Diane M. Hoffman

Culture and Self in Multicultural Education: Reflections on Discourse, Text, and Practice

Drawing principally from anthropological critiques of contemporary American multiculturalism, this interpretive analysis of multicultural education in the United States suggests that discourse, text, and practice in the multicultural domain are imbued with unexamined assumptions concerning such basic concepts as culture, self, and individual identity. The article provides a critical analysis of these ideas and their presentation in multicultural discourses and illustrates how they are shaped by dominant core American cultural frames of reference. It argues that a more reflexive multicultural discourse is needed, both to advance research on the implementation of multicultural education, as well as to promote more genuine forms of multicultural teaching and learning. Furthermore, a reflexive or self-aware multiculturalism would allow us to focus on developing models for learning culture that can promote real transformation in the way we conceptualize and practice education in plural societies.

Reflecting on Social Emotional Learning: A Critical Perspective on Trends in the United States

This critical cultural analysis of trends in the field of social emotional learning (SEL) in the United States considers how ideas concerning emotional skills and competencies have informed programmatic discourse. While currently stressing links between SEL and academic achievement, program literature also places emphasis on ideals of caring, community, and diversity. However, recommended practices across programs tend to undermine these ideals by focusing on emotional and behavioral control strategies that privilege individualist models of self. SEL in practice thus becomes another way to focus attention on measurement and remediation of individual deficits rather than a way to redirect educators’ focus toward the relational contexts of classrooms and schools. The promise of SEL to foster increased achievement and equity in American education may not be realized unless more work is done to connect ideals with practices and to address the political and cultural assumptions that are being built into contemporary approaches.

Risky investments: Parenting and the production of the 'resilient child'

In recent years, consciousness of high levels of societal and familial risk have made raising a ‘resilient child’ a key theme in parenting culture. Using evidence from the popular literature on parenting resilient children, this interpretive discourse-based critique explores the ways resilience has been conceptualised in the parenting advice literature. It suggests that this literature advocates a ‘resilience pedagogy’ that reflects social class differentials and dramatically expands the possibilities for parental intervention in childrens lives. The analysis identifies clear links between resilience pedagogy and an emphasis on parenting strategies focused on fostering childrens emotional competencies. While ostensibly legitimising and valuing childrens emotional worlds, the underlying message of resilience pedagogy is more one of social control and conformity, in which parents become a primary means for the delivery of rationalised and therapeutic models of parent–child relationships that respond to larger political, cultural, and class-based visions of social order.

Childhood Ideology in the United States: A Comparative Cultural View

Childhood ideology functions in each nation as a complex of ideas about what children are like and how best to teach and socialise them. One important domain of childhood ideology concerns ideas and practices related to childrens development and behaviour management. Drawing from an analysis of popular childrearing magazines and early childhood education materials in the United States, this cultural study describes contemporary American mainstream beliefs concerning childrens early emotional and behavioural development. In particular, the paper explores themes of emotional expression, autonomy, individuality, power, and consumerism. Some comparisons with Japanese views on child development and emotional/behavioural socialisation are also made. The paper suggests that popular ideas and techniques of emotional and behavioural management in the United States in both families and early childcare environments reflect a dominant ideology of children that has potentially negative consequences for childrens welfare. Furthermore, childhood ideologies, while retaining culturally specific values and ideas neither remain static nor exist in isolation from one another. The paper questions the global diffusion of a Western-style professionalised discourse of child psychology that may not be applicable to all nations and their children.

How (Not) to Feel: Culture and the Politics of Emotion in the American Parenting Advice Literature.

This interpretive critique of the US parenting advice literature explores the underlying cultural values and assumptions concerning emotion and power that are revealed in discourses on child behavior management. The analysis reveals a clear emphasis on the pedagogical and therapeutic role of an emotionally knowledgeable parent in relation to a deficient child. Parents are supposed to teach the child how to handle negative emotions through explicit strategies such as labeling, verbalization, and therapeutic listening, many of which are imbued with cultural and class bias. While emotions appear to be valued, the underlying subtext is one of emotional control and disengagement. The discourse can be read as a window on a contemporary politics of emotion in which freedom of expression and regulation of the self exist in uneasy tension, and in which emotions represent a dangerous terrain of social dis/order.

Saving children, saving Haiti? Child vulnerability and narratives of the nation:

Long before the earthquake in Haiti on 12 January 2010, but particularly since, international media and humanitarian groups have drawn attention to the ‘vulnerable child’ in Haiti, a child often portrayed as needing ‘saving’. Focusing in particular on the restavèk (child domestic laborer), this article first explores the ways in which such children are represented as vulnerable and victimized, despite emerging ethnographic evidence on children’s lived experience that paints a rather different picture. It then argues that far from being inconsequential, however, representations of children’s vulnerability enable a critique of the Haitian culture and nation itself as fundamentally flawed and in need of saving through the interventions of the international order. Raising the question of for whom and for what purposes such projects of critique and saving exist, the article suggests that the saving of Haiti’s children can be seen as a way to position the Haitian nation within a universalized and moralizing narrative of maturation/development that ultimately is not so much about meeting Haiti’s (and its children’s) needs as it is about satisfying the needs and desires of the more powerful in terms of their own security, prosperity and global dominance.

Individualism and Individuality in American and Japanese Early Education: A Review and Critique

Comparisons of Japanese and American early education frequently rely on a contrast between so-called Japanese groupism and American individualism. This article suggests that this simplistic contrast leaves unexamined the different cultural understandings of the individual that underlie Japanese and American educational practices. Drawing on and integrating existing literature on early education and the self in Japan, this article suggests that a distinction needs to be made between individualism and individuality, with Japanese education tending toward a focus on individuality and American education toward individualism. The article explores the implications of this distinction for educational practices and for cultural self-critique among American educators.

Migrant Children in Haiti: Domestic Labor and the Politics of Representation

As do many other nations in the world today, Haiti faces extraordinary challenges to economic and social development, not the least of which are the complicated issues that surround questions of child labor, child welfare, international human rights, and democratic citizenship. These issues constitute a landscape of competing national and transnational discourses, shaped both by universal charitable concerns and by differing visions of what may constitute best practices for assisting children and communities facing situations of abuse and exploitation. Against this backdrop, a long tradition of internal independent migration of children within Haiti to assume unpaid positions as domestic workers reflects a particular convergence of historical, social, economic, and political forces. A recent surge of international media interest in child domestic workers in Haiti (known as restavek) has made the topic an important one for human rights and international aid organizations concerned with child welfare.

Diversity in Practice: Perspectives on Concept, Context, and Policy.

Although diversity is a concept that has generated many policy initiatives, it is also an idea that merits closer critical analysis. This article argues that many efforts to support diversity are framed by discourses grounded in conceptualizations of culture, difference, and identity that, far from encouraging genuine multiculturalism, merely serve to perpetuate the status quo. Educators and policy makers need to become far more sensitive to the implicit stasis of current categories of thinking about difference so that more effective and pedagogically appropriate models for teaching and learning about diversity can be implemented.

Culture, self, and“URI”: Anti-Americanism in contemporary South Korea

As a much debated phenomenon in contemporary South Korea, anti-Americanism has been seen primarily as a response to the perceived political and economic domination of the United States in Korean affairs. This article suggests that such a view, however, is incomplete without consideration of the cultural and psychological context in which contemporary discourses of cultural nationalism have arisen: specifically, an indigenous cultural psychology characterized by an emphasis onuri (“we”)—a collective sense of socially diffuse yet unified and homogenous selfhood. As one variety of contemporary national cultural discourse, anti-Americanism is a response to certain to certain unwelcome trends in cultural development that have already begun to undermine the collective sense of Korean selfhood, as reflected in part in Korean concern over the Western “cultural invasion,” and Korean critiques of American bias and arrogance in dealings with Korea. However, far from being a static concept concerned only with defensive protection of Korean identity,uri also reflects Korean concern for re-formulating national cultural identity in terms more accommodating to the outside. Ultimately, anti-Americanism needs to be seen in the context of a Korean cultural psychology, which posits the enduring value of a collectively defined selfhood as an alternative to the prevailing individualist representations of the West.