McDermott's Take on Reconstructing Culture in Education Research

• In Event: Applying Cultural Construction Frameworks in Engineering Education Research

Abstract

Purpose

This “background poster,” introducing Ray McDermott’s take on cultural analysis, serves as an overarching theoretical perspective connecting the empirical studies in this session.

Theoretical Framework and Results

Our presentations draw upon McDermott’s notion of “educational facts” as cultural facts (Varenne & McDermott, 1999). All facts about educational equity are not purely objective; they must be observed and retold socially and assigned a certain meaning through being embedded in a given culture. When approaching any educational fact (e.g. research issue, classroom event, educational problem), McDermott clarifies his cultural analysis by contrasting three possible approaches to cultural research in education (McDermott & Varenne, 2006).

In a cultural deprivation model, we find individuals with problems. Any poor performances we see individuals producing can be directly attributed back to the individuals, as they are lacking in ability or some cultural material that others must have in order to perform better. By ignoring all other aspects of the problem, this approach overemphasizes the agency of the individual to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. In effect it blames students for failures that are observed. In a cultural difference model, by contrast, we find individuals with differences in background and ways of operating in the world. Educational inequities are produced because some of those cultures align with a given educational setting and some don’t. This is the more nuanced and politically correct approach toward incorporating culture into explanations of success and failure, seen in much educational research. The trouble with this approach is that, if the School still has an unassailable right to construct assessments and policies in a particular way, then the “different” students are legitimately disadvantaged and can just as easily be blamed for having a different background as they can for having inherent deficiencies. Alternatively, in this view, we can see individuals as helplessly buffeted by cultural winds that produce their troubles, denying the students’ agency in our accounts.

Finally in a culture as disability or cultural-analytic framework, we bring into focus the many actors required to produce, observe, and make meaningful any given educational problem. Educational problems are created systemically by many actors constrained within the broader cultural milieu which creates them. Differences between individuals and groups are conceptualized not as idiosyncratic or benign happenings, but as the carefully produced outcome of a culture which seeks to produce differentiation and reify existing power relationships through a meritocratic justification of assignment of resources by locally produced success/failure. Within this perspective, researchers can wrestle with the full reality of any educational problem, and the individual can be conceptualized as agentic but heavily constrained and struggling against a culture which must be answered as the “always already there.”

Significance

McDermott suggests that a cultural analytic lens can offer new insight on educational problems which have come to be seen as intractable and inevitable, by focusing on the actual mechanisms for the (re)production of the problem and therefore on the operational levers for possible change.

Authors

• Stephen Douglas Secules, University of Maryland - College Park

• Ayush Gupta, University of Maryland - College Park