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Between Convictions and Uncertainties: Culture’s Cohesion and Special Education Scholarship Dr. Alfredo J. Artiles Professor Division of Curriculum & Instruction Arizona State University It is important to honor the complexity of culture as we improve special education research in a global multicultural era. To honor the complexity of culture means that we need to learn to deal with a number of ambiguities and uncertainties as we study the role of culture in human development.

Dr. Artiles stated that culture should be at the center of education—i.e., we must recognize that culture permeates everything we do in educational research, policy, and practice. This is a significant challenge because we live in a society that was founded on culture blind ideologies. It is not surprising, therefore, that we now have a number of policy and legislative initiatives that ignore the role of culture. An extreme example is the elimination of bilingual education in some states. At the same time, efforts that address culture explicitly sometimes do not honor the multi-faceted nature of culture; such initiatives might oversimplify the idea of culture or perpetuate stereotypes about certain cultural groups.

As educators strive to close persistent achievement gaps across racial groups, they face paradoxical situations that require them to address and ignore culture. Paradoxes are created by the co-existence of contradictory reforms such as the use of particular reading instruction methods, accountability reforms, policies to prevent disproportionaility, and discipline policies.

To illustrate this state of affairs, Dr. Artiles discussed the multiple (often contradictory) ways in which culture is represented in the recent National Research Council report on minorities in special education (Donovan & Cross, 2002). For example, multiple perspectives on culture are presented in the report to explain overrepresentation:

• Disregard for culture—the role of culture is not acknowledged in some of the explanations.
• Culture as a way of life—group patterning (e.g., typical behaviors) is emphasized.
• Culture as a static marker—constructs like race and ethnicity are used as synonyms.
• An interpretivist view of culture—it is indexed in routine practices of groups, but it avoids a deterministic perspective by stressing both the role of historical legacies and a situated understanding of the effects of culture.

In conclusion, the view of culture used in the report is fragmented; it
• favors a categorical and static view,
• is represented as bounded: Favors patterning over within-group diversity,
• ignores the invisibility of culture,
• disregards a person’s agency, and
• overlooks power and perspective.

Overall, the patterns identified in the report reflect historical trends observed in the special education field. Specifically, there has been a silence about culture in special education research and about the functions of special education in a diverse society. At the same time, however, it is important to acknowledge some progress has been made in recent years to address culture as reflected in actions such as federal funding of projects and requirements added to professional preparation standards.

In the last segment of his presentation, Dr. Artiles presented three guidelines to address and honor the complexity (uncertainties and ambiguities) and dynamic nature of culture:

1. Culture has multiple locations
Culture is located in both the mind of individuals (as subjective knowledge) and material practices—i.e., what people do every day in the form of routine practices. Practices are shaped by both historical legacies inherited from past generations and adaptations to the current ecological circumstances of people’s lives. From this perspective, culture is dynamic; it is always reproducing its legacies and changing to cope with present demands and constraints. This perspective on culture enables us to understand how group characteristics are formed and maintained while it also focuses attention on the fact that there are within-group differences.
We need to represent and study culture in this way.

2. Use a multi-level temporal model
Time is a key dimension in all research efforts. We can study phenomena over periods of time or at a particular point in time. Cultural historical theory enables us to identify multiple scales of time to study culture. For instance, culture can be examined at the level of cultural history. At this level, culture is examined in groups’ traditions and distinctive patterns. The early literature on multicultural education tends to focus on this temporal scale since distinctive features of cultural groups are stressed. The next temporal scale is the life history level. The classic example of research that focuses on this scale is developmental psychology because it tracks developmental trajectories over the life span. Yet, another temporal scale to examine culture is the so-called micro-genetic level—i.e., the moment-to-moment history of events. Examples of work conducted along this temporal scale include analysis of discourse patterns in social encounters and the sociolinguistic and interactional analyses of classroom life. The separation of these temporal scales is artificial because they are mutually embedded. Ideally, we should promote the implementation of a research program on the role of culture in human development that addresses questions at all temporal levels—i.e., group, individual, and interactional levels. This ambitious agenda would enable us to produce a more comprehensive perspective on culture, development, and disability.

3. Acknowledge power and perspective
People’s thought processes, feelings, and actions are always experienced from a particular cultural perspective. Researchers typically neither acknowledge nor document how their own cultural perspectives mediate the questions addressed in their work, and the ways in which cultural assumptions inform projects’ sampling and data collection and analysis procedures. The anthropologist Renato Rosaldo explained that as the other becomes more culturally visible in research studies, the (researcher) self becomes correspondingly less so. Hence, when we read about a cultural event or about individuals engaged in cultural work, we always have to ask, whose perspective is being portrayed and what cultural perspective the researcher brought to the situation under scrutiny? This is particularly important when we conduct research with cultural groups that have been historically disenfranchised because not all cultural contents and practices are equally valued. There are indeed deep ideological assumptions in our society that ascribe more or less power to distinct cultural groups. Thus, the challenge for researchers is to understand how their cultural perspectives and the influence of power issues mediate their work.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Artiles' scholarship focuses on how constructions of "difference" mediate educational systems' responses to the needs of culturally diverse students. His current research interests are racial/linguistic minorities' representation in special education, teacher learning in multicultural contexts, and comparative research on equity issues in special education.

Dr. Artiles has published extensively for researcher and practitioner audiences and serves on the editorial board of several specialized journals. He is an advisor to several organizations/programs in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Dr. Artiles has presented his work at professional conferences in the United States, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. He received Postdoctoral Fellowships from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and the Center for Minority Research in Special Education (COMRISE). Dr. Artiles received the 2001 Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association's Committee on the Role and Status of Minorities in Educational Research & Development. He is a principal investigator for the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt) (with J. Klingner, E. Kozleski, and C. Utley).