What is cultural identity?

Question

What is cultural identity?

Answer 1

people from one area have one cultural identity.

Answer 2

The things about you that are defined by your culture. It could be religion, morals, how you raise your children, the art you enjoy, how you keep your house, what status symbols you value...

Answer 3

The purpose of this unit is to enable young students to identify themselves and others with regard to many complex factors, including race, ethnicity, physical appearance and ability, gender, and family structure. The students will understand themselves better, become better prepared to accept people who are different from themselves, and learn to refrain from making assumptions about people by way of external examination. The secondary goal is to create a tone of harmony among classmates and multicultural appreciation. This unit will meet the needs of our school's magnet theme: Celebrating Literacy through the Arts, Technology, and Multiculturalism.

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I teach first grade at Davis Street Inter-District Magnet School in New Haven, Connecticut. Multiculturalism is a very important thread throughout our curriculum, including a school-wide initiative of international study. On the other hand, our school, and consequently, my classroom, is comprised of about 95 percent African American students. The school is a "free lunch" school with a majority of its student body comprised of families from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Since we are an inter-district magnet school, the students do have some opportunity to meet students from other towns, but for the most part, the students are from the same type of neighborhood, economic background, race, and even religion. The students do not have very many opportunities to learn about people different from themselves through peer interactions or community activities. I aim to provide these opportunities through engaging multicultural literature. Though many cultures will be studied within this unit, the most emphasis will be on African American people, with some emphasis on Latino, White, and Biracial people, in order to reflect the racial backgrounds of my students. In addition to teaching about people from other places and ethnicities, I will encourage open communication in class, in order to allow the students to discover differences among themselves, such as family structures, traditions, and hobbies.

At Davis School, there has been a great emphasis recently on reading and writing in order to address a need to improve scores on state-mandated tests. Much of our teaching time is spent working on literacy skills, especially responding to literature. Therefore, in order to maximize the time I have to teach social studies, I have utilized multicultural literature to integrate the social studies themes with the required literacy activities to form the basis of most of the lessons for this unit.

This curriculum unit is designed for first grade students, but the content could easily be extended to teach students from first to fifth grade. In order to adapt the curriculum for older children, the reading could be supplemented with longer and more challenging texts. The students could delve much deeper into terminology and history and they would be expected to write with much more depth.

The students I teach are usually between the ages 5 ½ and 7 ½, and have a wide range of abilities in verbal, written, and comprehension skills. Some of my students enter first grade able to write complete sentences and read fairly fluently. Others know only some of the sounds and letters of the alphabet. For this reason, I start the year by teaching and reviewing letters, sounds, and skills for looking at and reading books. During social studies, I reinforce basic literacy skills, sequencing, and story elements using choral question and answer format. This allows advanced students to participate proudly and help less advanced students to learn without feeling self-conscious.

I am fortunate to have an assistant teacher. This is an asset in terms of individualizing instruction and providing extra support for small groups or individual children that need it. This allows me to move more freely from student to student offering feedback specific to each based upon his or her abilities. For instance, more advanced students often need extra suggestions in order to extend their work to a higher level, and lower level students might need the work broken into steps, with immediate feedback as they work.

This year-long curriculum unit consists of four ten-week mini-units: one for each marking period. It is to be implemented at least two to three times a week, for approximately 30-60 minutes per lesson. Each section of the unit corresponds to one of four themes that build understanding of cultural identity and provide a natural avenue to teach interpersonal respect and communication. The four themes are: Family and Me, Community and Traditions, African American History, and Celebrating Diversity.

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Rationale

In a class discussion, I recently found myself stressing the point that culture is more than the color of one's skin and that people may define themselves in ways that are not visible on the surface. I listened with dismay as the students in my class reduced their rich identities to simply Black or White. As students blurted out comments such as, "I'm Black but my mom's White," or "You're White," I realized the need for the students to learn about the complexities of personal identification. The unit I've created will address this need. In order to ensure that it is age-appropriate and psychologically sound, I've extensively consulted the work of Beverly Tatum, Ph.D., and John W. Santrock, Ph.D. Please refer to the Resources section for more information.

According to Dr. Santrock, identity formation is a life-long endeavor that begins with self- recognition at about 18 months of age and does not end until personal reflection in old age (544). Therefore, it would be unreasonable to expect students to fully understand identity as a result of one unit. By the end of the year, I would like the students to be exposed to people who may be different from them in various ways, to avoid prejudice as much as possible, to learn some additional ways to describe themselves, and to develop a sense of self -pride.

Young children are often unsure of who they are and how to describe themselves to others. I've found that at the beginning of the year, first graders can usually make a few statements about what they look like as well as some foods or activities they enjoy. Santrock states that self-definitions in early childhood are usually reflections of the physical self and sometimes physical activities (366-368), but by the age of 7, children begin to describe themselves in psychological rather than only physical ways and they are also much more likely to describe themselves in terms of comparison to others (434-435). The students in my class will practice relating to others throughout the year as they compare themselves to one another and to characters from books.

According to Dr. Tatum, by the time children enter school, they develop "an understanding of race or ethnicity which is concrete and associated with specific markers-the language one speaks, the foods one eats, the physical characteristics one has" (179). The term race refers to category of "people who perceive themselves and are perceived by others as possessing distinctive hereditary traits" and ethnicity refers to a category of "people who perceive themselves and are perceived by others as sharing cultural traits"(179). The conversation I quoted earlier from my own classroom showed me that the children were definitely aware of race and color, but it also demonstrated that as first grade students, they were still forming ideas about racial identity and did not understand the ways that adults categorize people. For example, one student referred to his African American mother as White because of her light skin tone. In fact, the idea of race constancy, that a person's race will not change during his life, is generally just being formed between ages 6-7 (Tatum 43), so teachers should not be surprised or concerned if they hear students make comments such as, "My mom says that if I keep going in the sun I'll turn black." Nonetheless, teachers need to be careful about the language used in class.

In this narrative as well as in the classroom, I use the word White to refer to people of European descent. In American society, Whites are the majority group, which is defined as the one that has the "power to determine the values and norms of society to set public policy." The minority groups are the ones that "have inferior power and access to resources" (A. Hancock). Therefore, as part of the majority group, the key issue for healthy identity formation for White children in American society is developing a realistic sense of pride in their cultural heritage without being consumed by ideas of superiority and inferiority, or shame (Tatum 107). I believe that exposure to positive images of White people through literature and opportunities to compare and contrast characters of many races with their own experiences will enable young White children to develop positive self-image and an understanding that people are not inferior or superior due to their physical characteristics or group membership.

I use the word Black to refer to people of African descent. Though this categorization may at times be confusing to young children depending on the physical traits they see, I use it in order to include African American people of all skin tones as well as people of African descent from outside the US. I explain that White and Black are not terms that relate to the actual color of someone's skin, but words that describe groups of people based on where their ancestors came from and physical features. Black children face many obstacles in terms of forming positive racial identity in our society. Therefore, it is important to encourage students to discuss their concerns, to observe positive Black role mode