Enseñanza & Teaching (Sep 2011)
Teaching as a cultural practice: managing diverse classrooms
Abstract
Teaching is a cultural process. Actions that take place in this process are influenced by some cultural assumptions which shape pre-defined objectives and affect content, educational treatment, assessments, and relationships among participants. It is, therefore, of utmost importance not only to make explicit the cultural reality of education, but also to think critically about it. In this paper, we focus on the issue of teaching and learning in the context of cultural diversity from a socio-cultural and socio-political theoretical framework. The keywords «classroom management» it generates over 6.5 million hits in google.com. However, when we type «managing diverse classrooms», there are only 200,000 hits. This divergence indicates that classroom management is a widely explored topic, while work about how to manage a cultural diverse classroom is still limited. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for teachers to use and improve their cultural knowledge to manage classrooms more effectively. This article argues that growth in cultural awareness of the teaching process improves the quality of teaching and, therefore, students’ learning.
