THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION

C
PETER ANDREW G. REGENCIA, Ed. D.
PhD in Development Education
Teacher III
Amontay National High School
Pitogo, Quezon
 Contrast liberal and conservative versions of cultural politics of
education with a critical one by explaining the concept of cultural
politics with reference to the work of Paulo Freire, Stuart Hall, Pierre
Bourdieu, and Henry Giroux;
Explain what is at stake in the denial of cultural politics in terms of an
understanding of knowledge as canonical versus contested; and
Explain these ideas through current tends toward standardization of
the curriculum, standardized testing, and struggles over the so-called
curriculum wars.
liberal and conservative perspectives

Matthew Arnold:
CULTURE collection of the BEST and BRIGHTEST
of human endeavorsideas and art.
 EDUCATION
(accommodationist view)

transmitting culture to the young"

 Culture Wars
(1980s, 1990s)

LIBERALS advocated for expanding the canon to include works by

historically marginalized cultural groups including women, African
Americans, and Latinos.
CONSERVATIVES stridently defended a curriculum based on the
great books of Eurocentric tradition.
 Criticalists
Primary focus on what cultural works do as the products of meaning-making
practices and processes.

Political Question of Culture:

WHAT DO CULTURAL PRODUCTS DO?
Poetic Question of Culture:
WHAT CULTURAL WORKS MEAN?
 What cultural works do?
This means

How their meanings affirm or contest already existing sets of

meanings (discourses)
How in a given context a cultural work tends to have (preferred
meaning by S. Hall)
How such preferred meanings mobilize people to act in the material
world.
 GET OVER THE CURRICULUM WARS

Common advocacies:
Better practices
More rigor
Essentially carrying on the educational practices of the past but simply doing a better job of it

Common Arguments:
Strengthening public schooling (avoiding privatization, stopping the overemphasis on testing) while
ignoring what criticalists consider to be the most crucial dimension of public schooling: cultural politics.
 CULTURAL POLITICS

The HEART of CRITICAL

PERSPECTIVE in EDUCATION.
 Stuart Hall argued:

CULTURE is about SHARED MEANINGS

that are produced through DIALOGUE,
albeit (although) always in unequal
exchanges.
 CULTURAL POLITICS

The struggle to make meaning among competing parties

and a recognition of the inevitable meaning-making
dimensions of human practices.
 Stuart Hall rejects

Cultural meaning as being fixed, universal, and timeliness

An understanding of cultural meaning as the result of authorial intention

COMMUNITIES OF INTERPRETATION make sense of

the CULTURAL PRODUCT.
 PREFERRED READINGS (S. Hall)

Interpretations that are likely at a particular time

and place as opposed to fixed for all time.
For Stuart Hall

WE are ALL THE TIME involved in MAKING MEANING

PRACTICES (SIGNIFIYING PRACTICES).

SIGNIFIYING PRACTICES not only LANGUAGE but

EVERYTHING that we do that becomes MEANINGFUL or
SIGNIFIES in a COMMUNITY.
CULTURAL WORKERS
people who are engaged in public meaning making activities.

TEACHERS
key public figures in the making of meaning for young people.
 Teachers are always responding to already
RESPONSIBILITY

existing broader public discourses.

Teachers are also responsible for the ethical and
political implications of what they knowingly or
unwittingly affirm or contest in schools and classrooms.
Teachers in a relationship of responding to students and
social contexts inhabited by teachers and students such that
teaching and learning is understood as being dialogic and
driven by the exchange of meaning.
 PRAXIS (by Paulo Freire)
The ongoing process of reflecting on and theorizing ones
experiences and actions.
Henry Giroux explains
The ISSUE is not whether or not teachers practices are based in theories;
rather, it is the EXTENT to which teachers UNDERSTAND THEORETICAL
UNDERPINNINGS and ASSUMPTIONS are behind their practices.
 Related to CULTURAL POLITICS awareness

Differ from the transmission oriented idea of teacher responsibility that

holds teachers responsible for delivering knowledge that experts
elsewhere deem of most value.

In that disciplinary idea of teacher responsibility

Teachers MUST simply ENFORCE the RIGHT KNOWLEDGE.
If CULTURAL POLITICS is the process of meaning-making
among competing parties,

WHO are THESE PARTIES that

COMPETE for CULTURAL MEANING?
Pierre Bourdieu believed that

ECONOMIC CLASS was a critical category

in the competition for cultural meaning.
 MONEY... the traditional meaning of word
3 WAYS THAT CLASS PRIVILEGE

GENERATION TO GENERATION

CAPITAL (financial wealth).

IS TRANSMITTED FROM

SOCIAL CAPITAL. The social networks that individuals

are able to joint that allow for social benefit.
CULTURAL CAPITAL (objectified, embodied, and cultural
forms). The knowledge, tastes, and dispositions that are
socially valued and rewarded and the tools for appropriating
them.)
For Pierre Bourdieu

CULTURAL CAPITAL begins in the HOME

and rewarded or punished in the
SCHOOLS.
 SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE

The experience of having ones culture,

knowledge, language, tastes, and dispositions
DEVALUED.
 POSITIVE IDEOLOGY

An ideology that presumes that the only

knowledge and truth that matter are those that
can be measured.
 Why is this on the test rather than that which is excluded?
Whose knowledge and interests does this view represent?
Whose perspectives and interests are framed out of the test
and why?
How does the selection of these particular truth claims relate
to material interests or other broader social struggles and
forces?
 CULTURAL PEDAGOGY
HOW CULTURAL PRODUCTS AND INSTITUTIONS
EDUCATE PEOPLE and hence require questioning for
pedagogical effects they have and the meanings and
interests related to their production, circulation, and
interpretation.
 CULTURAL PEDAGOGY
The STRUGGLE over CULTURE.

A struggle that is also about formation of society and its

institutions, public values, and public discourse from which
individuals and groups draw their conceptual inventories.