Towards a Pedagogy of Transculturality
In our interconnected world, our students experience and traverse digital and physical moments of cultural contacts in more numerous and complex manners than ever before. Such experiences have prompted us to revisit, with lessons learnt from our students, the powerful framework that has underpinned much important research and practice on asset-based approaches to teaching–culturally sustaining pedagogies. Through an analytical deep dive of a student artifact produced in an undergraduate Education course, we trace how diverse young people may navigate their multiple identities and cultures relationally, and are constantly in processes of negotiating these relations. As such, attempting to practice culturally sustaining pedagogies without interrogating the homogenous and separate notions of “culture” that sometimes undergird such pedagogies may only reinforce static and reductive understandings of cultures in practice. We, instead, adopt the notion of transculturality to denote that cultures have always already been colored by moments of contact, and trace the contact zones students create between their myriad cultural practices. Lastly, we reflect on a pedagogy of transculturality designed to enable students to practice such deep and meaningful engagements with their plural cultures that constitute their identities.
Glynda Hull
Professor
Berkeley School of Education
Catherine Park
Doctoral Candidate
Berkeley School of Education
BIOS:
Glynda is professor and associate dean in the UC Berkeley School of Education and the faculty director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. Her research focuses on literacy, learning in digital spaces, and community, school, and university collaborations. She holds the Shurtleff Chair in undergraduate education and is a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award. She has long been interested in how to create inclusive spaces and engaging tools for learning online.
Catherine is a doctoral candidate in the Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender program in the School of Education, UC Berkeley. Catherine is interested in understanding how diverse students navigate schooling in a globalizing world with their multilingual and multicultural backgrounds. Her dissertation research looks specifically to the growth of multilingual K-12 programs, with focus on Mandarin-English dual language immersion, and how school leaders, parents, and students negotiate their desires for a more global schooling amidst the constraints and opportunities afforded by public education in the US.
Friday, February 2, 2024
B-4 Dwinelle Hall & Zoom
3-5pm
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