LET’S TALK about The Cultural Model

WHAZZZZUUUUPPPPP my fellow readers! It’s Jordan again and today I would like to talk more about the Cultural Model in classrooms. To discuss Cultural Modeling Framework I will discuss what I learned from an article I read written by Carol D. Lee titled: ‘Every good‐bye ain’t gone’: Analyzing the cultural underpinnings of classroom talk

Carol D. Lee, is an Associate Professor of Education and Social Policy in the Learning Sciences Program, as well as, of African-American Studies at Northwestern University. She was also previously the president of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy and is currently the Vice President of Division G of the American Educational Research Association. 

In her article published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education her research explains the Cultural Modeling Framework for designing learning environments that achieve deeper conceptual understanding of everyday knowledge using culturally diverse students to support subject-matter specific learning. “It reports a study of Cultural Modeling in the teaching of response to literature in an urban underachieving high school serving African-American students from low-income communities who are also speakers of African-American English”. The study can provide new understandings of how cultural models and practices created in everyday life are taken up through constructive processes inside classrooms. This study is specific for efforts to create learning environments that meet the needs of ethnic and racial minority youth.

The data was collected  from a three-year intervention in an urban high school. The school in this research was selected based on the student population being almost entirely African-American along with the fact that the school was on academic probation due to a history of low academic performance. The intervention involved the use of the Cultural Modeling in Literature curriculum and Carol D. Lee, also, taught one class each of the three years. Overall during the intervention there were quarterly assessments of students’ comprehension of short stories they had not read before, talk-aloud protocols of specific case study students, interviews with both students and faculty, field notes taken of faculty meetings and general activity in the school for each of the three years, as well as extensive video of classroom teaching by all of the English department faculty, including video of my own teaching everyday used to analyze and collect data for research.

The findings include that in Cultural Modeling classrooms students were most deeply engaged in literary debates during the following times (written specifically from the articles findings) 

• call and response
• tonal semantics, including repetition and alliteration; narrative sequencing
• rhythmic, dramatic, evocative language; use of proverbs, aphorisms, Biblical verses
• sermonic tone reminiscent of traditional Black Church rhetoric, especially in vocabulary
•  imagery, metaphor; cultural references, ethnolinguistic idioms
• verbal inventiveness, unique nomenclature
• cultural values–community consciousness
• and field dependency *working better in teams through interpersonal relationships*

Discussions of the research findings provide evidence that the students in this intervention were able to “transfer competences they developed from reasoning about everyday texts to reasoning about canonical literature: from examinations of the quality of reasoning about canonical texts that followed the modeling phase of instruction, from group assessments as well as from talk-aloud protocols of case study students, in both cases reading short stories they had not been taught” (Lee, 2006).  Looking into the case described Lee explains that there may be a broader pattern of practical discussions within the mechanisms of teachings rooted in African-American English and their cultural discourse. Research also shows that it is most productive for learners to make connections between previous knowledge and new targeted learning that being said the article indicates that future research should aim to understand the range of diverse pathways of learning and development that are generative 

However, some limitations may include that the study was done in a classroom of almost all African-American students with similar backgrounds and not in a diverse classroom, future research could also include research of  AAE within more diverse classrooms 

This provides useful information for our research on classroom culture because the Cultural Modeling Framework brings attention to scaffolding students’ everyday knowledge to support discipline-specific learning in schools. This is a unique concept and helps create an open mind in learning about the students cultural funds of knowledge and how to make use of that in classrooms.

References:

Carol D. Lee (2006) ‘Every good‐bye ain’t gone’: analyzing the cultural underpinnings of classroom talk, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19:3, 305-327, DOI: 10.1080/09518390600696729