Los dispositivos de la mirada

As early as 1988, Olson argued that culture is central to understanding the context and meaning behind teachers’ thinking and behaviour:

Making sense of teaching means interpreting what teachers do and say in order that we may reveal the rules of the game in which they participate…against which any particular teacher's account has to be placed...[otherwise] the significance of what they say is lost. (p. 167)

However, the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and culture was hardly explored until the mid-1990s, when scholars including Bruner, Olson, Strauss and Torff began to explore the

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concept of ‘folk pedagogy’ to delineate the relationship between teaching, teacher thinking and culture (DeZutter, 2008). Their central thesis is that ‘nothing is ‘culture free’’ (Bruner, 1996, p.14), and that culture ‘provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conceptions of ourselves and our powers’ (p.x). According to these scholars, each distinct culture in each historical period has a distinctive ‘folk psychology’ –

our everyday intuitive theories about how our own minds and the minds of others work…[which] reflect not only certain wired-in human tendencies…[but also] certain deeply ingrained cultural beliefs about the mind. (Olson and Bruner, 1995, p.10)

These lay theories are rarely made explicit, yet they are omnipresent and fundamentally shape a culture’s ‘folk pedagogy’ – their ‘body of assumptions or notions of what children’s minds are like and how one may help them learn’, which shape all teaching or adult-child interactions within that society (Ibid.)14. Even when a teacher receives extensive training in an alternate teaching approach, it can still be difficult to override the tendency to teach according to one’s culturally-inherited folk pedagogy. Bruner thus argues that any educational innovation will have to compete with, replace, or modify the folk psychological and pedagogical theories that already guide both teachers and students’ practice.

While folk pedagogy scholarship offers a useful foundation of how educational practices are shaped by certain beliefs about learners’ minds (Bruner, 1996) and of the cultural roots of these beliefs, it is nevertheless limited in that it focuses only on a narrow set of beliefs about the mind – which as argued earlier is not sufficient for understanding the totality of teachers’ thinking and behaviour. There is need to also look at broader cultural beliefs including worldview and ideological beliefs that may influence teaching – of which folk theories are only one component. Folk pedagogy research has also been critiqued for being mostly theoretical rather than empirical, and for failing to provide much elaboration on what kind of mental entity a folk theory is (DeZutter, 2008), other than seeing it as comprised of cultural beliefs. For this reason, this study chooses to use the construct of ‘belief’ instead which is grounded in a larger theoretical and empirical body of literature, while still acknowledging the cultural sources of these beliefs and their role in formulating the theories which guide teachers’ practice (Pajares, 1992).

Unfortunately few have continued to build on the foundation laid by Bruner and his colleagues. Only a few studies can be found that explore the influence of culture on teachers’ beliefs, most of which do not utilise the concept of folk pedagogy. For example, Chan & Elliott (2004) explored how culture shapes epistemological beliefs through a cross-cultural analysis of epistemological studies in North America, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and found several

14 _{In India, the culturally dominant folk psychology and pedagogy are what Olson and Bruner (1995)}

describe as a didactic or transmission model, which sees learners’ minds as blank slates to be filled. This folk theory is rooted in various cultural and historical forces that have shaped Indian education: the ancient Vedic system, the guru-shishya (teacher-disciple) tradition, and the British colonial legacy which largely built on ancient didactic traditions.

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specific belief dimensions predominant in the Hong Kong Chinese sample but not in the other contexts. Mansour (2008, 2009, 2013) found that science teachers’ pedagogical beliefs regarding their roles, students’ roles, aims of teaching as well as their teaching practice were profoundly shaped by their socio-cultural contexts including their personal religious beliefs. Other studies have also shown that teachers in different countries have differing cultural beliefs about curriculum, subject matter, how students learn, appropriate classroom relationships, and so forth, which must be taken into account in any attempt at pedagogical reform (Clarke, 2003; Rao, Cheng & Narain, 2003; Santagata, 2004). However, in most teacher belief studies culture is not a theoretically well-elaborated construct, and most are vague at best regarding the relationship between beliefs and culture (DeZutter, 2008), which is a gap that the present study seeks to address. In some cases, authors have drawn from cognitive anthropology and use a cultural models approach to gain deeper insight into shared dimensions of teachers’ beliefs (Blumenfeld-Jones, 1996; Clarke, 2001; DeZutter, 2008). Blumenfeld-Jones argues that analysis of cultural models reveals the origins and complexities of teachers’ thinking in ways unavailable to other forms of analysis. Like Bruner, he concludes that curriculum reform cannot be successful without first understanding teachers’ cultural models, otherwise the strength of these deep-seated models will outweigh the strength of the innovation. Similarly, Clarke concludes that Indian teachers’ implicit models ‘are not just idiosyncratic and personal but rather, embedded in the broader social and cultural environment in which the teachers live’ (p.139).

Another relevant body of literature emerging in recent decades focuses on the role of culture in shaping pedagogy, though it does not always explicitly elucidate the role of teachers’ beliefs in mediating this relationship between culture and pedagogy. Some studies have already been mentioned in the previous chapter that look at the role of cultural factors restricting the implementation of learner-centred pedagogy (e.g. Ginsburg, 2006; Gupta, 2006; O’Sullivan, 2006; Schweisfurth, 2013; Tabuwala, 1997). For example, Schweisfurth (2013) cites various studies (e.g. Hofstede, 2003; Stenberg, 2007; Harkness et al, 2007) that identify certain cultural assumptions that differ across societies and that may conflict with the assumptions of learner-centred education. Examples include hierarchical relationships, collectivism, teachers’ views about the ideal student, which behaviours are considered ‘smart’, and appropriate adult-child relationships. Gu (2010) warns us to be wary of attempts at defining universal best practices, since teaching is a value-laden, culturally-embedded practice, and thus the very notion of teaching effectiveness is a culturally relative concept. Thus understanding teachers’ cultural beliefs is also crucial in helping educational reformers discern what is an appropriate form of learner-centred practice in that particular cultural context, since responsiveness to cultural realities may require learner-centred education to take different manifestations in different places.

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Perhaps the most significant of these studies is Robin Alexander’s (2001) comparative study of differences in pedagogy across five countries (India, Russia, France, UK, and USA). Alexander finds that in addition to economic, political and demographic factors that fuel educational differences, teachers’ thinking and practice are strongly shaped by the culture in which teachers are embedded. In particular, he finds that Indian educational philosophy differs vastly from Euro-American educational philosophies, based on very different notions of what values and skills are seen as developmentally and socially appropriate for children growing up in each context. In his analysis of conceptualisations of educational quality in the context of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme in India, Alexander (2008) stresses the necessity of keeping cultural context in mind while analysing pedagogical values and practices:

Culture is so pervasive a shaper of education and educational realities that it cannot possibly be ignored. It gives rise to varying and often competing accounts of knowledge, of learning and of the relationship between teacher and taught, in other words the very stuff of pedagogy. (p.19)

The above research brings to stark prominence the necessity of studying how culture shapes teachers’ beliefs and practice, especially in light of the political economy of development, as highlighted in the previous chapter. Such research is essential in the effort to thwart the tendency of international development and educational initiatives to at times view ‘solutions’ as culturally-neutral, and thereby export them inappropriately.