REINVENTING AMERICAN CULTURE:
Perspectives of Inclusion

The Great Expectations of Mentors and Students (G.E.M.S.) Learning Community:

A Coordinated Studies Model

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

The Great Expectations of Mentors and Students (G.E.M.S.) Learning Community has evolved from a simple linked courses-specific cohort prototype to its present incarnation as a coordinated studies model. 

The G.E.M.S. program was designed to facilitate the retention of underrepresented groups in higher education and to authentically prepare pre-teaching/human resource development students for service in their respective fields. Like all learning community models, the G.E.M.S. program is a curricular structure which links together "...several existing courses...so that students have opportunities for deeper understanding and integration of material they are learning and more interaction with one another and their teachers as fellow participants in the learning enterprise..."(Anderson,1990 p. 19)

The G.E.M.S.  program coordinated study learning community model provides students and faculty alike the opportunity to be fully engaged in active, interactive and interdisciplinary learning around broad themes and sub-themes. It opportunes them as well to experience learning as an integrative and intense intellectual, emotional and personal experience.  It, in addition, provides opportunities for faculty to plan and team-teach a unified body of material over an extended period of time.

Program Description

The G.E.M.S. program coordinated study learning community model is organized around the following theme:

            Reinventing American Culture: Perspectives of Inclusion

It is team-taught by three (3) instructors from the disciplines of education, history/sociology and English (writing). Students are enrolled in twelve credit hour units which constitute for most a full academic load. Course combinations typically include at least one education class (EDF  1005, EDF 2060, EEX 2000, EDG 2943 and EDG 2701),  one or more history/sociology classes(ISS 1120, ISS 1160, AMH 2020, AMH 2035 and AMH  2091) and/or one English reading/writing class (REA 0010,ENC 0021, ENC 1101, 1102, 2301). The following illustration gives an idea of the various combinations possible.

Classes meet twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, four hours a day from 9:00a.m. to 1:00p.m, with  an additional three to six (3-6) hours per week of educational outreach activities.  Direct instruction and planned in class and/or extra-classroom learning activities will be presented in a mix of plenary and small group environments flexibly scheduled throughout the instructional period (see tentative schedule). Faculty will be present and participating during the entire instructional period.

Themes and Sub themes: Powerful Conceptual Structures

The G.E.M.S. program coordinated studies learning community academic program is thematic and explores concepts and conceptual structures common to a broad range of disciplines including education, sociology, history and English writing. The theme, "Reinventing American Culture: Perspectives of Inclusion" is the overarching rubric and establishes the conceptual structure of instruction and learning activities alike with such implicit general questions as: 

What is "culture?" What is the relationship of culture and the self sense? What is American culture? What is transformation? What is personal transformation? What is the relationship of personal transformation  and American culture? Does the self need re-inventing? Does American culture need re-inventing? What is meant by the term "inclusion?"

Culture

The concepts "culture" and "custom" are central to the learnings and understandings anticipated as outcomes of this learning experiment. According to Marilyn Ferguson (1987):

"Cultural norms and mores are the great unexamined assumptions that run our lives. We become accustomed to roles; theybecome customary and therefore unchallenged. " (Ferguson, 1987, p.388)

Students and faculty will explore various definitions of culture, subculture, and microculture (ethnicity).  They will examine the notions of characteristic cultural thought and behavior and the core beliefs, values and attitudes from which they are derived. They will explore how culture is formed and how it is transmitted; how it perpetuates itself and how it diffuses and changes. They will explore, in addition, the demographics of South Florida as a cultural laboratory and it characteristic "cultural pockets" of populations. They will look at their respective communities and the forces therein that shape or influence their thoughts and opinions, their attitudes and behaviors. They will identify and examine the beliefs values and attitudes which determine the bulk of their behavior and explore alternatives to the same.

Culture and the Selfsense

Students and faculty will explore various definitions of “selfsense” including psychoanalytic paradigms of personality e.g. the id, ego and superego, the ego as an inferred self, self-perception, the self-concept, aspects and facets, self-concept and defense mechanisms, and self concept as a product of characteristic cultural thought and behavior. They will examine the selfsenseas the central core belief structure in a constellation of core and peripheral beliefs that comprise personal cultural thought and influence individual lbehavior. They will, in addition, constrast the same with the mores and norms of the predominate culture (macro culture) and the microcultures to which they belong. They will finally study the importance of the selfsense as the “agency”of personal transformation.

Transformation

Students and faculty will explore the various definitions and concepts that fall under the rubric of transformation, personal and societal. According to Ferguson,

“...the beginning of personal transformation is absurdly easy. We only have to pay attention to the flow of attention itself. Immediately we have added a new perspective. Mind can then observe its many moods, its body tensions, the flux of attention, its choices and impasses, hurting and wishing, tasting and touching. (Ferguson, p.68)”

Along with the study of the self sense, the members of the learning community will explore the notion of “the mind-behind-the-scenes” i.e. the part that watches the watcher.  Identifying with a broader more expansive dimension than our usual fragmented consciousness, this mind/self is freer and better informed. Ferguson continues:

“...his wider perspective has access to universes of information processed by the brain at an unconscious level, realms we usuallycan't penetrate because of static or control from the surface mind— what Edward Carpenter called "the little, local self. (p.69)"

Mind, in fact, is its own vehicle of transformation, inherently prepared to shift into new dimensions of development  if only we let it. Conflict, contradiction, mixed feelings, the pain of development, can be integrated at higher and higher levels. Each new integration makes the next easier. Integral to this process is paradigm change or paradigm shifts.  The whole purpose of the learning community is to bring about a change in mental models (beliefs), to identify prevailing paradigms that influence personal thinking and behavior,  and to introduce new frameworks for thinking about and understanding the world we live in.

American Culture and Custom: The American Dreamand Creed

According to Ricardo L. Garcia (1991):

"The way people live together in a community isa result of social and historical forces as well as regional and local circumstances.  Children growing up in the many communities in the United States acquire their family's culture as well as the regional culture that pervades their community.  Also, because the public schools teach a secular version of the Protestant work ethic--allegiance to free enterprise, individualism and self-reliance; the virtues of hard work, punctuality, and competitiveness as well as a...[macroculture]...governed by constitutional doctrines and laws, living in America is a complicated affair..."(Garcia,1991, pp.15-16)

What is American Culture? The answer to this question can be found through anexploration and examination of the various notions of the American Dream and the American Creed.  American culture is a national culture (macroculture) with its mores, folkways (customs), and norms (including a common language, literary heritage and history) which coheres the cultural groups subsumed within the context of the American nation-state.

With respect to the American Dream, Ferguson asserts:

"The dream is a chameleon; it has changed again and again.  For the first immigrants, America was a continent to explore and exploit, a haven for the unwanted and the dissenters--a new beginning.  Gradually the dream became an ascetic and idealized image of democracy, bespeaking the age-old hope for justice and self-governance. All toquickly, that dream metamorphosed into an expansionist, materialist, nationalist, and even imperialist vision of wealth and domination--paternalism, Manifest Destiny.  Yet even then, there was a competing Transcendentalist vision: excellence, spiritual riches, the unfolding of the latent gifts of the individual." (Ferguson, p.120)

Faculty and students will examine the ideas that power the American dream: capitalism, materialism, individualism, transcendentalism, human equality and democracy.

The American Creed has been described as an expression of the central mores of American national culture. According to Garcia:

The ...[American]...Creed contains a presumption of human equality, a feeling intertwined with general Christian notions whichholds that all people are brothers and sisters under the skin, that all peoples are equal in the eyes of the law. Implicit in the creed is the Protestant work ethic: work is one's salvation, and if one works hard, spends wisely, takes advantage of opportunities, and leads a clean life, salvation will be at hand.  Material gain, such as money in the bank, a new house, and two cars, is tangible proof that one is saved.  The American Creed basically holds that any person in American society can prosper materially by capitalizing on the opportunities offered in society. This is sometimes called the 'bootstrap theory,'...The creed assumes that all persons are equal under the law, and with this general protection, all persons can prosper on their own merit. Those who do not prosper...fail because they do not capitalize on opportunities provided them.  They fail, therefore, because of some character flaw, such as laziness or slovenly living, rather than a flaw or breakdown in the workings of the Creed.  Circumstances of birth, such as the social class or racial or ethnic group one inherits, are considered irrelevant."(Garcia, p.17)

The American Dream and the subsequent American Creed are the powerful ideas that gave birth to the American experiment and its on-going revolution – revolution aimed at transforming reality itself. Only in the relative freedoms which characterize the social environment of the United States of America can a "bloodless" revolution occur.

Only in a nation which can criticize its own injustices e.g. its management or mismanagement of material and human resources, its abuses of political powercan the real aims of the American Revolution be realized: creative personality liberated, personal initiative awakened. Only in a nation which questions its very culture, its morality and customs, its laws, religions and arts can a shift in the whole worldview of that culture occur and perhaps even bloodlessly.

Reinventing American Culture

It is the expressed and unequivocal position of thefaculty planning the instructional component of the G.E.M.S program coordinated studies learning community that American Culture needs to be reinvented. By "reinvent" we mean the common first and second definitions of the word:

"to make as if for the first time somethingalready invented <reinvent the wheel> 2: to remake or redo completely. (WWWebster's [On-line] Dictionary, http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary,1999)

The process of reinventing American culture is preceded by individual paradigm shifts in which individual frameworks for understanding and explaining the realities of American culture change -- the individual thinks about Americanculture in distinctly different ways. The often puzzling observations, contradictions and anomalies heretofore unexplained by the old frameworks are suddenly explained in the light of powerfully new insights. Collective individual paradigm shifts create over time therapeutic and cathartic upheavals which revitalize the culture--which cause shifts in the cultural worldview. It is during this process that culture gets reinvented primarily because individuals are in the process of reinventing themselves.

Faculty and students in the G.E.M.S. program coordinated studies learning community will aggressively pursue a constructivist teaching- learning strategy designed to enable the learner to gain insights on selected aspects of American culture and change his/her frameworks for thinking about, understanding and explaining American culture.

Inclusion

What is inclusion? According to Shafik Abu-Tahir (1999):

"It is generally accepted that 'inclusion' means inviting those who have been historically locked out to "come in". This well-intentioned meaning must be strengthened. A weakness of this definition is evident. Who has the authority or right to "invite" others in? And how did the "inviters" get in? Finally, who is doing the excluding? It is time we both recognize andaccept that we are all born "in"!  No one has the right to invite others in! It definitely becomes our responsibility as a society to remove all barriers which uphold exclusion since none of us have the authority to "invite" others "in"! So what is inclusion? Inclusion is recognizing our...oneness...and interdependence. Inclusion is recognizing that we are "one" even though we are not the "same". The act of inclusion means fighting against exclusion and all of the social diseases exclusion gives birth to - i.e. racism, sexism, [...ethnocentrism, heterosexism, lingicism, classism, ableism, etc,...writer's insert ]. Fighting for inclusion also involves assuring that all support systems are available to those who need such support. Providing andmaintaining support systems is a civic responsibility, not a favor. We were all born "in". Society will immediately improve at the point we honor this truth!!" "(Abu-Tahir, 1999, http://www.inclusion.com/ what_is.html).

Faculty and students in the G.E.M.S. program coordinated studies learning communitywill explore and examine the various notions of inclusion and the points of view in which inclusion is considered or evaluated.

Ways of Learning and Knowing

The majority of students in the G.E.M.S. program coordinated studies learning community are pre-teaching interns or human resource development majors. As such, faculty and students will explore and examine the various ways in which people learn from an individual and cultural perspective. Students will identify their own particular ways of learning and knowing through the use of such measures as the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, Anton Gregorc's "Mindstyles Styles," Crescencio Torres' "Language System Diagnostic Inventory, Herman Witkin's "Group Embedded Figures Test", Right Brain-Left Brain Hemispheric Dominance measures, among others. They will also identify specific cultural approaches to teaching-learning.

Students and faculty will in addition, examine such concepts/practices related toteaching-learning as the cognitive field interactionist-behaviorist debate, understanding pedagogies, personal transformation, social transformation, multicultural awareness and consciousness, insights, schemes, paradigms, cognitive styles, multiple intelligences, and emotional intelligence. Students will be afforded opportunities to apply these concepts in authentic classroom situations or real school environments under supervision.

Writing in the Content Area

Improved academic writing skills are among the most important educational outcomes anticipated in the learning community experience. If personal transformation describes the several simultaneous learning experiences and educational outcomes  planned for the student, e.g. gaining insights, creating and changing their frameworks for thinking about, understanding and explaining aspects of their personal realities, changing their behaviors, then the student's ability to record and express those experiences in writing becomes an authentic measure of those experiences and outcomes.  As such, student writing in the form of reflective journals, reaction papers and formal reports, etc., should be able to competently depict that transformation.

Instructional methods to be employed require students to interact extensively, brainstorm  ideas, to do group workand pair work and to set the stage for writing.   Instructional intervention will reflect several areasof emphasis:

• helping students to express themselves clearly both in writing as well as in speaking.Students should be able to write fairly accurate and coherent paragraphs inorder to report on given topics.
• helping students write complex sentences using varied sentence patterns to link ideas in  multiparagraph essays. Students  should be able to express opinions andwrite summaries and reports in a variety of given  situations.
• helping students show variety in their expression of ideas using standard American grammar and complex structures to write longer essays in various rhetorical modes; comparison/contrast, classification and process analysis, cause and effect and definition and argumentation. Students should be able to summarize and paraphrase reading/literature texts, lectures, research findings, in class and extra-classroom experiences and present them in journal entries, essays or related written forms that are competent and clearly understood.

Innovative Instruction and Assessment Strategies

The instructional delivery system employed by the G.E.M.S. program coordinated studies learning community is rooted in the constellation of concepts and techniques known as transpersonal education.  Adherents of transpersonal education recognize that  

"Learning, after all, is not schools, teachers, literacy, math, grades, achievement. It is the process by which we have moved every step of the way since we first breathed; the transformation that occursin the brain whenever new information is integrated, whenever a new skill is mastered."(Ferguson, p. 288)

Techniques of instruction to be employed emphasize the social construction of knowledge, i.e. that knowledge is created through the interaction of human beings with each other and with their environment; that knowledge is rooted in human experience transcending cultural difference and exists as a part of a continuum rather than as subjects. These same instructional techniques are designed to  encourage students to search for meaning, for forms and patterns in events and phenomena; to recognize their own schemes and paradigms, how they shift and -- to understand that frustration and struggle almost always precede insights.

Typical instructional strategies and techniques include the self-disclosing survey, the "Book Seminar", the Read/Talk and Read/Analyze cooperative learning techniques. Students will, in addition, keep a reflective journal, in whichthey among other exercises  will deconstruct an important idea or concept a day. There will be take home objective measures given to insure the reading of materials and to provide practice in test taking skills. Students will keep all relevant work in a performance portfolio and submit the same at the end of the term as a part of their final grade.

Computer-assisted instruction will also be a regular feature of the learning community.  All students will be exposed to all the competencies of the instructional technology course in regular lab periods daily.  Final projects will demonstrate those competencies in their presentation.

Strategies for assessing student work include the group marking of all written assignments by the team of faculty (two marking for conceptual content, one marking for grammar and syntax), regular spot check quizzes and writing samples as anon-going measure of writing competencies, averaging the numerical scores on objective measures,  a major individual or group writing project e.g. term paper or expository report, student self-assessments, and a student -faculty negotiating process to determine final grade.  

Attendance and Punctuality

Classroom attendance is required.  Students can miss no more the five (5) class sessions in the term. Missing partial periods must be arranged in advance with learning community faculty. Final grade will be adversely affected by poor attendance.  Students are committed to a twelve (12) credit  instructional load. If the student plans to drop out of the learning community, they must drop all twelve credits.  Students who stop attending class and fail to officially drop the course, will receive a failing grade for each of the learning community courses in which they are registered.

Students will be expected to clock-in prior to entering class and clock out at the end.Strict attention will be paid to student punctuality.  Unacceptable levels of lateness will affect performance adversely.

Grading Policy:

Students will earn written assessments from each of the learning community faculty forwork submitted.  Objective measures will be assessed according to the grading scheme described below.  A final grade will be determined by a weighted average of all objective measures and a written assessment negotiated between the three faculty and the student which will be converted to a letter grade for each of the courses in which the student is registered.  Tests and assignments will either be objective measures, essays, projects, etc. .  There will be a provision for make-up exams by arrangement with the learning community faculty. Late  assignments will be penalized by grade reduction.  It is important that the student understands that course requirements will not be fulfilled until all required assignments are turned in.  The learning community faculty will accept any required assignment late. The grading scale on objective measures is as follows:

            A =      92- 100%

            B =      84 -  91%

            C =      74 -  83%

            D =      60 -  73%

Tests/Assignments:  There will be weekly take home assignments (objective measures) throughout the course. There will be a writing assignment assigned each day.

Reflective Journal:  Students are required to keep a reflective journal, dated with entries for each class day or extra classroom assignment. Entries must be well written and edited before final submission.

Term Project:                                    

The student will be required as a part of a group to write a group term paper (minimum of fifteen (15) typewritten pages) which will be the written component of a group project on a theme related subject mutually agreed upon by the student(s) and the faculty. Projects will be presented and videotaped. The term paper component of the project must be word processed, edited and meet reasonable conventions of citation of references, footnoting and/or listing bibliographies.

Portfolio: Students are required to submit a portfolio of all the work and significant accomplishments completed and achieved during the term. Students will be inform by the learning community faculty as to the required content and organization of the portfolio.

Educational Outreach:                      

Participation in a minimum of fifteen (15) assigned hours educational outreach programs is required.

Options: Students will be afforded the opportunity to earn extra credit in various ways:

Various special assignments can be used to offset poor performances on tests/assignments as approved by the learning community faculty.  Students must understand, however, that an extra credit assignment is not a substitute for failure to complete and hand in a required assignment. Required assignments must be turned in before extra credit is awarded.

Performance Objectives:

1. The student will be able to describe verbally and in writing selected research(classic and current) and literature on culture, cultural change and its impact on personal and social transformation.
2. The student will be able to express verbally and in writing personal philosophical positions, values and frameworks for thinking about, understanding and explaining social, political  and educational issues as the relate to culture, cultural change, diversity, educational reform, personal and social transformation.
3. The student will be able to express verbally and in writing the centralconcepts and conceptual structures of the course and what they mean (their connectedness) in the student's personal life.
4. The student will demonstrate developing research, inquiry and academic writing skills in their several forms and recognize their importance ,
5. The student demonstrate developing computer literacy skills which will be expressed various projects, assignments and the final project.
6. The student demonstrate developing self-assessment skills which will be expressed verbally and in writing.
7. In content specific areas, the student will:

7.1. demonstrate knowledge of sociological terms asthey relate to personal and social transformation by defining key concepts such as culture; macroculture; microcultures; acculturation; assimilation; pluralism; beliefs, values, attitudes and stereotypes; prejudice; discrimination and chauvinism/oppression; ethnicity and ethnocentrism; race and racism;  gender and sexism; sexual orientation and heterosexism; language and linguicism; social class and classism; religion and religious chauvinism; age and ageism; and exceptionality  and ableism

7.2. demonstrate knowledge of educational terms asthey relate to personal and social transformation by defining key concepts such as learning, transformation, cognitive-field interactionism, behaviorism, insights, conditioning,  paradigms, paradigm shifts, teaching, the instructional conversation, means of assisting, multiple intelligences and emotional intelligences.

7.3. demonstrate some knowledge of unifying beliefs, values and attitudes shared by several American subcultural groups.

7.4. demonstrate some comprehension of psychological concepts as they relate to personal transformation by defining: self-concept; self-esteem; self-fulfilling prophecy; law of  reciprocity; social learning theory; cognitive restructuring; internal and external locus of control; convergent and divergent thinking; and empowerment of the individual.

7.5. demonstrate some comprehension of the self-actualization process by identifying the individual  states and characteristics of self-actualization, and adoption of one's cultural identity.

1. The student will read current literature related to course content in addition to required readings in textbook(s).
2. The student will contribute personal opinions/points of view concerning personally significant and/or controversial issues related to personal and social transformation.
3. The student will begin to develop and/or expand his/her own personal frameworks to think about, understand andexplain culture cultural change, teaching-learning, personal and social transformation.
4. The student will begin to build or improve on his/her ability to build support groups.
5. The student  will begin to develop skills in bridging the social-academic divide where social and academic concerns compete.
6. The student will recognize that his/her voice is as important as any in theprocess of constructing knowledge.
7. The student will  become committed to the value of respecting the worth and dignity of the individual.
8. The student will become commented to the value that all students are capable of learning and should be provided  with successful experiences which will enhance the manifestation of the individual's positive potentials.
9. The student will begin to demonstrate the ability for self-examination and the willingness to alter beliefs, values   attitudes and change behaviors.

Required Textbooks:

McNair, J. Personal transformations: The Process of Multicultural Awareness/Consciousness. New York, Forbes Custom Publishing, 1998.

Selected Readings from (but not limited to):

Ani, M. Yurugu: An African-centeredcritique of European cultural thought and behavior. New Jersey. Africa World Press, 1994.

Bennett, Lerone. Before the Mayflower: Ahistory of Black America. SixthEdition (Revised) New York. Penguin Books, 1987.

Branch, T. Parting the waters: America in the King years 1954-63. New York. Touchstone, 1988.

Citron, M.J. Gender and the musical canon. New York. Cambridge University Press 1993.

Diop, C.A.. Civilization or barbarism: An authentic anthropology. New York. Lawrence Hill Books, 1991.

Ferguson, M. The Aquarian conspiracy: Personal and social transformation in our time. New York. Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam, 1987.

Garcia, R.L. Teaching in a pluralistic society: Concepts, Models, strategies. Second Edition. New York. HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

Garrow, D.J.  Bearing the cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York. Random House, 1986.

Parillo, V.N. Strangers to these shores: Race and ethnic relations in the United States. Fourth Edition  New York. MacMillan Publishing Company, 1994.

Takaki, R. A different mirror: A history y of multicultural America. New York. Little Brown and Company, 1993.