酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Culturally or Ideologocally Contested Pedagogy ?
Review of Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents

Author: Li, Guofang*
Year: c2006
Printed: Albany, N.Y. : State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0-7914-6593-4, ib., 0-7914-6594-2, h.
Pages: xvi, 265 s ill.

*Dr. Guofang Li, a Chinese native, is an associate professor of second language and literacy education in the Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan in 2000 and was a post-doctoral fellow (SSHRC) at the University of British Columbia during 2000-2001, during which time she conducted a year-long ethnographic investigation into the home-school divide about literacy practices and educational goals between Canadian mainstream teachers and Chinese immigrant parents. Dr. Li is an emerging scholar who has been dedicating her career to debunk the “model minority myth”, the popular idea that Asian students -- Chinese students, in particular -- are, by nature, better equipped to succeed academically than other minority groups in the U.S. and Canada. "The presentation of Asians as a 'model minority,'" emphasizes Li,” reinforces the 'blame the victim' approach to minority students' failure. It promotes the 'invisibility' of troubled students and disguises the social realities of many children who are not academically successful."


Review:


“When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” This was one of the first English sayings I memorized, and I accepted its claim with no doubt when I memorized it because there was a Chinese saying expressing the same attitude, “Learn the customs of a new place when one goes and lives there.” Now, almost three decades later, I, as a member of a minority group in Canada, have become less sure of its claim mainly because of the uneven power relations among minority groups and dominant groups. How should we understand this English saying in the Canadian context, with its rapid demographic change? To answer this challenging question, Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents, is a fascinating, timely investigation into the home-school divide about literacy practices and educational goals between mainstream teachers and Chinese immigrant parents. This book focuses on a Vancouver suburb, Richmond, where the Chinese population constitutes more than one third of its population and surpasses the white community numerically and socioeconomically, but not politically, and where the author uncovers disturbing cultural conflicts, educational dissensions, and "silent" power struggles between teachers and parents.

Taking an ethnographic approach and well-grounded in socio-constructivist educational theories that view literacy learning as situated practice shaping and being shaped by the contexts of learners and educators, Guofang Li spent one-year in classroom observation and interviewing teachers, students, and parents. Her book reveals disturbing cultural conflicts and power struggles between mainstream school teachers and middle- and upper-class Chinese immigrant parents. The subjects of the book demonstrate that many white, middle-class teachers believed that student-centered and meaning-based teaching was the most effective approach, while many Chinese immigrant parents believed that teacher-centered, skill-focused teaching was far better.

More worrisome, although they have a strong sense of responsibility to assist their Chinese students and a passion for their teaching, the focal teachers in her study had no idea about the students’ home literacy practices and about their parents’ cultural beliefs about literacy learning and academic success while they unwaveringly cling to their de-contextualized universalist view about the “holistic” approach even when parents complained numerous times. Frustrated by the Canadian education system and anxious about their children’s academic performance and more importantly, because of a lack of cultural understanding and adjustment to the mainstream language of education and pedagogy, Chinese parents employed whatever financial means they could get to make up for what they found dissatisfaction in Canadian public schools: hiring tutors or going to the tutoring schools after classes to enhance their children’s learning. Li found a lack of effective communication between teachers and parents, which resulted in opposition between them. As a result of these ongoing battles between teachers and parents, eight focal students in her study have still struggled with their literacy learning and identity development.

An illustrating example is the dispute about the reading homework that teachers assigned. Li found most Chinese parents didn’t read with their children the English books while asking and monitoring their children to work on the homework the tutors assigned. From the teachers’ point of view, Chinese parents didn’t take responsibility to help their children with their homework, and worse, they over-programmed their children to do a lot of after-school activities, which hindered children’s learning and adjusting in school. From the parents’ point of view, they didn’t think it was fair of the teachers to rely on them to teach their children English because they were not native-speakers and they didn’t want their children to pick up their accents, and more importantly, they didn’t think reading assignments could be viewed as homework. Therefore, out of frustration with teachers and anxiety over their children’s academic performance, they programmed their children to a lot of after-school activities. In my view, this dispute could easily be solved by a comprised approach: that is to hire native English speakers to read with children that will help children and parents with their English and give them a good opportunity to have social contact with people outside their ethnic world and to learn something valuable and relevant to their immigrant life here.

Li examines this issue of Chinese immigrant children’s literacy experiences not only from a socio-cultural but also from an acculturative perspective, which includes an examination of the larger context of demographic changes and the evolving relationship between school authorities and immigrant families. Instead of blaming either side, she promotes a contextualized pedagogy of cultural reciprocity that will bring educators and parents together as partners. Her suggestions include the idea that teachers modify their pedagogies to respond to parents’ beliefs such as giving direct instruction, and that teachers can use students’ home language and culture to facilitate their learning at school. She also advocates for informed parent/educator cooperation and mutual accommodation in order to bridge the cultural gap between home and school, which is a crucial step to empower students and to ease their learning difficulties. In her view, “achieving a plural consciousness and cultivating pedagogy of cultural reciprocity … requires us to abandon the binary oppositions that prevail in the dominant educational canon.”

Recent drastic demographic changes in schools due to the influx of immigrants has exerted great pressure for the schools to resolve the increasingly educational failure of minority students; although some scholars have given empirical attention to the cultural disruptions and beliefs between home and school that directly hinder the linguistic, cultural, psychological, and thus academic developments of children, those conclusions and suggestions that researchers offer have not trickled down to the applied fields -- schools -- and frontline teachers. Li’s book documents a timely and fascinating ethnographic study of bridging the home-school divide in the case of middle-class Chinese immigrant children, and it reminds teachers, schools, parents, and researchers that they need to establish reciprocal partnerships and make informed negotiations of meaning both at home and in school. More importantly, her study makes a case about “literacy as situated practice” that is characterized by constructive, communal, and cultural ways of learning and doing.

However, there is a disturbing tendency in Li’s way of framing the battles of literacy and schooling between mainstream teachers and Chinese immigrant parents:

First of all, the subtitle of the book seems to be mistitled and thus, it is misleading. Throughout her book, she focuses exclusively on the study about the conflicting cultural beliefs about schooling and literacy practices between two mainstream teachers and eight Chinese immigrant families, and nowhere in her book does she mention any of the non-Chinese Asian families’ literacy practices and learning experiences. The word “Asian” used in the subtitle reveals her, or at least the publisher’s, conformist attitude to North American politics of lumping minority groups together.

Secondly, at the time of her study at the University of British Columbia, she finished her doctoral research on Chinese immigrant families’ bicultural literacy practices and socialization in Saskatoon and she stayed in Canada for at least five years, during which time she has gained enough knowledge about the history of Chinese immigrants in Canada. However, in the first two pages of the introductory chapter that portrays her first-time experience of living in Vancouver where more than one third of its population is Chinese, the way she describes her experience as “a state of cultural shock” stemming from the “overwhelming” Chinese presence in Vancouver is comparable to the viewpoint of a unskilled mainstream scholar doing his/her first time research in Chinese immigrant family issues. Furthermore, in Chapter Two entitled The City, the school, and the Families, the way she presents the social, cultural, demographic, and historical contexts of her study subjects, in some aspects, particularly in the representation of Chinese “overwhelming and even intrusive presence” in Vancouver, is comparable to the viewpoint of Canadian mainstream media that often prejudge against Chinese people, which is well-documented in Frances Henry and Carol Tator’s Discourses of Domination: Racial Bias in the Canadian English-Language Press.

Finally, for a scholar who adopts the social constructivist approach to her study subjects and who views literacy as situated practice, it is disturbingly surprising to find that Li doesn’t put Chinese immigrant parents’ educational aspirations and expectations into the ideological and political contexts of BC’s Traditional Schooling Movement. Since the mid-1990s, BC’s public education system experienced a significant political challenge from highly organized, activist parents advocating the creation of “traditional schools.” Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction and using research literature and interviewing data from key persons in Traditional Schooling Movement, Cecilia Kalaw, in her master’s thesis entitled Traditional Schooling as Parents’ Rights Movement in British Columbia, examines the emergence of parent groups and “choice” advocacy organizations that collectively form BC’s Traditional Schooling Movement and the movement’s impact on the public education system. Some Chinese immigrant parents play a visible, yet not significant role in the movement because of a lack of enough political clouts and the historically-held racist attitude against Chinese people in British Columbia, which is “subtly” documented in Jane Gaskell’s journal article entitled The ‘Public” in Public Schools: A School Board Debate. In Li’s most foundational chapter, Chapter Two, she says nothing about this movement that mainstream Canadian parents, mainly middle-class parents, launched. On pages 42-43, it is again disturbingly surprising to find that she mentions only Chinese immigrant parents’ several attempts at introducing Chinese courses and a traditional schooling model into the public education system. Her description of Chinese immigrant parents “aggressive” approach to change the unsatisfactory Canadian education system reinforces the stereotyped images of the Chinese immigrants, dichotomising the whole issue between ill-adjusted immigrant parents and mainstream teachers

In a nutshell, on the one hand, I truly appreciate Guofang Li’s focused attention on Chinese immigrant families’ literacy practices, cultural beliefs about schooling, and English learning barriers, which open up an educational forum to challenge the mainstream discourses about literacy and schooling; particularly at a the time of cutting back the number of ESL teachers and diverting already not enough ELS founding elsewhere, her view about literacy as situated practice will significantly challenge mainstream teachers’ uncritical acception of the de-contextualized “holistic” approach to literacy practice, which teach English and literacy from the viewpoint of native English speakers. On the other hand, the way she frames and represents the conflicting views between mainstream teachers and Chinese immigrant parents fails part of her epistemological goal – “abandoning the binary oppositions that prevail in the dominant educational canon.” More badly, it dichotomises the battles of literacy and schooling between ill-adjusted immigrant parents and mainstream teachers, distorting the big picture of Traditional Schooling Movement in the context of globalization and mobilization of human and capital resources.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Culturally or Ideologocally Contested Pedagogy ?
Review of Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents

Author: Li, Guofang*
Year: c2006
Printed: Albany, N.Y. : State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0-7914-6593-4, ib., 0-7914-6594-2, h.
Pages: xvi, 265 s ill.

*Dr. Guofang Li, a Chinese native, is an associate professor of second language and literacy education in the Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan in 2000 and was a post-doctoral fellow (SSHRC) at the University of British Columbia during 2000-2001, during which time she conducted a year-long ethnographic investigation into the home-school divide about literacy practices and educational goals between Canadian mainstream teachers and Chinese immigrant parents. Dr. Li is an emerging scholar who has been dedicating her career to debunk the “model minority myth”, the popular idea that Asian students -- Chinese students, in particular -- are, by nature, better equipped to succeed academically than other minority groups in the U.S. and Canada. "The presentation of Asians as a 'model minority,'" emphasizes Li,” reinforces the 'blame the victim' approach to minority students' failure. It promotes the 'invisibility' of troubled students and disguises the social realities of many children who are not academically successful."


Review:


“When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” This was one of the first English sayings I memorized, and I accepted its claim with no doubt when I memorized it because there was a Chinese saying expressing the same attitude, “Learn the customs of a new place when one goes and lives there.” Now, almost three decades later, I, as a member of a minority group in Canada, have become less sure of its claim mainly because of the uneven power relations among minority groups and dominant groups. How should we understand this English saying in the Canadian context, with its rapid demographic change? To answer this challenging question, Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents, is a fascinating, timely investigation into the home-school divide about literacy practices and educational goals between mainstream teachers and Chinese immigrant parents. This book focuses on a Vancouver suburb, Richmond, where the Chinese population constitutes more than one third of its population and surpasses the white community numerically and socioeconomically, but not politically, and where the author uncovers disturbing cultural conflicts, educational dissensions, and "silent" power struggles between teachers and parents.

Taking an ethnographic approach and well-grounded in socio-constructivist educational theories that view literacy learning as situated practice shaping and being shaped by the contexts of learners and educators, Guofang Li spent one-year in classroom observation and interviewing teachers, students, and parents. Her book reveals disturbing cultural conflicts and power struggles between mainstream school teachers and middle- and upper-class Chinese immigrant parents. The subjects of the book demonstrate that many white, middle-class teachers believed that student-centered and meaning-based teaching was the most effective approach, while many Chinese immigrant parents believed that teacher-centered, skill-focused teaching was far better.

More worrisome, although they have a strong sense of responsibility to assist their Chinese students and a passion for their teaching, the focal teachers in her study had no idea about the students’ home literacy practices and about their parents’ cultural beliefs about literacy learning and academic success while they unwaveringly cling to their de-contextualized universalist view about the “holistic” approach even when parents complained numerous times. Frustrated by the Canadian education system and anxious about their children’s academic performance and more importantly, because of a lack of cultural understanding and adjustment to the mainstream language of education and pedagogy, Chinese parents employed whatever financial means they could get to make up for what they found dissatisfaction in Canadian public schools: hiring tutors or going to the tutoring schools after classes to enhance their children’s learning. Li found a lack of effective communication between teachers and parents, which resulted in opposition between them. As a result of these ongoing battles between teachers and parents, eight focal students in her study have still struggled with their literacy learning and identity development.

An illustrating example is the dispute about the reading homework that teachers assigned. Li found most Chinese parents didn’t read with their children the English books while asking and monitoring their children to work on the homework the tutors assigned. From the teachers’ point of view, Chinese parents didn’t take responsibility to help their children with their homework, and worse, they over-programmed their children to do a lot of after-school activities, which hindered children’s learning and adjusting in school. From the parents’ point of view, they didn’t think it was fair of the teachers to rely on them to teach their children English because they were not native-speakers and they didn’t want their children to pick up their accents, and more importantly, they didn’t think reading assignments could be viewed as homework. Therefore, out of frustration with teachers and anxiety over their children’s academic performance, they programmed their children to a lot of after-school activities. In my view, this dispute could easily be solved by a comprised approach: that is to hire native English speakers to read with children that will help children and parents with their English and give them a good opportunity to have social contact with people outside their ethnic world and to learn something valuable and relevant to their immigrant life here.

Li examines this issue of Chinese immigrant children’s literacy experiences not only from a socio-cultural but also from an acculturative perspective, which includes an examination of the larger context of demographic changes and the evolving relationship between school authorities and immigrant families. Instead of blaming either side, she promotes a contextualized pedagogy of cultural reciprocity that will bring educators and parents together as partners. Her suggestions include the idea that teachers modify their pedagogies to respond to parents’ beliefs such as giving direct instruction, and that teachers can use students’ home language and culture to facilitate their learning at school. She also advocates for informed parent/educator cooperation and mutual accommodation in order to bridge the cultural gap between home and school, which is a crucial step to empower students and to ease their learning difficulties. In her view, “achieving a plural consciousness and cultivating pedagogy of cultural reciprocity … requires us to abandon the binary oppositions that prevail in the dominant educational canon.”

Recent drastic demographic changes in schools due to the influx of immigrants has exerted great pressure for the schools to resolve the increasingly educational failure of minority students; although some scholars have given empirical attention to the cultural disruptions and beliefs between home and school that directly hinder the linguistic, cultural, psychological, and thus academic developments of children, those conclusions and suggestions that researchers offer have not trickled down to the applied fields -- schools -- and frontline teachers. Li’s book documents a timely and fascinating ethnographic study of bridging the home-school divide in the case of middle-class Chinese immigrant children, and it reminds teachers, schools, parents, and researchers that they need to establish reciprocal partnerships and make informed negotiations of meaning both at home and in school. More importantly, her study makes a case about “literacy as situated practice” that is characterized by constructive, communal, and cultural ways of learning and doing.

However, there is a disturbing tendency in Li’s way of framing the battles of literacy and schooling between mainstream teachers and Chinese immigrant parents:

First of all, the subtitle of the book seems to be mistitled and thus, it is misleading. Throughout her book, she focuses exclusively on the study about the conflicting cultural beliefs about schooling and literacy practices between two mainstream teachers and eight Chinese immigrant families, and nowhere in her book does she mention any of the non-Chinese Asian families’ literacy practices and learning experiences. The word “Asian” used in the subtitle reveals her, or at least the publisher’s, conformist attitude to North American politics of lumping minority groups together.

Secondly, at the time of her study at the University of British Columbia, she finished her doctoral research on Chinese immigrant families’ bicultural literacy practices and socialization in Saskatoon and she stayed in Canada for at least five years, during which time she has gained enough knowledge about the history of Chinese immigrants in Canada. However, in the first two pages of the introductory chapter that portrays her first-time experience of living in Vancouver where more than one third of its population is Chinese, the way she describes her experience as “a state of cultural shock” stemming from the “overwhelming” Chinese presence in Vancouver is comparable to the viewpoint of a unskilled mainstream scholar doing his/her first time research in Chinese immigrant family issues. Furthermore, in Chapter Two entitled The City, the school, and the Families, the way she presents the social, cultural, demographic, and historical contexts of her study subjects, in some aspects, particularly in the representation of Chinese “overwhelming and even intrusive presence” in Vancouver, is comparable to the viewpoint of Canadian mainstream media that often prejudge against Chinese people, which is well-documented in Frances Henry and Carol Tator’s Discourses of Domination: Racial Bias in the Canadian English-Language Press.

Finally, for a scholar who adopts the social constructivist approach to her study subjects and who views literacy as situated practice, it is disturbingly surprising to find that Li doesn’t put Chinese immigrant parents’ educational aspirations and expectations into the ideological and political contexts of BC’s Traditional Schooling Movement. Since the mid-1990s, BC’s public education system experienced a significant political challenge from highly organized, activist parents advocating the creation of “traditional schools.” Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction and using research literature and interviewing data from key persons in Traditional Schooling Movement, Cecilia Kalaw, in her master’s thesis entitled Traditional Schooling as Parents’ Rights Movement in British Columbia, examines the emergence of parent groups and “choice” advocacy organizations that collectively form BC’s Traditional Schooling Movement and the movement’s impact on the public education system. Some Chinese immigrant parents play a visible, yet not significant role in the movement because of a lack of enough political clouts and the historically-held racist attitude against Chinese people in British Columbia, which is “subtly” documented in Jane Gaskell’s journal article entitled The ‘Public” in Public Schools: A School Board Debate. In Li’s most foundational chapter, Chapter Two, she says nothing about this movement that mainstream Canadian parents, mainly middle-class parents, launched. On pages 42-43, it is again disturbingly surprising to find that she mentions only Chinese immigrant parents’ several attempts at introducing Chinese courses and a traditional schooling model into the public education system. Her description of Chinese immigrant parents “aggressive” approach to change the unsatisfactory Canadian education system reinforces the stereotyped images of the Chinese immigrants, dichotomising the whole issue between ill-adjusted immigrant parents and mainstream teachers

In a nutshell, on the one hand, I truly appreciate Guofang Li’s focused attention on Chinese immigrant families’ literacy practices, cultural beliefs about schooling, and English learning barriers, which open up an educational forum to challenge the mainstream discourses about literacy and schooling; particularly at a the time of cutting back the number of ESL teachers and diverting already not enough ELS founding elsewhere, her view about literacy as situated practice will significantly challenge mainstream teachers’ uncritical acception of the de-contextualized “holistic” approach to literacy practice, which teach English and literacy from the viewpoint of native English speakers. On the other hand, the way she frames and represents the conflicting views between mainstream teachers and Chinese immigrant parents fails part of her epistemological goal – “abandoning the binary oppositions that prevail in the dominant educational canon.” More badly, it dichotomises the battles of literacy and schooling between ill-adjusted immigrant parents and mainstream teachers, distorting the big picture of Traditional Schooling Movement in the context of globalization and mobilization of human and capital resources.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Champagne]

[[Champagne]]

[ericcoliu]

In her interview with an American education reporter, "Contemporary public perceptions of Chinese and other Asian students are based on reports of their high test scores and high grades when compared to minority groups like black and Latino students in the U.S. and aboriginal groups in Canada," says Li, "and so these students are constructed as 'academic nerds,' 'high-achievers' and the like." She also emphasizes that this stereotype is reinforced by research literature that reports only Asian success stories, and that is destructive for those children whom the schools are failing. "The presentation of Asians as a 'model minority,'" says Li, "reinforces the 'blame the victim' approach to minority students' failure. It promotes the 'invisibility' of troubled students and disguises the social realities of many children who are not academically successful."

Although many Asian students do quite well in school and on standardized tests, Li maintains their success often reflects the additional expensive private schooling provided by upper- and middle-class parents on evenings and weekends. However, only about 30 percent of Chinese Americans have attained middle-class status, most of the Chinese immigrants remain members of the working or lower class, manual labourers with little English proficiency and limited education; thus, they don’t have any resource to enhance their children’ learning when schools fail their children.

The persistence of these ideas about the “model minority” myth, says Li, prevents us from unravelling the social realities of those who face problems in the educational system. Furthermore, she says, they authorize a flat denial of racism and structures of social dominance, and silence those who are not economically successful; more importantly, they have prevented mainstream educators from re-evaluating their pedagogy in order to facilitate minority students’ learning. The devastating consequence of this myth is that minority students often fall through the cracks in overburdened and underfunded public school systems without getting any help.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

In her interview with an American education reporter, "Contemporary public perceptions of Chinese and other Asian students are based on reports of their high test scores and high grades when compared to minority groups like black and Latino students in the U.S. and aboriginal groups in Canada," says Li, "and so these students are constructed as 'academic nerds,' 'high-achievers' and the like." She also emphasizes that this stereotype is reinforced by research literature that reports only Asian success stories, and that is destructive for those children whom the schools are failing. "The presentation of Asians as a 'model minority,'" says Li, "reinforces the 'blame the victim' approach to minority students' failure. It promotes the 'invisibility' of troubled students and disguises the social realities of many children who are not academically successful."

Although many Asian students do quite well in school and on standardized tests, Li maintains their success often reflects the additional expensive private schooling provided by upper- and middle-class parents on evenings and weekends. However, only about 30 percent of Chinese Americans have attained middle-class status, most of the Chinese immigrants remain members of the working or lower class, manual labourers with little English proficiency and limited education; thus, they don’t have any resource to enhance their children’ learning when schools fail their children.

The persistence of these ideas about the “model minority” myth, says Li, prevents us from unravelling the social realities of those who face problems in the educational system. Furthermore, she says, they authorize a flat denial of racism and structures of social dominance, and silence those who are not economically successful; more importantly, they have prevented mainstream educators from re-evaluating their pedagogy in order to facilitate minority students’ learning. The devastating consequence of this myth is that minority students often fall through the cracks in overburdened and underfunded public school systems without getting any help.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul