Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T04:02:27.520Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

18 - Cultural Modeling

CHAT as a Lens for Understanding Instructional Discourse Based on African American English Discourse Patterns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Carol D. Lee
Affiliation:
School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
Alex Kozulin
Affiliation:
International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential, Jerusalem
Boris Gindis
Affiliation:
Touro College, New York
Vladimir S. Ageyev
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Buffalo
Suzanne M. Miller
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Buffalo
Get access

Summary

A continuing challenge is how we as educational researchers are to investigate learning and development as these occur in complex settings in an attempt to understand the ecological niches of practice in the real world. In many ways, these questions are the terrain of Cultural–Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). CHAT, as articulated by Cole (1996) and others (Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch, 1991), is an outgrowth of the Russian school of psychology represented by Lev Vygotsky (1978, 1981, 1987), Alexander Luria (1976), and Alexei Leontiev (1981). This orientation to the study of human learning and development places several core tenets at the center of inquiry. These tenets include the mutually constituting influences of social interaction in participation in jointly constructed activity across multiple settings and the functions of mediating artifacts. CHAT places culture at the center of human sense-making activities. Educational research rooted in CHAT has documented the centrality of cultural systems; much less attention has been paid to cultural systems of non–European or non-European-American ethnic groups. In this chapter, I will illustrate how multiple mediational resources have been drawn upon in culturally responsive ways to support discipline-specific learning.

I have an abiding personal interest in these questions. In the Cultural Modeling Project (Lee, 1993; 1995a; 1995b; 2001), we developed a curriculum intervention in response to literature that was implemented over a 3-year period in an urban, underachieving high school.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. (M. Holquist, Ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press
Ball, A. F. (1992). Cultural preferences and the expository writing of African-American adolescents. Written Communication, 9(4), 501–532CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bereiter, C., & Engelmann, S. (1966). Teaching disadvantaged children in pre-school. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall
Bernstein, B. (1970). Social class, language, and socialization. In P. P. Giglioli (Ed.), Language and social context (pp. 157–178). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. (Richard Nice, Trans.). Stanford, NJ: Stanford University Press
Brofenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiment by nature and design. cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press
Cazden, C. (1988). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology, a once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Graves, B., & Frederiksen, C. H. (1996). A cognitive study of literary expertise. In R. J. Kruez, & M. S. MacNealy (Eds.), Empirical approaches to literature and aesthetics (pp. 397–418). Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Gutierrez, K., Rymes, B., & Larson, J. (1995). Script, Counterscript, and Underlife in the Classroom: James Brown versus Brown v. Board of Education. Harvard Educational Review, 65(3), 445–471CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halasz, L. (1987). Cognitive and social psychological approaches to literary discourse. In L. Halasz (Ed.), Literary discourse: Aspects of cognitive and social psychological approaches (pp. 1–37). New York: Walter de Gruyter
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The Dreamkeepers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Lee, C. D. (1993). Signifying as a scaffold for literary interpretation: The pedagogical implications of an African American discourse genre (Research Report Series). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English
Lee, C. D. (1995a). A culturally based cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching African American high school students' skills in literary interpretation. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(4), 608–631CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, C. D. (1995b). Signifying as a scaffold for literary interpretation. Journal of Black Psychology, 21(4), 357–381CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, C. D. (1998). Supporting the development of interpretive communities through metacognitive instructional conversations in culturally diverse classrooms. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association. San Diego, California
Lee, C. D. (2000). Signifying in the zone of proximal development. In C. D. Lee, & P. Smagorinsky (Ed.), Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research: Constructing meaning through collaborative inquiry (pp. 191–225). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, C. D. (2001). Is October Brown Chinese: A cultural modeling activity system for underachieving students. American Educational Research Journal, 38(1), 97–142CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, C. D., & Majors, Y. J. (2000). Cultural modeling's response to Rogoff's challenge: Understanding apprenticeship, guided participation and participatory appropriation in a culturally responsive, subject matter specific context. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans
Lee, C. D., Mendenhall, R., Rivers, A., & Tynes, B. (1999). Cultural modeling: A framework for scaffolding oral narrative repertoires for academic narrative writing. Paper presented at the Multicultural Narrative Analysis Conference at the University of South Florida, Tampa
Leontiev, A. N. (1981). The problem of activity in psychology. In J. V. Wertsch (Ed.), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe
Luria, A. R. (1976). Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Mufwene, S. (Ed.) (1993). Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties. Athens: The University of Georgia Press
Orr, E. W. (1987). Twice as less: Black English and the performance of Black students in mathematics and science. New York: Norton
Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press
Rogoff, B., & Lave, J. (Eds.) (1984). Everyday cognition: Its development in social context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Smitherman, G. (1977). Talkin and testifyin: The language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Smitherman, G. (1994). The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice: African American student writers. In A. Dyson, & C. Genishi (Eds.), The need for story: Cultural diversity in classroom and community (pp. 80–101). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English
Smitherman, G. (2000). Talk that talk: Language, culture and education in African America. New York: Routledge
Stotsky, S. (1999). Losing our language: How multicultural classroom instruction is undermining our children's ability to read, write, and reason. New York: Free Press
Toulmin, S., Rieke, R., & Janik, A. (1984). An introduction to reasoning. New York: Macmillan
van den Broek, P. (1996). Causal inferences in the comprehension of literary texts. In R. J. Kreuz, & M. S. MacNealy (Eds.), Empirical approaches to literature and aesthetics. Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Vygotsky, L. (1981). The genesis of higher mental functions. In J. Wertsch (Ed.), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology (pp. 144–188). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe
Vygotsky, L. (1987). Thinking and Speech. New York: Plenum
Wertsch, J. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Cultural Modeling
    • By Carol D. Lee, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
  • Edited by Alex Kozulin, International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential, Jerusalem, Boris Gindis, Touro College, New York, Vladimir S. Ageyev, State University of New York, Buffalo, Suzanne M. Miller, State University of New York, Buffalo
  • Book: Vygotsky's Educational Theory in Cultural Context
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511840975.020
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Cultural Modeling
    • By Carol D. Lee, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
  • Edited by Alex Kozulin, International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential, Jerusalem, Boris Gindis, Touro College, New York, Vladimir S. Ageyev, State University of New York, Buffalo, Suzanne M. Miller, State University of New York, Buffalo
  • Book: Vygotsky's Educational Theory in Cultural Context
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511840975.020
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Cultural Modeling
    • By Carol D. Lee, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
  • Edited by Alex Kozulin, International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential, Jerusalem, Boris Gindis, Touro College, New York, Vladimir S. Ageyev, State University of New York, Buffalo, Suzanne M. Miller, State University of New York, Buffalo
  • Book: Vygotsky's Educational Theory in Cultural Context
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511840975.020
Available formats
×