The Culture Tree
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Some years ago, I taught a course, “Cultural Diversity in Education,” at a local community college. I asked my students to write a brief reflection about how their cultural background shaped their view of the world. I was met with blank then panicked faces as my predominately white, middle class students protested, “But I don’t have a culture!” After my initial surprise at their outcry, I realized my white students’ culture was so normalized that they thought “culture” belonged only to people of color or recent immigrants.
Zaretta Hammond reminds us that everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a culture that serves as the “software to our brain’s hardware” (Hammond, 2015, p. 22). Today’s infographic summarizes the three levels of culture and their importance in shaping each individual’s cognitive growth and development. One need not know the details of every student’s surface and shallow culture, but an awareness of students’ deep cultural archetypes such as individualism or collectivism “can make culturally responsive teaching more manageable in a diverse classroom” (p. 25).
Hammond, Z. (2015). What’s culture got to do with it? In Hammond, Z & Jackson, Y. , Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students (pp. 22-24). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, a SAGE Company.