The importance of technology for making cultural values visible

This article explores the potential for using technological tools to foster teacher understanding of cultural diversity and promote teacher reflection. The authors review several studies in which different technologies were used in ways that allowed implicit teacher and student beliefs to become more explicit and thereby easier to reflect on. These studies were conducted inside and outside of the United States; the uses of technology for reflection are drawn across multiple cultures simultaneously. Three types of technologies are examined in more detail: technological artifacts (such as a software program), multimedia cases, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The authors conclude by examining the implications of the use of these technologies for teacher reflection and belief change. Those implications are also extended into suggestions for changes in preservice teacher education.

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WE CAN NO MORE ESCAPE the influences of our culture than can a fish live out of water. This article argues for the importance of understanding cultural values in both oneself and others, and highlights the special need for teachers to understand that cultural values can be made explicit in classrooms to enhance learning. Specifically, the purpose of this article is to (a) explore ways that technologies can help teachers obtain information and reflect on their own and their students' cultural values and beliefs, and (b) explore possibilities for highlighting cultural values in preservice education programs through technology. We begin by providing examples of the relationship between language and culture to show how miscommunication in classrooms and learning difficulties can occur through cultural mismatches. We then link technology to the study of culture and learning. This leads to implications for teachers and others who have an interest in understanding how technology can be used to make explicit cultural assumptions in classrooms so that teachers can create more culturally responsive learning environments.

Cultural Knowledge

Cultural knowledge--the implicit values and behaviors that form accepted practices within a cultural group--is acquired through lived experience and influences all aspects of our lives. While we can understand and empathize with others who have different cultural backgrounds, our own culture is unique to ourselves even while being shared with members from within the cultural group to which one belongs. (2) In this way, shared expectations and communication can occur within cultural communities while the unique characteristics of background knowledge become a part of each individual.

Consider, for example, how cultural knowledge influences the understanding of two simple sentences:

Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow.

When asked to restate these sentences in their own words, our mainly White, middle-class college students state that this is the beginning of a nursery rhyme, where a little girl and her lamb play together. This explanation is based on knowledge that this is a nursery rhyme common in Western, middle-class culture. The students' interpretations are colored by having had this rhyme read to them as young children (where reading to young children is, of course, also a cultural practice).

Yet there is nothing in the above sentences that leads specifically to a nursery rhyme explanation. Mary could be an adult female having a little lamb for dinner, with the second sentence then being interpreted along the lines of "Its fleece had once been white as snow." Similarly, Mary could be the name of a ewe giving birth to a little lamb with white fleece. While each of these interpretations is possible, the nursery rhyme interpretation is only triggered if one has this frame of reference because of having grown up in a specific culture Not having this frame of reference leads to one or more of the equally logical, alternative explanations

A related example can be drawn from Steffensen, Joag-Dev, and Anderson's (1979) research in which adults from India and from the United States read letters about a wedding in each country. Each group was then asked to interpret the letters and comment on what was happening. Interesting differences resulted due to each group's understanding of its own culture and misinterpretation (based on lack of knowledge) of the other group's culture. For example, when reading, "Did you know that Pam was going to wear her grand. mother's wedding dress? That gave her something old, and something borrowed, too," the Indian readers commented that the bride was wearing a dress that was old and unfashionable, implying they felt sorry that the bride might have been poor. Those readers were unaware of the cultural tradition of bride wearing "something old, something new something borrowed and something blue," which is common in the United States. In similar fashion, the readers from the U.S. misinterpreted information in the letters about the dowry given to the Indian groom's family by the bride's family. The dowry was interpreted as an exchange of gifts (rather than a one-way process) and was related to the gifts given as favors to members of the bridal party by the bride and groom. Similar differences in understanding and interpretation were found between African American and White teenagers who read a passage about "sounding"--an event found in African American communities in which participants exchange insults in a game of one-upsmanship. African American teenagers thought the passage involved a nonthreatening game, while White teenagers viewed the passage as describing a potentially violent confrontation (Reynolds, Taylor, Steffensen, Shirey, & Anderson, 1981).