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The preparation of novice teachers is dominated by psychological notions almost to the exclusion of other social science paradigms. The perspective that is least likely to be evident in teacher preparation is that of anthropology. However, prospective and novice teachers regularly and loosely use the word "culture" as an explanation for student patterns of behavior they cannot explain. This discussion focuses on the ways prospective and novice teachers construct culture simultaneously as both the problem and the answer to their struggles with students different from themselves. [culture of poverty, self-esteem, teacher education]
I am one of those rare teacher educators who was trained in anthropology and education. I benefited from the wisdom and expertise of George and Louise Spindler, Robert Textor, and cultural anthropologists such as James Lowell Gibbs, Jane Collins, and Renato Rosaldo. With those kinds of credentials you would think people would be jumping up and down to include me in a teacher education program and to pick my brain for ways to reconceptualize and redesign the preparation of teachers. I do not want to leave the impression that my colleagues do not appreciate me. What I am up against is much larger than the politics of my campus. My battle is with teacher education writ large and the stubborn insistence on suturing the field to psychology to the exclusion of every other social science.
The typical preservice teacher takes a series of foundations courses in the history, philosophy, and sociology of education. However, there is a strong concentration in psychology that includes courses in child or adolescent development, cognition and learning, and exceptionality (i.e., students with special needs). To understand teaching in the United States is to understand a wholly "psychologized" field. Anthropology of education rarely appears in preservice teacher education.
But the problem of culture in teaching is not merely one of exclusion. It is also one of overdetermination. What I mean by this is that culture is randomly and regularly used to explain everything. So at the same moment teacher education students learn nothing about culture, they use it with authority as one of the primary explanations for everything from school failure to problems with behavior management and discipline.
In this article I use "critical incidents" from a series...