The Acquisition of Cultural Competence: An Ethnographic Framework for Cultural Studies

Curricula

Laurence Kane

Mahsa Farahanynia2016

Cultural studies in the curriculum

• The position of cultural studies in the curriculum of advanced English learners at West German universities, in spite of several recent attempts to secure its role and upgrade its status, is still problematical.

• For the Federal State of Germany, the Ministry responsible for university curricula encountered resistance when it decided to introduce civilisation studies (Landeskunde) in a modest way into the English curriculum for trainee teachers.

Arguments against Landeskunde in West German universities

1. To some extent the negative reaction from the teachers of literature and linguistics since Landeskunde included apparently unrelated elements (e.g., courses on the churches, the political parties, music and art)

2. From a more practical point of view, since there was no significant Landeskunde tradition in university foreign language departments only a limited number of university lecturers were capable of teaching the subject.

3. The lack of library and other research resources very limited opportunities for original research

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The response by the supporters of Landeskunde

1. Strategies of specialization: They have concentrated their attention on one

aspect of civilisation studies, such as history or geography, and the teaching of

civilisation would attach with the scholarly prestige.

Drawback: It fails to satisfy some of the needs which courses in civilisation

studies should arguably provide for. (For instance, using history as a substitute

for Landeskunde will not provide sufficient opportunities either to practice the

language or to acquire knowledge about contemporary usage)

The response by the supporters of Landeskunde …

2. Use of cultural studies:

Cultural studies are concerned

with the way belief systems

are realised in a social

context;

Interplay

Macro level of society(social groups and communities, and

the larger social background)

Contemporary society

Micro level of society (the small-scale interaction of individuals)

The replacement of Landeskunde with cultural studies

• The redefinition implies that the older view of it as being completely restricted to providing ancillary services for linguistics and literature is inadequate, and that it has to be considered as much a subject in its own right as literature and linguistics.

• In fact, after examining the implications of the definition of cultural studies, it becomes evident that the mix of texts provided by cultural studies indeed provides excellent systematic language learning opportunities in a wide variety of contexts.

Sociological Approaches to Culture Research

• Sociological approaches emphasize the role of belief systems, and the interplay

between everyday life and macro-level social forces.

• Traditional definition: The older totalising views of culture as the entire way

of life of a people, including technology and material artefacts or everything one

would need to know to become a functioning member of society.

Sociological Approaches (cont.)

Approach 1Symbolic definition: The symbolic view of culture as 'beliefs, ritual practices and artforms' through which people experience and express meaning (Swidler 1986) (However, this definition excludes material artefacts or technological products, even though these can be the object of fetishistic and/or ritualistic cultural use.) Emphasizes cognitive basis of psychological processes

• From the curricular point of view, the focus on the symbolic meaning of cultural behaviour can be a useful guide to the selection of material. It provides a rationale for developing self-contained units in the curriculum since culture is seen as a 'tool-kit' of symbols, stories, rituals and world-views.

Sociological Approaches (cont.)Approach 2: • This approach emphasises the interplay of class systems and established

institutions with the symbolic 'tool-kit' in order to fully appreciate how cultural processes function.

• For instance, applying these ideas to a particular topic, to working-class culture in Great Britain, involves mapping out the cultural resources available to members of the working class in the forms of values, and lifestyles and relating these to the institutional and other macro-level constraints.

Sociological Approaches (cont.)

Approach 3: Ethnographic approach

• It implies a close attention to the density, the 'thickness’ of everyday

interaction within a given social setting. Emphasizes action rather than

pure cognition

• For instance, Willis combines an ethnographic investigation into tough

working-class kids with an explanation of how the culture they create

functions symbolically in the wider context of capitalism.

Regarding cultural studies curricula

• Regarding cultural studies curricula, three questions are raised:

1. What are the level of abstraction at which social problems should be set?

2. What is the problem of authenticity in cultural studies?

3. What is the problem of bias in cultural studies?

Regarding Level of Abstraction• Traditional approaches to civilisation/cultural studies have seldom given

systematic consideration to the question of whether a social question should be approached at a micro-level through oral histories, accounts of personal experience and so on or at an institutional level.

• Institutional or generalising approaches tend to fail to suggest the density and the contradictoriness of actual experience, while the more detailed accounts leave behind a feeling of randomness or arbitrariness.

• The ethnographic/symbolic approach gives a rationale for providing richly detailed accounts of everyday life. The detail is necessary to understand the functioning of the cultural process in a clearly defined area of everyday life since culture is realised through the tangible experiences of everyday life.

Regarding Level of Abstraction (cont.)

• What the ethnographer is in fact faced with. . . is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular and inexplicit, and full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render.

• It means that behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behavior or more precisely, social action that cultural forms find articulation.

• Whatever, or wherever, symbol systems 'in their own terms', may be, we gain empirical access to them by inspecting events, not by arranging abstracted entities into unified patterns 'microscopic‘ view

What approach is appropriate for cultural courses?

• Supplementing the 'microscopic' point of view of ethnographic approach with

the symbolic approach will induce awareness of social embedding of micro-

patterns and of relationships between the economic base and ideological

practices.

The drawback of the dual ethnographic/symbolic approach

• This approach seems to overburden the curriculum, regarding the relatively low priority and the limited time available to cultural studies within the university.

• The consequence must be to concentrate courses, apart from a small number of introductory lectures on small sectors of social life which offer the opportunity to combine the ethnographic and the symbolic approach.

• Courses might focus on studies of working-class culture, the culture of young people, the culture of leisure, the culture of racial minorities, and the social agents which are concerned with the transmission of ideology, for example the school system, the family and the mass media.

Regarding Authenticity and Bias• Inauthentic materials are those which project an inaccurate picture of a society,

though not necessarily through ill-will or bias.

• Major causes of inauthenticity

1. The lack of access to up-to-date materials.

Financial problems and the complexity of the publishing process certainly play a part here, but interactions between the culture's own autostereotype (the inconsistency of a culture's own self-image with reality) and foreign cultures’ heterostereotypes (the insistence on certain cultural images) on the part of education ministries, publishers and teachers may be misleading.

Frequently these features were held up uncritically for admiration, and sometimes for derision.

2. The expectation that the behaviour of one class as representative for all classes. This attitude affects both autostereotypes and heterostereotype.

Is the ethnographic/symbolic approach helpful?

• The ethnographic/symbolic approach does at least potentially offer some help here through its insistence on the importance of detail and by keeping textbook authors and students in touch with the result of ongoing research.

• There might, however, be some danger of replacing one stereotype by another if the range of topics becomes too limited.

• The ethnographic/symbolic approach should also be effective in countering charges of bias.

(to falsify the image of a country as a utopia (e.g. 'Merry Old England', America as the country of unlimited opportunity, etc.) or as an anti-utopia. )

A Taxonomy of Cultural Studies Objectives

• The taxonomy of cultural studies objectives:

1. The theoretical basis of cultural studies,

2. The institutional and social framing of everyday life,

3. Everyday life itself as a field of social action

1. Sub-goals of the theoretical basis of cultural studies

1. Students should be able to recognise the social determination of behaviour

2. Students should be able to recognise that everyday behaviour has symbolic

meanings

3. Students should have some knowledge of basic sociological models.

2. Sub-goals of the institutional and social framework

1. Students should be in a position to recognise differences and similarities between their own and the target society.

2. Students should be in a position to identify some of the characteristic features of the target society.

(in the case of someone who is studying Britain as the target culture this would mean being able to identify key features of the British social system such as the persistence of the class system, the structure of British political life)

2. Sub-goals of the institutional and social framework

3. Students should also be in a position to understand some of the factors which determine the process of change in the target society

(in the case of the student of England this would involve understanding changes in the economic structure, demographic changes due to the influx of immigrants in the post-war era and other changes.)

4. Students should also know something of the social agencies and institutions which are responsible for the transmission of social norms. This would include knowledge of the mass media and the education system, but also of family life.

3. Sub-goals of everyday life 1. Recognizing that there are culture-specific patterns of face-to-face interaction

which members of the target society conform to. This is obviously a fruitful field for comparisons with the students' first culture.

(Among points of comparison could be clothing, eating habits, gestures, proxemics etc.)

2. Recognizing that patterns of everyday interaction are themselves socially conditioned and reflect the larger social matrix.

3. Recognizing that patterns of everyday behaviour may differ by region or by class.

4. Recognizing the significance of the relationships between individual biographies and everyday patterns of behavior

5. Recognizing that patterns of everyday behaviour are complex and require first-hand and intensive study.

Implication of the taxonomy

• Similar or more complete lists of objectives can provide guidance for the

construction of cultural studies curricula and also a guide to the mix of

materials which are required, ranging from standard sociological descriptions

to biographies, autobiographies and oral histories (Kane, 1986).

Concluding words

• It is sometimes implied or explicitly argued that cultural studies in the language

learning context should exclude social and institutional factors and concentrate

on the micro-level of everyday interaction. Even in secondary education I

believe that such a reductive approach, because of its lack of explanatory

power, will fail to stir interest and will lead to a concept of the target culture in

which differences are viewed as peculiarities or eccentricities, and will be a

source of cultural and linguistic misunderstanding. A minimalist stance on

cultural studies would not do justice either to our students or the culture.