Adapting Open-space Learning Techniques to Teach Cultural Literacy (original) (raw)
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Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education: a new approach
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There is a growing body of work on the field of what is now known as ‘cultural literacy’, but little has been written about its application, and even less on how to teach it in the context of higher education. This article discusses ‘destabilisation’ as an approach to teaching cultural literacy in higher education in the context of the global challenges that universities face today. It defines the characteristics of destabilisation and highlights its advantages in relation to other teaching approaches that have a similar focus on developing cultural competence in students. The article also situates ‘destabilisation’ as a pedagogical term within a spectrum of experiential learning methods and techniques that are focused on developing cultural competence.
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Reading the World: Toward a Praxis of Inquiry, Critical Literacy, and Cultural Knowledge
Immersion into the world of inquiry, critical literacy, and cultural knowledge can be both challenging and intimidating. This is especially so when learners are expected to confront and grapple with ideas and conversations that may involve the complexities of power, gender, race, class, and other phenomena. These issues are bracketed by the ways in which educational and social institutions condition and shape learning and understanding. Within this context, a major responsibility of adult literacy educators is to locate and/or create openings in curricula and conversation that can positively impact pedagogical value, instructional goals, and academic learning.
Higher Education institutions face specific challenges preparing graduates to live and work in transdisciplinary and transcultural environments. It is imperative for these institutions to provide their students with the skill sets that will give them the mobility and flexibility to be able to operate efficiently in different cultural and professional contexts. This position paper proposes that developing proficiency in Cultural Literacy will allow graduates of Higher Education institutions to transcend such cultural and disciplinary boundaries. In this paper we define Cultural Literacy in Higher Education as a modus operandi and a threshold concept, following Meyer and Land’s understanding of the term. We also propose ‘Destabilisation’ and ‘Reflection’ as two strategies for teaching Cultural Literacy, and examine three case studies where these strategies were successfully embedded into teaching and learning spaces.
This study seeks to theorize and contextualize what happened in an undergraduate senior capstone course focusing on cultural literacy and critical pedagogy. Through our analysis and critical dialogue we came to recognize that while each cultural literacy circle reported positive outcomes, and positive feelings from group members about how they felt participating in the circles, only one group took action in a material way meant to explicitly combat oppression. Nearly every group talked about oppression and the struggle for justice, but ultimately their work remained at the level of discourse. They thought about oppression, talked and read about oppression, but their work as cultural literacy circles, with one exception, did not lead to concerted efforts to make an intervention in the historical reality their group focused on. We conclude with implications of these outcomes for others whose courses center critical pedagogy as both a topic of study as well as a pedagogical approach.