Module 7: Exploring Culture

After working through this module, you will be able to:

• Explain the concept of culture and its complexities.
• Describe the dominant (white) cultural ethos and its alternatives.
• Articulate how culture manifests in your library.

Introduction

Up to this point, we have focused almost exclusively on race and racism. To move forward with our work, we need to add an understanding of the concept of culture. In future modules, we will explore what it means to be culturally competent and culturally humble, as well as what it looks like when we implement culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Before we can engage with any of these ideas, however, we must have a foundational understanding of what culture is and how it works.

Respond

If possible, find a colleague and answer the following questions as a way of getting to know each other better:

1. What was your favorite song in your senior year of high school?
2. What is your favorite holiday or celebration, and why?
3. How do you usually greet new people?
4. How do you usually greet people from your family of origin?

If you can’t share these with a colleague, then just make notes of your answers.
Now think about each of these questions as they relate to culture. What aspect of culture is each addressing?
Click here to see our answers.

Make a list of other aspects of culture. Try to go beyond just food and festivals.
Click here to see our list.

Each of the aspects of culture identified here is not a fixed trait of a person, but rather something that arises from how that person participates in the activities, or practices, of the communities they are a part of (Gutierrez and Rogoff, 2003).  Each person has a dynamic repertoire of these practices, which “is developed, refined, and transformed through an individuals’ prolonged participation in cultural communities” (Parsons, Travis, and Simpson, 2005, p. 186). These practices may be explicit, like playing games, or implicit, like sharing values. The iceberg model of culture, explained below, explores this distinction between explicit and implicit cultural practices.

Watch

Watch this video to learn about the iceberg model of culture.

Interact

In her book chapter, “Multicultural Teacher Introspection,” Nitza Hidalgo (1993) goes beyond the iceberg model’s distinction between explicit and implicit culture to identify three levels of culture: concrete, behavioral, and symbolic.

1. Concrete: Visible, tangible, material, cultural products and artifacts
2. Behavioral: Reflects values; social roles, language, non-verbal communication, political affiliation
3. Symbolic: Implicit, abstract, values, beliefs, spirituality, religion

In this activity, sort the aspects from our list above into these three levels. If you identified aspects that we didn’t, think about how you would assign those to one of these levels as well.

You may feel that some aspects fit on more than one level. That may be the case; the boundaries between these levels are not rigid.

Respond

Think about your own culture. What is most important to how you think about yourself? At which level of culture do those aspects of your culture operate?

Now think about your library’s or school’s culture. Generate a list of how different aspects of culture manifest in your library or school.
Stumped? Click here to see a few example ideas.

Now sort these aspects of culture according to whether they are symbolic, behavioral, or concrete. Is one level represented more than the others?

Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede has spent decades mapping the dimensions of national culture. With his colleagues, he has identified “six basic issues that society needs to come to term with in order to organize itself.” He calls this the 6-D model of National Culture. The six dimensions are:

• Individualism
• Power distance
• Masculinity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Long-term orientation
• Indulgence

Read this web page for descriptions of each dimension as well as view videos of Hofstede explaining each dimension.

If we consider these six dimensions individually and collectively, we can arrive at a description of “American culture.”

Read this archived web page for Hofstede’s analysis of culture in the United States.

Pediatrics educator Marcia Carteret adds the following dimensions in her consideration of the dominant culture in the United States:

• Time and its control
• Task-orientation vs. relationship-orientation
• Comfort with change
• Personal control over destiny
• Self-sufficiency
• Status
• Language

Respond

Respond to the following prompt in your journal:

Libraries, like households, have culture – unspoken “rules” and norms that determine how people act and relate to one another. In many organizations in the United States, including libraries, workplace and organizational cultures reflect whiteness in ways that can be harmful for BIPOC and BIYOC. Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun call this “white supremacy culture.” Examples include individualism, objectivity, either/or thinking, and an emphasis on quantity over quality. Read the full article for additional indicators of white supremacy culture along with examples and antidotes.

After reading the article, reflect on the following questions in your journal:

• Which of these characteristics are evident in your library?
• How do they negatively impact BIYOC?
• What can you and your colleagues do to shift the belief(s) and behavior(s) to ones that support racial justice?

Nitza Hidalgo offers the following additional questions as examples of things you might consider when reflecting on your library culture:

• How are our values expressed in [library] dynamics with children [and teens]?
• How do we perceive authority? Does authority come with an ascribed role?
• What do we consider appropriate behavior for children [and teens] when interacting with adults?
• What kinds of verbal and nonverbal interactions would we consider appropriate between children [or teens] and the [librarian]? (Hidalgo 1993, p. 105-106)

Reflect

Take a moment to consider the characteristics of dominant or white culture shared above. Can you generate any alternatives to these ways of operating in the world?
Click here for examples.

At first glance, this model might seem to conflate race and culture. Race and culture are two separate concepts, and it is never safe to assume a person’s culture based on their race, or vice versa. While culture is neither race-dependent nor race-determined, however, it can be associated with race in the United States because of the U.S.’s history of physical segregation of ethnic and racial groups. Culture “includes practices that emerge from prolonged participation in particular communities” (Parsons, Travis, and Simpson, 2005). Because physically-bounded, geographic communities in the U.S. have historically been organized based on race and ethnicity, there will be some association between race and culture in spite of the lack of a dependent or deterministic relationship between them.

Reflect

Now that you have explored alternatives to white supremacy culture, think about:

• What existing examples of alternatives to white supremacy culture are evident in your library?
• How might you change current practices to challenge and disrupt white supremacy culture in your library?

But Wait!

In this section, we address common questions and concerns related to the material presented in each module. You may have these questions yourself, or someone you’re sharing this information with might raise them. We recommend that for each question below, you spend a few minutes thinking about your own response before clicking the arrow to the left of the question to see our response.

References

Boykin, A.W. (1983). The academic performance of Afro-American children. In J.T. Spence (Ed.), Achievement and achievement motives psychological and sociological approaches. (pp. 324-371). New York: W.H. Freeman.

Boykin, A.W. (1986). The triple quandary and the schooling of Afro-American children. In U. Neisser (Ed.), The school achievement of minority children: New perspectives. (pp. 57-92). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Bracy, P. B., Hughes-Hassell, S., & Rawson, C. H. (2017). Culturally relevant pedagogy and the Black Cultural Ethos. In S. Hughes-Hassell, P. B. Bracy, & C. H. Rawson (Eds.), Libraries, Literacy, and AFrican American Male Youth: Research and Practice (pp. 31-48). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Bracy, P.B. and Hughes-Hassell, S. Libraries, literacy, and African American youth [PowerPoint Slides]. Retrieved from https://libequity.web.unc.edu/libraries-literacy-and-african-american-youth-an-introduction/

Gutiérrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher, 32(5), 19–25. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032005019

Hidalgo, N. M. (1993). Multicultural teacher introspection. In T. Perry & J. W. Fraser (Eds.), Freedom’s Plow: Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom (pp. 99-106). New York, NY: Routledge.

Parsons, E.C., Travis, C., & Simpson, J. S. (2005). The Black Cultural Ethos, students’ instructional context preferences, and student achievement: An examination of culturally congruent science instruction in the eighth grade classes of one African American and one Euro-American teacher. The Negro Educational Review, 56(2-3), p.183-204.