Culture, Language, & Identity (202-0-20)
Instructors
Wan Shun Eva Lam
Meeting Info
Annenberg Hall G02: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM
Overview of class
Learning is not neutral; it is not the acquisition of an autonomous set of knowledge and skills. Learning happens in social and cultural practices, be they practices affiliated with cultural communities, academic disciplines, or professional and interest-based domains. Many of these practices are also taking place in online, global and intercultural contexts where people bring diverse experiences to the process of cultural production and learning.
This course provides a critical introduction to the social and cultural dimensions of learning, with a particular focus on how language and diverse tools and modes of expression mediate forms of identity, learning experiences, and participation in and transformation of social life. We will engage with ways of conceptualizing and studying the relation of culture, language and identity, interrogate existing borders, binaries and hierarchies, and consider learning in the contexts of demographic diversity, transnational migration, media flows and youth cultures.
An important goal of this course is to explore how linguistic and cultural diversity can provide generative resources for learning and education. Traditional schools and classrooms tend to draw from a limited range of resources for learning. This is reflected in the literature and content that are used, and the expectations for how people interact and communicate with each other. Such restricted curriculum contributes to the fact that many students' experiences are being marginalized from schooling, and students' having difficulty identifying with what they are expected to learn (cf. Martinez, Morales & Aldana, 2017). In this class, we will read studies that tackle these issues, which are both social scientific and political issues. We will also consider new ways to think about and design learning environments that draw from and build on a diverse range of knowledge, language and cultural resources for learning - resources that are more reflective of the experiences of our students.
Through the class readings, materials and discussions, we will venture into diverse settings across community, school, and new media environments. We will discuss research studies and promising educational designs to reconsider notions of culture and identity, agency and power, and societal engagement and education of our multicultural youth population.
Evaluation Method
reading responses, oral presentation, essay, multimedia project