilities (IDs) (Artiles, Trent, and Palmer 2004). Atthe national level, African Americans are over twice as likely than White students tobe diagnosed with IDs and Native Americans are 24% more likely to be identifiedwith LDs. African Americans are overrepresented in the E/BD category (59% morelikely) (Donovan and Cross 2002). Predominantly negative visions of culture perme-ate these socio-economic and educational trends, which are typically applied to stu-dents with disabilities and the so-called “culturally diverse” learners (defined byracial, ethnic, socio-economic, or linguistic traits).
Considerable resources have been devoted in the United States to understandand untie the tight knot of culture, learning, and ability differences. This is oftenarticulated in research as a problem of “population cultural validity” or approachedin intervention studies as a matter of gauging differential treatment impact across“cultural” groups (Donovan and Cross 2002). The trouble is that the idea of cultureis fraught with theoretical traps and ambiguities that permeate these well-intentionedefforts. Culture also carries considerable historical baggage that permeates policy,professional, and institutional practices that are not always taken into account inresearch projects. For example, we know that so-called culturally diverse groupshave been historically under-served, and scholarship from economics, labor studies,social psychology, urban planning, critical legal studies, sociology, public health,and history, among other fields, reminds us of the spectra of discrimination and
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oppression in the lives of these groups (Anyon 2005; Bobo 2011; Darity 2011;Harris 2001; Krieger 2011; Scott 2007; Stiker 2009).
An urgent challenge for the research community, therefore, is nothing less thanproducing knowledge that is mindful of the complexities of culture and equity as ameans to invest in a better future for this nation. For this reason, I argue that a firststep in addressing this multifaceted state of affairs is to examine critically how thenotion of culture is theorized in research that includes marginalized groups of stu-dents, particularly racial, socio-economic, and linguistic minorities. Such a critiquecan afford greater theoretical clarity in research design and dissemination, as well asinform future policy and reform efforts. These are urgent projects considering therapid transformations taking place in US society and the education field. Two suchtrends stand out.
First, educational reforms and policies are increasingly converging in a tangle ofnew structures, demands, and expectations with substantial equity consequences formarginalized learners (Artiles 2011). For instance, the traditional separation of gen-eral and special education is being redefined as reforms like Response to Interven-tion (RTI) gain momentum. RTI is a “multi-tier approach to the early identificationand support of students with learning and behavior needs … [It] is designed for usewhen making decisions in both general education and special education, creating awell-integrated system of instruction and intervention guided by child outcome data”(RTI Action Network http://www.rtinetwork.org/learn/what/whatisrti). This trend ishaving an impact on several million children and youth with disabilities. As statedearlier, many of these students are poor and come from racial minority backgrounds,thus a direct consequence of this trend is the thickening of student heterogeneity inthe mainstream educational system. At the same time, accountability requirementsdemand equal outcomes across groups, including culturally diverse and disabledlearners. This American trend is part of what anthropologist Ray McDermott and hiscolleagues called “global norming,” in which “minority, poor, and disabled childrenfill the bottom percentiles of test data around the world” (McDermott, Edgar, andScarloss 2011, 224).
Second, economist Sandy Darity (2011) recently noted that deficit oriented viewsof culture are increasingly visible in the social sciences, with the renewed interest inconstructs such as “cultural disadvantage,” “cultural deprivation,” and “culturalisthypotheses” to explain educational and other social outcome disparities. Race, lan-guage, gender, and social class are entwined with these visions of culture, andalthough talk about post-racialism has gained attention in some sectors of US soci-ety, contemporary sociological evidence on racial inequalities (Bobo 2011), as wellas the rising tide of what critical geographer David Harvey (2003) described asaccumulation by dispossession, demonstrate compellingly that circuits of inequalitycontinue to be reproduced in racial minority communities (Fine and Ruglis 2009).Embedded in these trends are problematic and often contradictory theoreticalassumptions about the notion of culture that mediate inequities affecting non-domi-nant populations, which translate into educational segregation, limited opportunities,and lower outcomes for these groups. Ironically, these trends are apparent despitecurrent educational accountability demands for all groups represented in school sys-tems (Darling-Hammond 2007).
To reiterate, the purpose of this manuscript is to broaden the analytic spotlightused to examine culture in educational contexts beyond individual and group traitsas a means to understand the intersections of learning and ability differences. I
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center my analysis in students of color and disabled learners (along with their inter-sections) as a window into how culture can be used to reify deficit views of thesepopulations. Moreover, I reframe the idea of culture to include institutional andsocial practices as a means to expand the unit of analysis beyond stereotyped groupsor individuals. I illustrate this framework in the context of RTI. As a means to con-textualize the core argument of this manuscript, I outline the ways in which the ideaof culture has been traditionally taken up in educational research.
Culture in traditional research practicesSimilar to other areas of social science research, the education field has treated theconstruct of culture in problematic ways (Gutierrez and Rogoff 2003; Rosaldo1993). A common practice has been to ignore culture. Careful reviews of empiricalknowledge bases in several disciplines and areas of inquiry have documented for thelast 20+ years the lack of attention, problematic conceptions of culture, or its proxies(Artiles et al. 2010; Lamont and Small 2008). We found, for example, that less than3% of special education and LD research published between the 1970s and the1990s in visible specialized journals examined culture in systematic ways (Artiles,Trent, and Kuan 1997). Graham (1992) and Santos de Barona (1993) found similarpatterns in the psychology literature. Influential reports such as the National ReadingPanel (2000) and the National Early Literacy Panel (2008) either ignored or did notfind evidence about the mediating role of culture and language in interventionresearch. Lindo (2006) reviewed the intervention research published in prominentreading journals between 1994 and 2004 and found that not a single study examinedoutcomes by race, a common proxy for culture.
Similarly, the last National Research Council (NRC) report on minority studentsin special education (Donovan and Cross 2002) concluded that intervention researchfindings could not be disaggregated by cultural or ethnic group. Furthermore, it wasconcluded that “[t]he committee is not aware of any published studies that comparethe quality of special education programs or the efficacy of specific instructionalpractices among various racial/ethnic groups” (338). The lack of attention inresearch reports to even indirect markers of culture, such as student ethnic/racialbackgrounds, suggests that culture is not deemed a relevant factor in the researchcommunity. As the NRC (2002) report concluded, the “assumption is that the perfor-mance of minority students with disabilities is comparable to majority students withdisabilities” (329).
To complicate matters, evidence suggests potential biases in research fundingdecisions in certain fields with direct relevance to education and disabilities, like med-icine – e.g. a recent study showed that [a]fter controlling for the applicant’s educa-tional background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publicationrecord, and employer characteristics, we find that Black applicants remain 10 percent-age points less likely than Whites to be awarded [National Institutes of Health]research funding (Ginther et al. 2011, 1015). Although investigators’ race does notnecessarily determine attention to culture or its proxies in study design, the questionarises as to whether greater minority representation in the research community mightbe associated with a more systematic attention to the production of knowledge that ismindful of culture. Given this state of affairs, the question raised by historian VanessaSiddle Walker (2005) is more urgent than ever, “[W]hat happens to the scholarshipwhen some voices are privileged and some are silenced, or worse, ignored?” (35).
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An alternative way to address culture in research is to account for it, though insuch a way, that it creates substantial theoretical and methodological challenges. Inthis perspective, only certain groups have culture, specifically, non-dominant groups,while mainstream society does not. This view is often framed from the vantage pointof “culture as a way of life” in which culture is regarded as an independent variable(Eisenhart 2001). It is assumed these groups’ cultures are monolithic and static; thatis, all members of a given non-dominant group share the same cultural codes andact accordingly in predictable ways, and their cultural practices do not change overtime. This framing of culture, therefore, has a strong deterministic flavor, and con-tributes to the social construction of populations. As political scientists Anne Schnei-der and Helen Ingram (1993) explained, the social construction of populations
refers to the cultural characterizations or popular images of the persons or groupswhose behavior and well-being are affected by public policy. These characterizationsare normative and evaluative, portraying groups in positive or negative terms throughsymbolic language, metaphors, and stories … . Social constructions become embeddedin policy as messages that are absorbed by citizens and affect their orientations andparticipation patterns. (334)
This use of culture as located in the “other” has important implications for researchquestion posing practices, sampling decisions, and intervention designs, among othermatters. Awareness of this point marks the difference in research between a focus on“body counts” across populations vis-à-vis a concern with the “embodied conse-quences of social positions” (Krieger and Smith 2004, 97); that is, the acknowledg-ment that researchers need to be concerned with understanding “embodied selves[that are] simultaneously and historically contingent social beings and biologicorganisms (Krieger and Smith 2004, 99).
Another implication of the view of culture “as a way of life” is found in theattention to cultural issues grounded in a “special case” logic in which research stud-ies and reports are published in journal special issues or separate chapters. Followingthis logic, some commentators argue for “group-specific” treatments or “responsive”approaches, such as behavioral interventions for African American learners or liter-acy approaches for Native American students. The socio-historical status of groupsin society and its mediating effects on these people’s lives and performance arerarely taken into account. The role culture plays in learning processes is underspeci-fied in this perspective. As an example, my colleagues and I found in a recent analy-sis of the views of culture underlying research on the racialization of disability thatculture is linked to learning either through assumed socialization or deprivation pro-cesses (Artiles et al. 2010). Both explanations are framed from a deficit standpoint.The argument goes as follows:
The premise in the cultural deprivation hypothesis is that living under certain condi-tions (e.g., poverty) exposes children to cultural practices that limit the acquisition ofnormative bodies of knowledge, dispositions, as well as skills, and limits access toexperiences that are valued by the dominant society. In this view, “the culture of pov-erty” deprives children of sound developmental experiences and becomes destiny. Asignificant limitation of these views is that the processes or mechanisms through whichculture enters learning to mediate socialization or cultural deprivation are not specified.Hence, these two understandings of the roles of culture in learning are problematic ontwo counts: they rely on limited definitions of culture and lack theoretical specificity.(Artiles et al. 2010, 291)
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A negative consequence of deficit thinking in educational research is what Eve Tuck(2009) described as “damage-centered” research – this is inquiry that “intends todocument people’s pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for theiroppression … [a key limitation of this perspective is that it] reinforces and rein-scribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless”(409).
In summary, the construct of culture occupies a problematic space in educationaland social science research, particularly in scholarship concerned with the intersec-tion of consequential differences (e.g. race, ability) and their attendant equity chal-lenges. Researchers cannot afford to continue ignoring or studying culture inproblematic ways at a time when socio-economic inequities are deepening particu-larly for groups considered “culturally different,” and the cultural variability thatdefines life in our global society is becoming the norm. For these reasons, I reframethe notion of culture to help us address some of the aforementioned shortcomingsand inform future research concerned with the intersections of learning and abilitydifferences.
More than identity badges: mapping the layers of cultureI ground this discussion in cultural historical research and theory, which has deeproots in cultural psychology, but it is also informed by an interdisciplinary knowl-edge base (Cole 1996). The advantage of this lens is that it places culture at the cen-ter of human experiences (Cole 1998). In this view, culture is defined as the socialmilieu in which the life of the people is embedded. [That is, culture is understood asan] “accumulation of the social experiences of humanity in the concrete form ofmeans and modes, schemes and patterns of human behavior, cognition, and commu-nication” (Stetsenko, as cited in Moll 2001, 115). This means that culture is a multi-dimensional construct that encompasses (Artiles 2003; Erickson 2004):
! a regulative dimension: culture embodies rules and prescriptions that offer af-fordances and constraints to human behavior;
! interpretive and instrumental dimensions: culture is located in the minds ofpeople as they interpret the world through values, beliefs, and knowledgestructures, as well as in material practices in which people participate every-day;
! a (re)productive dimension: culture embodies a dialectical relationship betweenthe reproduction of traditions and legacies, and the production of cultural prac-tices which allows people and groups to renew and innovate those practices,
! a cohesion dimension: culture is cohesive as reflected in groups’ and communi-ties’ shared ways with words, thoughts, feelings, and actions; but we find con-siderable heterogeneity within cultures as indexed in within-group variability.
These theoretical premises enable us to transcend the limits of traditional analyticalapproaches and re-frame the study of culture to account for several interdependentlayers. This conceptualization of culture affords a broader unit of analysis thatbridges agency and structure. For instance, a re-framing of culture in the study of“diversity” in classrooms would entail broadening the analytic spotlight past “thedemographics represented IN the classroom,” which is exclusively concerned with“what people bring,” such as their background traits (e.g. race, gender, social class,
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language background) along with distinctive (and often assumed static) groupbeliefs, values, linguistic practices, participation repertoires, and the like (Gallego,Cole, and LCHC 2001). In the traditional view of “demographics IN the classroom,”people are exposed to one culture which enculturates them to ways of thinking, feel-ing, and acting. Many efforts to address cultural differences in education haveembraced this perspective; thus, it is assumed that people carry and use cognitive,affective, and behavioral codes learned in their communities. We must update andadd to this perspective.
First, the traditional view of groups’ static cultural traits has been challenged byevidence showing that group members not only rely on the cultural practices learnedin their own communities, but also cross cultural boundaries in fluid and dynamicways (Gutierrez and Rogoff 2003). The evidence on globalization and transnational-ism supports this point. It is estimated that “220,000, students being educated inMexico are in fact U.S. citizens living transnational lives” (Suárez-Orozco et al.2011, 316). Multiple separations and reunifications characterize the lives of millionsof transnational children and youth in North America. These experiences compelthese children and youth to cross identity borders in flexible and adaptive ways thatdefy the cultural categories of “Mexican” and “American” citizens. As Bauman(2011) reminds us, “identity” though ostensibly a noun, behaves like a verb, albeit astrange one to be sure: appears only in the future tense. Though all too often hypos-tasized as an attribute of a material entity identity has the ontological status of a pro-ject and a postulate (19).
Aydin Bal (2009) documented how Russian immigrants of Turkish descent inthe south-western United States engaged at times in the use of linguistic practicesmore closely associated with Chicano students’ ways with words, or used AfricanAmerican linguistic expressions often found in popular culture, while at other times,they identified with Russian cultural practices. Yet, in other contexts, they exhibiteda strong affiliation with Turkish mores (Bal 2009). Similar patterns of fluid ethnicand linguistic identity adoption and changes have been documented with students ofPilipino, African American, and Latino backgrounds in other regions of the UnitedStates (Paris 2009). Pilipino students, for instance, would sometimes adopt AfricanAmerican English when interacting with peers in particular contexts and for specificgoals. These studies compel us to re-examine what we assume about “what studentsbring” to schools, for children and youth act and react across situations using cul-tural toolkits that embody, not only their primary cultural affiliation, but also a stra-tegic and situated approach to cultural boundary crossings and identity affiliations(Holland, Lachicotte, Jr, Skinner, and Cain 1998). The empirical evidence on howthese cultural practices of affiliation and language use mediate students’ learningprocesses (e.g. literacy acquisition) is only beginning to emerge (Nasir and Hand2006). These findings also offer evidence about the interface between people’s iden-tity intersections and the structural conditions under which they live. As publichealth scholars Nancy Krieger and George Smith (2004) explain:
a person is not one day a woman, another day Latina, another day heterosexual,another day single mother, another day living in a relatively poor neighborhood,another day working as a data processor, and still another day caring for both a smallchild and aging parents. The body does not neatly partition these experiences … [andresearchers must conceptualize and examine empirically the] embodied consequencesof social position. (97)
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The fluidity of identity and the strategic ways in which people adopt and performidentities have important implications for the study of culture and its mediating rolesin learning and ability differences. Specifically, this perspective compels researchersto be analytically concerned with documenting collective cultural identities (includ-ing their practices and memories), as well as with discerning within-group differ-ences in cultural communities. In other words, research must aim to understand howthe strategic and sometimes idiosyncratic identity performances of individuals coex-ist with the work they do to build and maintain collective cultural identities. Theevidence outlined in the preceding paragraphs illustrates the former. Recent evidencefrom anthropology and cultural studies shed light on the construction of collectiveidentities and memories that exemplify the latter (French 2012).
Cultural traditions and memories, for instance, are invoked and forged in thepresent through complex processes in which discursive connections are made“among moments presumed to be differently located in time and space” (French2012, 346). Wirtz described these processes as “telescoping” in her study of Santeríareligious practices, showing how “registers of speech index distinct historical voicesfrom different African and Afro-Cuban pasts and the concomitant sacred powerassociated with them among contemporary practitioners … The result is a temporal‘telescoping’ through which transcendent and ancestral voices not only speak in thepresent ritual moment but temporarily inhabit it, conveying their historicity” (ascited in French 2012, 346–347). An implication of this research for education is thatwe must see learners in classrooms as active agents that strategically perform vari-ous identities across moments of the day, as opposed to the traditional view of cul-ture that regards children and youth as mere enacters of the cultural codes of theircommunities. It also suggests that these individuals actively invoke and align in thepresent multiple voices, traditions, and beliefs from their pasts, sometimes to forget,other times to contest, and even to affiliate with collective identities (French 2012;Theidon 2012). This way, cultural identities and traditions result, to a significantextent, from semiotic work (French 2012).
These insights defy traditional educational research’s proclivity to essentializewhat students acquire in their cultural communities and carry around with them.Therefore, two other cultural layers must be accounted for so that we can understandthe complexities of the idea of culture, namely institutional and interactional (Cole1996; Rogoff 2003). The institutional layer of culture can be illustrated with what hasbeen described as “the canonical classroom culture,” and the interactional layer withthe notion of “cultureS produced in the classroom” (Gallego, Cole, and LCHC 2001).
There is indeed a “canonical classroom culture” in American schools, which hasbeen described in the sociology of education, educational anthropology, sociolin-guistic studies of classrooms, and other educational research communities (Gallego,Cole, and LCHC 2001). The classroom culture encompasses the assumptions, prac-tices, beliefs, and values that characterize routines, and rituals, in American class-rooms. These include the physical layout of classrooms and school buildings –which mold the kinds and modes of participation for students and teachers – and thestructures of activities and discourses that take place every day. Physical layouts alsoreflect particular arrangements to organize, stratify, and control students and teachers– e.g. groupings by age, ability levels, cafeteria, gym, labs, etc. In fact, the canonicalclassroom culture purportedly indexes social and cultural themes of mainstreamsociety, and ultimately define conceptions of competence that are applied to students(Gallego, Cole, and LCHC 2001). Doyle (1986) identified in a seminal review of
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research three canonical segments of classroom life, namely (in order of emphasis)seatwork, whole class/recitation work, and transitions and housekeeping activities.In turn, the dominant discourse that characterizes the canonical classroom culturehas been labeled the recitation script of Initiation–Response–Evaluation (IRE). Theteacher typically Initiates the script with a question or a statement, studentsRespond, and the teacher closes the cycle with an Evaluation of such response(Mehan 1979). These canonical patterns have endured across generations and havealso been documented in many other school settings outside of the United States(Gallego, Cole, and LCHC 2001). These aspects of the canonical classroom culture“are already there” when students arrive, and students are expected to be socializedand abide by the rules, assumptions, and routines embedded in the canonical culture.It has been assumed that the canonical culture collides with the cultures of non-dominant students, thus, contributing to their school failure if they do not acquire orfit in the canonical culture. Nevertheless, the preceding discussion of cultures in theclassroom and advances on the idea of student identities complicate this longstand-ing assumption. Gallego, Cole, and LCHC (2001) argued that classrooms havehybrid cultures of “the local and the socio historical levels of analysis” (957). Thislast point foregrounds the notion of classroom cultureS, which I outline next.
Neither the classroom culture nor the cultures in the classroom determine theprocesses and outcomes of classroom life. These two layers of culture certainlyafford, but also constrain, what can be achieved, reproduced, challenged, or inno-vated in classrooms (Erickson 2004). The interplay of these cultural layers mediatethe creation of the so called “classroom cultureS” mainly through interactional pro-cesses in everyday classroom life. In this vein, it is worth citing Erickson (1996) atlength:
as teachers and students interact in classrooms, they construct an ecology of social andcognitive relations in which influence between any and all parties is mutual, simulta-neous, and continuous. One aspect of this social and cognitive ecology is the multi-party character of the scene – many participants, all of them continually “on task,”albeit working on different kinds of tasks, some of which may be at cross purposeswith others. Although teachers in group discussion may attempt to enforce a participa-tion framework of successive dyadic teacher–student exchanges, often the conversationis more complicated than that. The conversations that take place are multiparty ones,and they may be ones in which various sets of speakers and auditors are engagedsimultaneously in multiple conversational floors [Reciprocal and complementary pro-cesses (e.g. body posture, gaze) mediate the organization of interactions, which arecharacterized by successive and simultaneous verbal and non-verbal actions]. (33)
The situated nature of these processes reminds us that students enter interactionswith multiple “attributes of social identity [e.g. gender, social class, disability, race]than actually become relevant in any particular encounter” (Erickson 2004, 149).What aspects of these identities become relevant during interactions are negotiatedin situ, which suggests that cultures in the classroom or the classroom culture can beeither reproduced or innovated in social encounters (Erickson 2004). Timing andcontextualization cues contribute to the coordination and navigation of interactions,which explain the situated and negotiated nature of interactional processes; neverthe-less, patterns emerge over time that forge “classroom cultureS” in which learningprocesses and outcomes are embedded, and ultimately define student competence,particularly during “gatekeeping situations” (i.e. “those in which the social mobilityof one or more of the participants was at stake,” Erickson 2004, 156).
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This perspective also implies that interventions to facilitate engagement andimprove learning rates of non-dominant students cannot rely solely on the alignmentof students’ cultural backgrounds with the classroom culture. Learners can challengeor ignore the classroom culture, and as I explained earlier, they also cross culturalboundaries on a regular basis. Moreover, cultural boundaries carry learning potentialthat can be leveraged to design learning interventions (Akkerman and Bakker 2011).I will return to these issues in the next section of the article.
I argue that future research on learning and ability differences will benefit fromexamining the interplay of these three layers of culture in the educational experi-ences of various groups of students, including racial minority learners and studentswith disabilities. This will enable researchers to disentangle conceptual confusionsabout the idea of culture and the limiting ways in which it has been examined tounderstand the role of culture in disability. Shifting the analytic focus in the way Ihave suggested will allow us to understand how culture is produced and reproducedat the intersections of what people bring and what is already there; how children’sand teachers’ actions, reactions, and improvisations nurture within-group diversity,and how historical sedimentations of institutional practices shape participationopportunities in schools. In other words, this unit of analysis will assist us to avoidthe theoretical traps of traditional understandings of culture. As a case in point, Idraw from core ideas of the framework I outlined in the preceding sections to cri-tique the work on RTI, with the hope that this discussion will illustrate the potentialapplicability of this standpoint on culture.
A second look at RTI through a cultural lensRTI aspires to reframe how educational systems respond to the needs of all students,with an emphasis on the prevention of school failure. A clear implication of thisfocus is the strengthening of the interface between general and special education,particularly for students with LDs and to a lesser extent with E/BDs (Vaughn andFuchs 2003). It offers nothing less than re-framing responses to struggling learners,using a public health logic in which prevention, early intervention, and ongoing databased performance monitoring are the hallmarks. Levels of increasing intensity andindividualization are built in the educational system as students’ responses to inter-ventions are tracked. Although there is considerable variability in how the RTI para-digm is operationalized, a few key features can be identified.
Several levels comprise RTI models, typically three (Fuchs, Fuchs, and Compton2012). Level 1 encompasses instructional strategies for all students, with the use ofsystematic screening and ongoing monitoring of performance to identify strugglinglearners who might need attention in Level 2 – which entails a more intense form ofintervention in small group formats, ranging between eight and 16 weeks of treat-ment. The last step in the ladder (i.e. Level 3) is special education. In order to work,RTI must be delivered with a high level of fidelity. “A central assumption is thatresponsiveness to treatment can differentiate between two explanations for lowachievement: poor instruction versus disability” (Fuchs 2002, 521). RTI also prom-ises to reduce special education identification rates and the longstanding racializationof disability through better (and instructionally valid) identification technologies.The available research evidence on this point, however, is not conclusive. To illus-trate, a recent RTI study conducted in seven school districts in south-western UnitedStates reported “there were no changes in the percentages of students representing
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various ethnic groups over time” (Wanzek and Vaughn 2011, 173). VanderHeyden,Witt, and Gilbertson (2007) concluded that “before and after [RTI] implementation,the proportion of evaluated minority students deviated substantially from theexpected proportion but no particular pattern emerged” (250) (see alsoLinan-Thompson 2010).
The analysis of RTI’s attention to the cultures represented IN classrooms andschools shows intriguing patterns. First, RTI is generally conceptualized to stressonly one aspect of a student’s identity, namely a learner of academic content inwhich learning is defined as a cognitive phenomenon. After all, RTI’s logic is thatstudents learn (or fail to learn) due to either instructional quality or disability. Thus,intersections with other student identity dimensions are not accounted for, with oneexception. There is a small set of RTI studies that have included English LanguageLearners (ELLs) or Dual-Language Learners.3 In these studies, the intersection oflanguage acquisition with learning academic content purportedly receives attention,though it is not clear whether there is consensus on the theoretical tenets that shouldinform this line of research. Moreover, there are substantial gaps and limitations inthis research. For instance, Gutierrez, Zepeda, and Castro (2010) concluded thatDual-Language Learners “remain largely understudied, often excluded from studiesof early learning and among the least understood from a policy perspective. Whenincluded, these children often are subsumed under a broader ‘at-risk’ category, mak-ing it difficult to understand underlying learning processes or to tease out relevantdifferences and factors” (334). Moreover, there is considerable heterogeneity in thispopulation that tends to be erased in many studies – e.g. social class differences, lit-eracy levels in either language, uses of L1 and L2, and even citizenship (79% ofchildren of immigrant families are US citizens) (Gutierrez, Zepeda, and Castro2010). At the same time, the increasing governmentality of immigration (Fassin2011) likely impinge upon immigrant families’ participation in research projects.
These are important considerations as these limitations pose substantial barriersto the generation of knowledge with this population. Lack of theoretical consensuson the intersections of language and disability could render RTI studies that merelysampled students with district-sanctioned labels (e.g. ELL, Limited EnglishProficient [LEP]) and applied instructional interventions that were simply translatedfrom research on early literacy development with monolingual English speakers.RTI studies could also be produced in which sampling of ELLs is carefully done toaccount for generational differences, proficiency levels in English and L1, literacydevelopment in L1 and L2, and other key demographic markers such as social classand ethnicity. RTI studies with Dual Language Learners will need to account for keyaspects that have been neglected in prior investigations with this population, such asthe role of opportunities to learn (beyond exposure to tier 1 interventions) in literacylearning, how L1 supports the acquisition of L2, how literacy skills in L1 transfer toL2, and the mediating effects of socio-emotional development in L2 and literacyacquisition across languages (Gutierrez, Zepeda, and Castro 2010). Having an RTIknowledge base with such disparate theoretical and methodological characteristicscomplicates the aggregation of knowledge on this population. In addition, interven-tions could be designed to account for the “connected” nature of learning in whichsome key design principles are included, such as interventions that leverage peersupports, are interest-powered, openly networked, and production-centered (Ito et al.2013). These developments in instructional design from the learning sciences couldmake a substantial contribution to interventions used in RTI, even if a standardized
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protocol is used. Let us also remember that student identity intersections are not fos-silized demographic markers; indeed they are fluid and dynamic. Information aboutthese intersections could be used to inform or enrich RTI screening practices orintervention components. The focus for screening and intervention measures wouldbe the unique sociocultural circumstances of the communities served in schools,instead of stereotypical assumptions about various groups.
Research methods are critical in this discussion. Qualitative studies about stu-dents’ identity kaleidoscopes promise to offer us insights about how learners borrow,trade, and transform linguistic, cognitive, and social tools from their peers, popularculture, and school knowledge cultures. This means that screening and interventionswill not target exclusively the mapping of skill sets from pre-defined “diversegroups” or “high or low performers;” rather this mapping process should also beconcerned with documenting “repertoires of practices and tools” that do not haveneatly delineated language, ethnic, or other traditional boundaries (Gutierrez andRogoff 2003). The selection of research methods should also take into account theinterpretive layer of culture and the situated nature of data collection efforts sincestudy participants actively try to make sense of what researchers are trying to dowhen presenting tasks, questions, or other data collection procedures. An interestinglesson on this point is illustrated in a recent study. Viruell-Fuentes et al. (2011)found that language of interview makes a difference in the quality and accuracy ofdata collected about the health status of Latinos(as). Although public health mea-sures of Latino health show an equal or stronger condition than Whites, Latino self-reports show the opposite pattern. Viruell-Fuentes et al. (2011) found that “transla-tion of the English word ‘fair’ to ‘regular’ induces Spanish-language respondents toreport poorer health than they would in English” (1306). The word “regular” inSpanish has a more negative connotation in some Latin American countries than theword “fair.”
Let us now shift our attention to the second layer of the framework I have out-lined, namely the canonical classroom culture. There is a wealth of research on thecanonical classroom culture that dates back to at least the middle of the twentiethcentury. Historical, institutional, and technical aspects interlace in the constitution ofthe canonical classroom culture. As explained earlier, the canonical culture regulatesteacher Q&A practices, preferred narrative styles, turn-taking procedures, compe-tence criteria, and behavioral rules. Although there is variability in the number andtypes of classroom activity segments, the preeminence of the IRE recitation script isincreasingly apparent as students move to higher grades. Indeed, the “range of class-room activities is greatly reduced and the recitation script is fully implemented asthe normative cultural order of the classroom” (Gallego, Cole, and LCHC 2001,964). Moreover, “becoming a student is a process of cultural conditioning in whichchildren are pressed to adopt the way of life of the classroom (the classroom culture)as their own” (965).
RTI aspires to become a central component, if not, the canonical classroom cul-ture, as teachers set up and orchestrate conditions to provide instruction to all stu-dents. This includes (a) the core program, (b) classroom routines that are meant toprovide opportunity for instructional differentiation, (c) accommodations that inprinciple permit virtually all students access to the primary prevention program, and(d) problem-solving strategies for addressing students’ motivation and behavior(Fuchs, Fuchs, and Compton 2012, 265). Potential for trouble arises, however, dueto several issues. First, as I explained, RTI addresses the cultures IN the classroom
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in a narrow fashion. This shortcoming could impinge upon the motivational and rel-evance power of interventions because learners’ capabilities, resources, and needswould be defined in limited ways, most likely missing sets of abilities, practices andskills that these learners bring or develop in the classroom, but that are not withinthe perception or attention fields of traditional RTI practices.
Second, researchers have identified several issues with screenings and assess-ments used in primary and secondary interventions. For instance, studies have found“unacceptably high rates of false positives (or students who appear at risk but arenot) with one-stage screens, particularly in the early grades” (Fuchs, Fuchs, andCompton 2012, 266). Similarly, Linan-Thompson (2010) identified RTI assessmentproblems with ELLs; she concluded that
relying on a single measure as a benchmark is misguided. If teachers rely on this mea-sure to make decisions about who needs instructional support, they may over identifystudents in the early grades for Tier 2 interventions denying them the opportunity per-haps, to develop higher levels of academic language if they are tracked needlessly intoa Tier 2 reading intervention rather spending time in content areas. They may also missthose students who read fluently but do not comprehend what they read. (973)
This means that students are not only narrowly defined by the range of acceptableresponses built into specific assessment tasks, but they are also susceptible to beingmisclassified by the very tools of this paradigm. The view of culture in which thismanuscript is grounded implies that knowledge, level of development, or expertiseis a situated notion that vary depending on what people do and who is involved insuch performance (Cole 1996; French 2012). Thus, the challenge for RTI is todevelop assessment procedures and tools that are sensitive to these culturalconsiderations.
Moreover, the conditions and contexts of the traditional canonical culture ofclassrooms have been transformed substantially in the last 20 years, too often for theworse. As I alluded to briefly in the introduction of this article, societal inequalitieshave deepened in the last generation, which affect the kinds of educational opportu-nities available to so-called culturally different learners (Harvey 2003). Lowerschool funding, lower teacher quality, low level curricula, mounting accountabilitypressures at a time of depleting resources for teachers and administrators, high childpoverty rates, and an unprecedented influx of immigrant students and ELLs in urbanand rural districts are only a few examples of the conditions under which the canoni-cal classroom culture is being enacted in many public schools today. In addition,many policies have created paradoxical situations for school personnel as these man-dates exert pressure to create and maintain equitable conditions with no supply ofresources to achieve these laudable goals. This state of affairs has deepened inequal-ities for non-dominant learners as the canonical classroom culture has shrunk its nor-mative scope through a curriculum driven by testing results and coercive practicesthat aim to erase professional judgment and maintain total control of student behav-ior. Unfortunately, we do not have research data on how RTI is interfacing with thiscontemporary version of the canonical classroom culture, though there is some evi-dence about how schools are appropriating RTI in the midst of the current historicalconditions of the canonical classroom culture. For example, Doug Fuchs andcolleagues (2012) described implementation variability surrounding RTI that speaksto this point. They said RTI
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can include one tier or as many as six or seven tiers. Tiers designated by the samenumber may represent different services in different schools. In School A, for example,Tier 2 may involve peer tutoring in the mainstream classroom; in School B, it signifiesadult-led small-group tutoring in the auxiliary gym. Varying criteria define “responsive-ness”; varying measures index student performance … Similar inconsistency extendsto the role of special education. In Jenkins et al.’s survey of RTI-implementing teachersand administrators in 62 schools across 17 states, 12 separate approaches weredescribed for serving students [with disabilities] … reflecting different views aboutwhether special education should exist within or outside RTI frameworks, and whatservices it should provide. One constant among the many variants of RTI is that, as anearly intervention and prevention system, it is costly in time and resources. (264)
Orosco and Klingner (2010) also reported that RTI implementation with ELLs seemsto be mediated by a constellation of factors that included teacher factors (e.g. beliefs,knowledge, dispositions about L2), institutional constraints (e.g. opportunities andresources for professional development, negative school culture), and misalignmentsin assessment and between instruction and assessment. The implications of thesetrends for educational equity are obvious. My point is that at a time when the cul-tures IN schools are increasing their complexity and fluidity, and the canonical cul-ture of the classroom is increasingly fraught with structural inequities, RTI seems tobe oblivious to these trends for it ignores kids’ intersectional identities and requiresconsiderable amounts of support.
Let us also consider the third dimension of the proposed framework called“classroom cultureS” (Gallego, Cole, and LCHC 2001). I published with my col-league Elizabeth Kozleski a sociocultural critique of this aspect elsewhere thatexamined what counts as “response” and “intervention” in RTI (Artiles and Kozleski2010). Rather than repeating those points, I share a few reflections about this thirddimension of culture.
Classsroom cultureS refer to the spaces between the canonical classroom cultureand the cultures IN the classroom. Classroom cultureS emerge out of the everydayinteractions among people that share an institutional space. Through multiple andrecurrent interactions, rules are formulated and set (resisted or negotiated), expecta-tions are communicated and challenged, goals are set and redefined, and activitiesget completed or boycotted. As I explained earlier, kids rely on peer and pop cul-tures that defy stereotypical renditions of what students bring to schools from theethnic, linguistic, social class and other communities in which they are immersed.Thus, classroom cultureS represent hybrids of the canonical classroom culture andthe cultures IN the classroom. Through participation in these classroom cultureS,individuals become new kinds of people. A great deal of interpretive work goes intoforging classroom cultureS, though not all of it is done explicitly or deliberately.Efforts have been made to engineer classroom cultureS that are based on a
mixed model in which the overall ethos of the classroom satisfies the goals of diversityand student agency, while it recognizes that self-discipline, excellence, and traditionplay essential roles. The desired mix is attempted by distributing the power, goals, andactivities throughout different participation structures that constitute the learning-teach-ing experience in an effort to change, rather than perpetuate, educational inequitiesamong students along ethnically, economically, or medically defined lines. (Gallego,Cole, and LCHC 2001, 983)
Examples of these efforts include Mike Cole’s work at the Lab for ComparativeHuman Cognition on design experiments and mutual appropriation interventions,Kris Gutierrez’ social design experiments, Luis Moll’s and Norma Gonzalez’ work
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on funds of knowledge, and Carol Lee’s cultural modeling research. These programsof research are grounded in a sociocultural perspective on learning largely influencedby (neo)Vygotskian approaches, and rely on interdisciplinary premises that fore-ground the social origins of learning, the cultural mediation of mental activities, anda primary interest in the study of developmental processes in transition (Moll 2001).Moreover, these programs of research rest on the premise that “individual develop-ment constitutes and is constituted by social and cultural-historical activities andpractices … [In this perspective] culture is not an entity that influences individuals.Instead, people contribute to the creation of cultural processes and cultural processescontribute to the creation of people” (Rogoff 2003, 51, emphasis in original). Thereis also recent work on “connected learning,” which is described as a theoretical para-digm and an intervention framework. Digital media tools play a central role in thedesign and analysis of learning environments grounded in this perspective.Connected learning is described as
socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, orpolitical opportunity. Connected learning is realized when a young person is able topursue a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, andis in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career suc-cess, or civic engagement. This model is based on evidence that the most resilient,adaptive, and effective learning involves individual interest as well as social support toovercome adversity and provide recognition. (Ito et al. 2013, 4)
Other examples are found in intervention approaches based on neo-Vygotskian andactivity theory perspectives that promise to offer viable framings in the organizationof learning that draw from the complex model of culture described in this article(Downing-Wilson, Lecusay, and Cole 2011; Engestrom 2011; Engestrom andSannino 2010).
The challenge is that RTI creates classroom cultureS that are circumscribedaround the roles and participation rules prescribed by the interventions conducted atits different levels and that target specific isolated skills or skill sets, particularly inthe early grades. This is particularly the case when RTI models rely on standardizedprotocols that depend upon scripted participatory frameworks. But we should alsoexpect that multiple classroom cultureS emerge in each level of an RTI system thatdo not necessarily align with the intervention protocols; these cultureS might berelated to what Scott (1990) labeled hidden transcripts, the “discourse that takesplace ‘offstage’, beyond direct observation by powerholders” (4). This is an interest-ing consideration since it means that interventions could be conducted with highfidelity, but with weak ecological validity.4 (Arzubiaga et al. 2008, 320). By thesame token, children’s “offstage” cultural activities may not be aligned either withthe behaviors, skills, or practices ostensibly mapped in intervention protocols.
Indeed, there is a scarcity of research on these “unofficial” classroom cultureS atany of the RTI levels, and how they could afford or constrain the impact of interven-tions. Given the issues I raised, a key challenge is to reconfigure RTI (or any class-room intervention) as a mixed model that integrates strategically the dimensions ofculture I outlined in this manuscript. These ideas also raise complex questions, suchas, what would be required for the design of future interventions, for coding typesof student responses, and for the scalability and sustainability of this approach?
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ConclusionA key message of the analysis presented in this article is that researchers need to bemindful of the ubiquity of culture, as indexed not only in the psyche and routine prac-tices of children and their families, but in the beliefs and theories of educators aboutcompetence that mediate referrals and eligibility decisions, the school practices andassumptions about normal development and behavior, and the cultural codes embed-ded in assessment tools and instructional strategies. This standpoint helps us tran-scend the assumption that culture equals identity badges; instead, it compels us toaccount for the role of culture in learning, and challenges us to question longstandingdominant assumptions about difference. In short, this proposal enables us to rely on aview of culture that honors its dynamic, historical, and dialectical nature.
The challenge to use more complex notions of culture, given the historicalmoment in which we live, will contribute to pursue what Luke (2011) described as a“cultural science of education.” This science is informed by research that builds onsolid theoretical insights about human development, learning, and teaching, as wellas on the latest developments in research methodologies. This research has an inter-disciplinary nature and systematically takes into account the notion of culture.Whether our research focuses on RTI, inclusive education, learning opportunities, oraccountability of educational systems, a “cultural science of education” calls for anapproach that Alan Luke (2011), paraphrasing Dell Hymes described as “a sciencewith the requisite theoretical humility to represent communities’ and cultures’ every-day practices and rights, not to override and overwrite them” (368).
AcknowledgmentsThe author is grateful to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stan-ford University and Universidad Rafael Landívar (Guatemala) for the support and hospitalitythat allowed the ideas presented in this article to be developed and articulated. Earlier ver-sions of this manuscript were presented as the 2011 Educational Review Lecture presented atthe University of Birmingham (UK), the 2011 Edward L. Meyen Distinguished Lecture atthe University of Kansas, and the 2013 Bowen Fellows Lecture Series at Claremont GraduateUniversity. The author is grateful to Kris Gutierrez, Elizabeth Kozleski, Stan Trent, and theSociocultural Research Group for their comments and recommendations. The author assumesresponsibility for the limitations of the article.
Notes1. I use the term “non-dominant” instead of the traditional labels “minority” or “students of
color.” Following Gutierrez (2008), I use the term “non-dominant” to emphasize theoppressive role of power and power relations in the lives of these individuals. Note, how-ever, that this term does not imply that non-dominant students are passively subjected tooppression; indeed, agency and active participation play key roles in the lives of theseindividuals.
2. Globalization is defined as “the integration and disintegration of markets, characterizedby the post-nationalization of production, distribution, and consumption of goods andservices” (Suárez-Orozco et al. 2011, 312).
3. “[L]earners who are acquiring two languages simultaneously or who are developing their pri-mary language as they learn a second language” ( Gutierrez, Zepeda, and Castro 2010, 334)
4. “[T]he extent to which behavior sampled in one setting can be taken as characteristic ofan individual’s cognitive processes in a range of other settings” (Cole 1996, 222). Thiscan be the case because “intervention tasks, procedures, or situations [may not be alignedwith the study] participants’ routine ways to perform or use the cognitive, linguistic, orsocial strategies purportedly tapped by the intervention”.
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