Getting to Deep Culture

If you’ve been in education in any capacity, you’ve likely heard about the iceberg of culture. Zaretta Hammond made an update by using the Culture Tree, which I love because culture is always changing and adapting, especially as different cultures are interacting with each other. While I love love love what Zaretta Hammond has done with Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain–it is still a widely used reference in my local districts–we are still woefully short on the depth of knowledge to deep culture. I think what is important to understand that leads to the important interpretation of aperture is that deep culture leads to strong emotional reactions–in teachers as well as students. While Hammond does refer to Hofstede and one important cultural dimension, there is very little mentioned to address the wide variety of deep cultural values that sit in the roots of the tree. How do we understand what is going on in the roots? How do we find a way to talk about it, to make it tangible? It’s very difficult to articulate WHY a situation feels wrong, not normal, inappropriate–there are many words we can use to describe the emotional reaction. It is also hard to understand why it may not feel that way to other people–and that might be a cultural understanding, not a universal morality that everyone understands (which is also cultural, but we’ll get to that…). 

My next posts will get to these questions.