Culturally relevant pedagogy.

In her address at the University of Colorado "The Best Should Teach Awards, 2012", Gloria Ladson Billings notes that knowing more about the culture of your students makes one better able to reach them and to help them to learn.  I think that most teachers already know this, although they may not term what they do as culturally relevant pedagogy. We are taught during our B.Ed. to "know your students" and while often this means know what they know, understand their learning needs, and be sensitive to their behavioural or emotional needs - a good teacher will instinctively take the time to understand the demographic of his school, the socio-political factors facing families, and the economics of the catchment area (I'm talking about K-12 more than adult education where students may emanate from a wider net than is possible to generalize), it almost goes without saying that he will also be sensitive to, and may educate himself on the cultural issues of his students.

In the 2013 Tisdell et al article that reported findings related to teaching beliefs and pedagogical practices of educators of FL, it is made abundantly clear that the role of the FL teacher is more than the commonly stated goal of "helping learners understand financial information" (Tisdell, 2012 p. 343). In this article, the authors look at FLE in underserved population groups in community-based settings. It was found that imparting financial knowledge does not lead to behaviour change. The learners' attitudes towards money are affected by social context, and behaviour with money only changes with examination of attitudes. Indeed, "dollars are not the legacy. The attitudes are the legacy." The educators who participated in interviews allowed culture to inform their teaching. The culturally responsive approach taken by these educators involved adapting the curriculum and the pedagogy to align with their students' culture. "It is impossible to change people's financial behaviour without considering the beliefs that inform the behaviour" (Tisdell, 2012 p. 351). The authors also state the importance of drawing on students' prior knowledge, of engaging them in the telling of personal stories, and involving them in small and large group activities - all of which contribute to the building of collaborative learning communities where students trust one another, take risks, and learn from each other. Clearly, a parallel can be drawn here to the K-12 classroom.

More challenging I believe is the situation of the adult educator who teaches online. Not only does he need to address the learning needs, the personal needs, and the cultural needs of the learner, but he must also be capable of aligning his pedagogy to the type of learning that is expected by the new generation of students. And culture in this case is more than that which is encompassed by family background or community or locality - but the culture of the digital native. No longer do young adults accept learning by rote, they balk at the notion of Googling information to spew forth in a traditional essay. Today's learners (adults and children) are not only consumers. They are producers and contributors to the digital world around them. They want to mash up, remix, sample, and re-image. Their ability to create is vast and the affordances of digital technologies lend themselves to this so seamlessly. The trouble is that this explosion in digital technologies and digital literacies has taken place at such a rapid pace that the teaching profession is having a very hard time keeping up. Many teachers are uncomfortable with the new technologies, those who have a comfort level with them may have concerns about how to use them effectively - in other words, how to implement a new technology in a transformational manner rather than simply replacing an old technology with a new technology. In addition, there are the concerns surrounding copyright - if you allow your students to complete an assignment which involves remixing other people's intellectual property - and if those people take issue with what your student has done - who is liable? The student? The teacher? The institution? Before the vast expansion of digital technologies, our conception of writing meant text via alphabetization, print on a page, black and white. Today, writing usually involves digital technologies and encompasses images, or sound, or video, as well as traditional text, and often all of these modes at the same time, remixed to express something new - and adding to our culture. The problem with this, legally speaking, is that pre-digital age copyright laws remain in effect. In an  educational institution, one can only imagine how emphatic would be the desire of bureaucrats, dean  principals and teachers to steer clear of legal entanglements and how fearful they might be that students would put them in delicate situations should remixing projects become widely accepted practice in schools. The fact of the matter is however that most of our children, teens, and young adults are already criminals according to copyright law. What teenager does not habitually download "free" music from YouTube, or have an enviable library of torrent downloaded movies from sites such as PirateBay? 

(Lessig, 2008)

Criminalizing those (mostly young people) who embrace our "read-write" digital culture (Lessig, 2008), is utterly pointless as well as potentially culturally crippling. However, until the law makers develop a way out of it, I have to assume that school boards will continue to be wary of allowing students to "plagiarize" even while these same students develop healthy online followings as creative digital remixers outside of school. That's kind of messed up - as my sons would say.

The big issue here is the chasm between the law makers/owners of copyright and the right of the people to engage in cultural practices that include the remix and mash up of existing works to produce new ones. It's not like this is a new concept, it's just that never before has it been so easy, so rampant, and so disconcerting to the holders of the "original" works. In the entire history of art, literature, drama, and even dance, it is understood that re-inventing, or appropriating, rewriting, retelling, adapting - whatever you want to label it - has, and always will be how culture is fashioned and how it is rewritten to echo the realities of the current population. Only now is it criminal to do so... Take Romeo and Juliet for example, here's what I gleaned from www.historicalfiction.com:

1440's  Masuccio Salernitano's poem Mariotto and Ganozza

1531    Luigi da Porto, Newly Found Story of Two Noble Lovers

1554    Matteo Bandello, Romeo e Giulietta

1562    Arthur Brooke, The Tragic History of Romeus and Juliet

1582    William Painter, Palace of Pleasure

1590    Lope de Vega, (Spanish version)

1590's  Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Restoration, William Davenant, wrote a revision of his uncle's (Shakespeare) play

1679    Thomas Otway, The History and Fall of Caius Marius

1744    Theophilus Cibber, revision

IMDB indexes over 34 films based on the story. These include West Side Story (don't forget that was on Broadway too), and my personal favourite, Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

2010    Robin Maxwell's novel O Juliet

...but today we can't adapt, remix, retell, appropriate using digital technologies because the world has gone crazy...