Cultural Construction Zones

Abstract

In working with preparatory teachers, we have tried to “place diversity front and center” to help students “see culture” as a prerequisite for culturally responsive teaching. The language arts methods-course students who, like the authors, are White women from middle-or upper-income families, participated in learning opportunities that included writing cultural memoirs, field experiences in diverse settings, and written reflection on the relation between their cultural constructions and those of the students they were teaching. In this article, we turn around the culture question we’ve pushed the students to consider to ourselves: What are we learning about our students as cultural beings that is helping us prepare them more effectively to be culturally responsive teachers? We identified three areas of growth: We reconstructed our understanding of students as complex cultural beings, of ourselves as privileged teachers of the privileged, and of the nature and relationship of resistance and risk.