Cultural Literacies

The term cultural literacies refers to the values, attitudes, beliefs, and predispositions of each of the many cultural groups that make up the modern world and the societies in which we live. Cultural literacies refers to the ability to understand and value the customs, values, and beliefs of one's own culture and the cultures of others. The term implies the capacity to function harmoniously on a daily basis in social settings consisting of more than one culture. Cultural literacies are important in the development of multicultural curricula designed for schools serving more than one cultural group and for curricula aimed at preparing students to live in a culturally interdependent world.

The idea of cultural literacies in the plural form is an outgrowth of three ideas: culture, literacy, and multiple cultures or multiple literacies. Literacy is often defined as the ability to read, write, and speak the dominant language. The explosion of knowledge in the sciences, humanities, and the arts, and the expansion of media modes through television and computers, contributed to the expansion of the idea of literacy to the idea of cultural literacy defined as the knowledge and skills needed to succeed within a culture. Globalization and high levels of human migration in the world, along with curricular concerns for multiculturalism and cross-cultural understanding contributed to an expansion of the idea of cultural literacy to the idea that there are many cultural literacies. For curriculum this means that even though a person of a different culture may not be literate in the dominant culture, he or she will exhibit literacy in his or her own culture. The idea of cultural literacies, therefore, is that a person exhibits literacy within his or her own culture. In the modern cross-cultural world there are many cultural literacies. For the curriculum, recognizing, valuing, and accepting cultural literacies other than one's own is a mark of being culturally literate. An individual may be said to be literate when that person has an awareness and understanding of the literacies of others as well as possessing literacy within his or her own culture.

The words culture, literacy, and cultural literacies are open to flexible definitions and to different interpretations. Readers in the area will confront two related but very different ideas. In one, cultural literacies refers to cultural expressions within a culture such as reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, and others. Within this interpretation of the notion of cultural literacies there are debates over which specific content elements should define literacy within that culture. The significance of this for curriculum has to do with what is considered core curriculum and what is considered peripheral, elective, or frill curriculum. Traditionally, reading, writing, and arithmetic were considered the core curriculum for cultural literacy. The idea has been expanded to many different content areas, so it is common to think in terms of different cultural literacies depending on students' talents and the particular selection of courses and overall program studied within a curriculum. The main curricular debates in this notion of cultural literacies are over three main matters: questions of core knowledge and skills—that is, what are the core knowledge areas and skills and how to represent them in the curriculum; broader questions of cultural characteristics and qualities and their cultural history and how to represent cultural qualities in the curriculum; and for progressive educators, the content and democratic forms of education needed to politically empower culturally disenfranchised students and how to create an action-oriented curriculum.

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