SAMENVATTING 4.3C
Project 1. On diversity
1. Acculturation
Warikoo (2009) – Cultural explanations for racial and ethnic stratification in academic achievement: A
call for a new and improved theory
➔ Goal article: assess literature on cultural explanations for ethno-racial differences in K-12
schooling and academic performance
➔ Some cultural arguments problematically define certain ethno-racial identities and cultures
as subtractive from the goal of academic mobility while defining the ethnic cultures and
identities of others as additive and oriented toward this goal
➔ Two schools of thought reviewed that compare immigrant and native minority students:
- Cultural-ecological theory
- Segmented assimilation theory
➔ Second: empirical research examined that highlights the complexity of culture, focusing on
four domains:
- The school’s cultural environment
- Variation in identities and cultural practices within ethnic and racial groups
- The multidimensional nature of culture and its variable impact on students
- The intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender
➔ Race and ethnicity must be understood contextually, not only as dummy variables, to explain
better how culture influences schooling and achievement
• Definition of used terms:
- ‘native minority’ = nativity, referring specifically to minority students of African
American, Native American, Puerto Rican, and Chicano/a heritages, whose foreparents
are either indigenous or were forcefully incorporated via slavery or conquests into what
has become known as the US
- ‘immigrant minority’ = primarily refers to those students whose parents or grandparents
emigrated from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America through the most recent
immigration flows to the US
• Goal review:
a) To illuminate how culture is deployed in educational research to explain disparate
achievement outcomes between ethnoracial groups
b) To discuss the multiple dimensions of group membership with respect to culture in
schools for native and immigrant minority students
• Focus on four domains:
a) The school’s cultural ethos
b) Variation in identities and cultural practices within ethnic and racial groups
c) The multidimensional nature of culture and its variable impact on students
d) The intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender
• Culture: practices and meanings shared by members of a particular social group, such as
families, ethnic networks, neighbourhoods, communities, schools, and organizations
- Culture characterized by shared values, beliefs, behaviours, styles, and tool-kits of
‘symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views’, practices ranging from speech styles and
language, to specific kinds of physical interaction, to tastes in music, clothing, and food,
, and other ‘symbolic’ ethnic cures; and symbolic boundaries, or ‘conceptual distinctions
made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space’
• Shared group identity: emerging from either a collective narrative or beliefs about shared
historical experiences, social experiences, and/or ancestry
- Characterizes a dimension of culture
• Challenges of interpretation of research:
- Etic approach: the analyst or research imposes meaning on the situation
- Emic approach: relies on the individuals’ being observed own meanings
• A Cultural-Ecology Theory (CETs)
- Social scientists in US in attempt to integrate both cultural and structural factors of
educational stratification
- In the late 1970s, CET emerged as one of the most viable cultural explanations for ethno-
racial differences in achievement
- Voluntary minorities: offspring of those who arrived at the borders and shores of the
United States voluntarily, most in search of improved economic opportunities
o CET: ‘voluntary’ minority students maintain more optimistic beliefs about their
chances for success than their peers classified as ‘involuntary’, ‘caste-like’ or ‘native’
racial and ethnic minorities
o Voluntary minorities believe that after a period of adaptation, they will self-advance
o Although they potentially face both cultural invisibility and conflict in classrooms,
voluntary minorities will perform better than native minorities, as they take a
relativist stance and perceive that their conditions are better than those in either
their parents’ or their native lands
- Other minorities: refugees (predominantly from Southeast Asia), who are not categorized
as voluntary immigrants but rather as persons who were forced to come to the United
States as a result of political and/or economic crises in their places of origins
- Involuntary or native minorities in the US: Black youth resist ‘acting White’ by avoiding or
rejecting those social behavioural patterns that they associate with Whiteness →
embracing the school curriculum, speaking Standard English, spending much time in the
library, and getting good grades, for example
o Oppositional culture leading to own academic underachievement
o Refuse to fully embrace these behaviours because they feel:
a) That these requirements are imposed on them by Whites
b) That their own cultural and language differences are markers of identity to be
maintained and not to be overcome
o Resistance to ‘acting White’ one of the most popular cultural explanations for the
ethno-racial academic achievement gap
- CET explains differences between these two groups: their sociocultural responses to
discrimination and cultural invisibility → this theory maintains that voluntary minority
students see school success as a major means to upward mobility, believing that the
strategies that hold for middle-class Whites hold for them, whereas involuntary
minorities view the opportunity structure as primarily closed to them and their family
members. Involuntary minorities render certain behaviours conducive to upward mobility
as only beneficial to the White middle class; hence, they culturally invert and embrace an
oppositional culture.
• Segmented Assimilation Theory
- Accept basic premises of CET (specifically the oppositional culture frame)
