Culture and teaching

Culture and Teaching (CaT) engages the study of education as a cultural phenomenon. As a student in CaT, you will study a range of educational processes that take place both in and beyond the borders of schools, and explore alternative epistemologies and pedagogies. While CaT primarily engages schools and schooling, it also attends to families, neighborhoods, and international communities.

CaT is a politically committed program. Faculty and students are dedicated to seeking better understandings of issues pertaining to equity and social justice in both research and teaching. The track is interdisciplinary and collaborative, so your work as a student will encompass many different approaches, methods, and perspectives.

Some of CaT's courses focus on the ways in which teachers are prepared to teach; engage in ongoing professional development; and develop their own personal and professional identities within collegial communities. Other courses examine the salience of understanding white racial identity for pedagogy and social change; as well as the implications of globalization and immigration for teaching, learning, and curriculum. Still other courses explore popular culture and media in relation to contemporary critical theory and teaching practices. “Culture" in CaT includes thinking about "high" and "popular" cultures, the cultures of teaching and the cultures of learning, and how our responses to all influence and are influenced by everyday meanings and practices. “Teaching” in CaT includes thinking about how, as educational leaders and researchers in and outside of the classroom, we might take up radical democratic forms of life with our fellow learners

Faculty

Timothy J. Lensmire
Tim’s teaching, research, and writing are animated by commitments to and hopes for radical democracy. His past research focused on the teaching of writing in schools. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin and John Dewey, among others, he criticized and reconstructed traditional and progressive conceptions of the teacher's role, student voice, and community in the writing classroom. His current research and writing are grounded in critical white studies and focused on an ethnographic interview study he completed recently in a small rural community. The goal of this work is to build descriptions of, and theoretical insights about, the racial identities of white people, as part of a larger pedagogical and political project concerned with race and social change.

Bic Ngo
Bic’s research examines how and why schools and classrooms advantage some groups over others, as well as the ways schools and classrooms are critical sites for social and cultural transformation. She employs ethnographic methodology and engages critical, cultural and feminist theories to explore the implications of globalization and immigration for teaching, learning and curriculum. Her work has explored issues of culture and inequality in the education of Hmong American and Lao American students and families. Currently, her research seeks to explicate the impact of culture change on Hmong students' education, and the implications for how we theorize immigrant identity and anti-oppressive education.

Mistilina Sato
Misty’s research seeks to better understand the ways in which teachers, as people and as professionals, engage in processes of developing their practice, leadership, personal and professional identities, and their collegial relationships and communities. The theoretical lens she brings to her research is one of practical reasoning. Practical reasoning recognizes the intellectual process of taking everyday action through a process of deliberation, foregrounds the local and timely nature of action, and emphasizes the personal identity of the teacher. Recent studies have focused on teacher leadership and the teacher change process, specifically in the context of science education, National Board Certification, and everyday or formative assessment integrated in the teachers’ instructional practice.

Thom Swiss
Thom’s writing and teaching focus on interdisciplinary subjects, particularly the cultural studies of education. Cultural studies in education—a collection of interdisciplinary texts, theories, and practices—can help educators understand many of the things done in the field of education, starting with the ideological production of "education" as a concept. Thom teaches across disciplinary and genre boundaries (digital media, popular music, literature, cultural journalism, and the discourses of education) and encourages his graduate students to read materials from a range of fields and perspectives. Like others in the Culture and Teaching track, Thom is dedicated to issues pertaining to equity and social justice in both research and teaching. He joined the faculty in 2006 and chairs C&I’s Diversity Committee.

Student profiles

Brian Lozenski (Diversity of Views and Experiences (DOVE) Fellow 2008-09)

Photo left and above: Culture
and Teaching Ph.D. student
Brian Lozenski performing
with his band, Junkyard Empire

I am originally from Philadelphia, PA; my undergraduate degree is from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY where I majored in Operations Research Engineering and minored in Africana Studies. I received a Master's degree in Urban Education with a concentration in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003.

I taught secondary mathematics for eight years in Philadelphia, PA and St. Paul, MN, and during that time I developed a leadership program for African American boys and also coached several chess teams. I have been a trainer for Wellstone Action's Campus Camp program for four years, where I work with college students around the country on developing community organizing skills. I am a husband and father of two wonderful daughters and in my spare time I am the MC for Junkyard Empire -- a politically progressive, live hip-hop band.

I entered the Culture and Teaching Ph.D. program in order to advance my understanding of critical multicultural education in urban schools and to develop educational models centered on social justice.

Aaron Hokanson

Read about Aaron on the Culture and Teaching blog!