Prompt 2 - Cultural Capital

Because I am working at an inner city middle school this semester, I have had the opportunity to work with students from many distinct and diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Rather than make assumptions based on my observations, I’d like to take this opportunity to use some statistics from a reputable information gathering website (For the privacy of my middle school, I will not post the exact web address. It is produced by the Center for School Improvement and Educational Policy in partnership with a state university).

Approximately 74% of the students at my school are eligible for free or reduced lunches, 48% are Hispanic, 22% are African-American, 21% are White, and 9% are Asian. From this data, I can shatter the first assumption that the public has about inner city schools: they aren’t always filled with students from African-American ethnicity. It might not be the ideal diversity mosaic with 48% being Hispanic, but it is a far cry from the middle school that I attended which has a student body made up of 98% White students.

What kind of cultural capital does one gain by providing a cultural mosaic for students to be a part of during the educational process? This is a loaded question in the field of pedagogy, with many interpretations and feelings surrounding it. First, I’d like to define by what I mean by the term “cultural capital.” By cultural capital, I’m referring to the metaphorical spending power that an ethnic heritage has within a society. But that definition in and of itself I feel is too narrow; let us not look just at the race and ethnicity of the students but also their social class, their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion and faith, their physical and mental abilities or disabilities. Cultural in contemporary society is a broad term, and therefore, should be handled with delicacy as to not fall into the trap that culture is something that can be immediately seen at the first glance of a person.

The first, and maybe most straightforward benefit (or disadvantage, depending on a persons view point) is the diverse linguistics that a cultural mosaic can provide. One war happening right now in the field of pedagogy is the debate over whether or not classrooms should be “English Only.” I happen to believe that if critical thinking has been developed in a student, then it does not matter what language the skill has been developed in – it can be transferred over to English. Notice that I don’t say that our cultural doesn’t need English (I’d be crazy to say that as an English major), but that other languages can be just as beautiful as English, and that language is a corner stone of a persons ethnic heritage.

Secondly, a diverse classroom setting allows students to see difference in a positive light. Students can either be fascinated by difference or live in an alienated fear of it and public school helps to shape these views. At no point should it be made invisible, nor should it be made to seem inferior either. Difference is the term where I turn culture up on to its head for some readers, so to be explicit, I mean difference in every possible sense of the word: students need to be made aware that there is difference is language, in skin color, in gender, in rich and poor and everything in between, difference in faiths, difference in politics, difference in the way that people think, and mostly importantly, that difference is an intimate relationship between systems of power in society and identification of the self. Therefore, no ones difference is a crime, rather it is a gift that everyone can learn from and should be valued as such.