Cultures in Transition

Overview

Rather than a term to be defined or a framework to be outlined, culture in transition suggests an understanding of culture that attends to the changeability of cultural worlds in an increasingly diverse and global society, as well as the pervasiveness of dominant cultural, discursive, political, and socioeconomic norms in society. In this sense, the terms culture and cultural worlds are writ large, encompassing multiple and overlapping cultural factors pertaining to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and class, among myriad others, as they interact with the milieu of mainstream societies. The dynamics of culture, as connected to these factors, has been an area of debate and reconceptualization in a range of disciplines and areas of scholarship, each contributing to a fluid and dynamic understanding of how cultures exist in flux in diverse educational contexts. As outlined in subsequent sections, conceptualizing culture as in transition given current trends in education and society has become increasingly prevalent across fields that contribute to research and scholarship in education and challenges scholars, researchers, and educators to reframe the role of culture in the shaping of individual and collective identities across communities and educational contexts. Finally, a practice theory approach to the examination of identity construction in educational contexts exemplifies how framing cultural worlds as shifting and dynamic can contribute to the study of complex issues in diversity and education.

Cultures in Social and Educational Contexts

Educational institutions are embedded in complex and shifting cultural landscapes that are continuously formed and reformed amid various powerful trends. In the United States, one of these trends stems from the increasing diversity of the population. Projections based on the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that racial and ethnic minorities will make up 54% of the population in 2050, and the Pew Research Center projects that by then almost one in five individuals in the United States (19%) will be an immigrant. The growing diversity of the U.S. population ensures the increase of cross-cultural possibilities and tensions as immigrant groups as well as minority groups in the [Page 581]United States interact with the dominant normative culture.

Even as the population becomes increasingly diverse, a second trend is the persistent stratification and segregation of U.S. society according to racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic markers. According to a 2009 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, in the largest 100 U.S. school districts, 70.6% of the student population in 2007 consisted of students of color and a disproportionate percentage—53% of students—were eligible for reduced-price lunch. In comparison, many White middle-class students were attending more affluent suburban institutions with smaller student-to-teacher/staff ratios. The schooling of the majority of students of color in the United States is grounded in educational cultures that the media and general public associate with low expectations and limited opportunities.

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