Yosso notes
Define cultural capital: the knowledges of the upper and middle classes are considered capital valuable to a hierarchical society. Formal schooling allows access to this capital if one is not born into the world that has it. This leads schools to assume that students of color lack capital (are deficient) and thus need to be fixed or infused with this capital if they are to make it.
Yosso argues that outsider knowledges can value the voices and presence of people of color. The margins become places of transformative resistence.
CRT is a way to theorize and challenge the ways race and racism impact on society. This counters the idea that students of color come with cultural deficiencies.
The idea of community cultural wealth. Outlines 6 forms of capital that go unrecognized within a traditional Bourdieuan analysis of cultural capital.
Community cultural wealth has the potential to transform schooling.
CRT: goes over a history of the development of CRT out of CLS and the critiques (black/white dichotomy, missed experiences of women, Native Americans, etc.) CRT addresses racism at its intersections with other forms of subordination.
5 tenets of CRT to inform theory, research, pedagogy,
1) intercentricity of race and racism: central, permenant, fundamental part of US society, wrapped up with gender, class, immigration, surname, phenotype, accent, sexuality
2) challenge to dominant ideology: challenges White privilege, refutes claims of objectivity, meritocracy, color blindness, race neutrality. No such thing as objective research, exposes deficit informed research. Such approaches are camouflage for interests of dominant groups.
3) commitment to social justice: a transformative approach to oppression.
4) centrality of experiential knowledge: draws on lived experiences of people
5) utilization of itnerdisciplinary approaches: goes beyond disciplinary boundaries
together these represent a challenge to existing modes of scholarship.
contradictory nature of education: schools often oppress and marginalize but maintain the power to emancipate and transform.
Racism disguised in form of normative values
CRT allows people to hear each others voices and become empowered participants
Deficit thinking: minority students and families are at fault for poor academic performance because lack of normative cultural knowledge and skills, parents don't value education
Leads to banking model of education
Race is often coded as cultural difference
Culture: behaviors, values learned, shared, exhibited by a group of people. Evidenced in mateiral and nonmaterial productions. Culture is neither fixed nor static.
Capital: cultural (education, language), social (social networks, connections), economic (money, material possessions). Can be acquired through family or schooling. Dominant groups stay dominant because access to capital and using capital is controled and limited.
This leads to the assertion that some communites are culturally wealthy and others are poor. White middle class culture becomes the standard and all others are compared to it. Cultural capital refers to the accumlation of specifc forms of knowledge, skills, abilities valued by privleged groups.
Even though a minority student may have all sorts of knowledges, those knowledges are not valued by the school. ((it is the school that is deficient because it is limited in its definitions))
Communities of color nurture cultural wealth through at least 6 forms of capital that are dynamic processes that build on one another:
1) aspirational: ability to maintain hopes and dreams in the face of barriers
2) navigational: Ability to move through insittutions not created with communiteis of color in mind. Resilience. How to maneuver through structures of inequality.
3) social: The networks of people and community resources. Help navigating through society's institutions.
4) linguistic: the intellectual and social skills attained through experiences in more than one language or style. Students of color arrive at school with multiple lagnuage and communication skills. Storytelling skills, art, music, poetry, translation
5) familial: a sense of community history, memory, cultural intiution. Commitment to community well being. Isolation is minimized.
6) resistance: the knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenges inequality.
community cultural wealth is about serving the struggle toward social and racial justice - not about coopting or exploiting the strengths of communities of color.
we need to restructure social institutions around the knowledges, skills, abilities and networks of people of color rather than trying to make them fit into existing social structures.
It's about transforming structures not transforming people.
McDermott & Varenne (1995) Culture as Disability
Disabilities are less the propoerty of persons than they are moments in a cultural focus.
The coherence of a culture comes from the partial and mutually dependent knowledge of each person and depends on the work we do together. It is made up of many voices brought to life by others. The coherence of culture is hammered together by many individuals in multiple realities. It is mutually constructed, and interactional achievement, it is never an individual property.
If we believe there is only one way to be in a culture, then we are lead to believe that hsoe who are different from the norm are missing something - that they are "disabled."
"When culture is understood as the knowledge that people need for living with each other, it is easy to focus on how some always appear to have more cultural knowledge than others, that some can be a part of everything and others not, that some are able and others not" (p. 326).
In every society there are ways of being locked out.
"A disability may be a better display board for the weaknesses of a cultural system than it is an account of real persons" (p. 327).
Disabilites are a cultural fabrication
Culture has the power to disable.
The difficulties people experience tell us little about the physical conditions of the people we label as disabled and more about the rigid institutionalization of ways of handling physical and social space.
"When does a physical difference count, under what conditions, and in what ways, and for what reasons?" (p. 328).
need to ask, how is the "problem" a result of cultural arrangments. (p. 331).
Different approaches to disabilities:
Deprivation - people in different groups develop differently enough to be shown as distinctly different. Uses a stable set of tasks as a measure. This is the basis for most psychometrics. This also leads to the positioning of children color as being deficient. Puts the blame on the individual as not being able to escape their early socialization in order to meet the demands of dominant society.
Difference - People develop differently but in ways attuned to the demands of their cultures. Focuses not on defined tasks but on every day tasks. If you can identify those tasks, you can then discern what disabilities might arise. This leads us to understand that children fail in school because their culture does not match what is expected in school. This represents a powerful move away from the deprivation model, yet it is easy to slip back into the deprivation model from the difference model.
Culture as disability - every culture teaches people what to strive for and marks off people who are to be marginalized. Within a culture, there are multiple positions to occupy. The people in those positions must possess and be known to possess particular qualities that symbolize their position to others. It is important to understand how they are put into these positions (not just being born into or enculturated into those positions). Groups stand in relation to a wider system of groups. Culture is an organization of hopes and dreams about how the world should be (p. 337). But cultures organize for disabilities. Culture fashions our problems for us and then expects us to fashion solutions.
We have not broken people but identifications tuned to the workings of institutions serving political and economic ends through educational means.
A shfit from studying what is wrong with "them" to what is wrong with the culture that has constructed "them."