Conceptions of Culture: What Multicultural Educators Need to Know

The concept of culture stands, clearly but unsteadily, at the heart of multicultural education. This book provides a systematic, in-depth understanding of the role that culture plays in the massive literature of multicultural education as multiple and antithetical definitions of culture exist. The book also shows multicultural educators how to discern the definition used in any particular book or article. Thomas Wren deploys methods and concepts from philosophy and the social sciences to provide an analytic framework within which the history and current state of culture theory can be understood both for its own sake and for its educational significance. Although the book is full of theory, it is not a theoretical book in the usual sense. It is a road map, accompanied by the related theoretical information and tools that graduate students and faculty need to (1) navigate the complex terrain of multicultural education literature, (2) apply the book’s analytical framework to that literature and to their own future practice, and (3) anticipate the social changes and accompanying conceptual changes in our notions of culture that are now occurring as part of the "cultural hybridity" of today's students.

Table of Contents:
Preface Chapter 1. Defining Culture and Multicultural Education: How To Do It, and Why Chapter 2. The Concept of Culture in the Social Sciences Chapter 3. Topical, Structural, and Functional Conceptions of Culture in the Professional Literature of Multicultural Education Chapter 4. Historical, Normative, and Behavioral Conceptions of Culture in the Professional Literature of Multicultural Education Chapter 5. Cognitive, Symbolic, and Critical Conceptions of Culture in the Professional Literature of Multicultural Education Chapter 6. Beyond the Critical Turn References

About the Author :
Thomas E. Wren is professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, where he directs the graduate program in social philosophy. He holds graduate degrees in education and English literature as well as philosophy and has published extensively on moral education and other educational themes. He is on the editorial boards of Theory and Research in Education and The Journal of Moral Education.

Review :
With elegant clarity, distinguished philosopher Thomas Wren incisively analyzes the conflicting conceptions of 'culture' that underpin contrasting models of multiculturalism as well as their pedagogic and political assumptions. This book is a substantive resource for students of culture and for anyone implementing, researching, or critiquing multicultural education. This clearly written book delivers on its title by placing multicultural education as its proper historical perspective connecting current disagreements to long-standing differences in the social sciences over the meanings of culture, society and enculturation. Only a philosopher could have offered the perspective that Wren provides. In this wonderful book, Wren offers educators the keys toward unlocking the hidden assumptions behind the arguments over multicultural education and provides them with the intellectual tools needed to forge their own well-informed perspectives. This is a wonderfully instructive book.Wren addresses a blind spot in the literature and pedagogy of multicultural education—the underexamined concept of culture—and in doing so provides a model of cogent interdisciplinary analysis.This is essential reading for anyone interested in multicultural education. In chapter 1, Wren (philosophy, Loyola Univ.) explores both formal and informal definitions of culture as they are framed in terms of overlapping practical agendas in the classroom. In the second chapter, he explores conceptions of culture in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, providing students of multicultural education with resources for reading and research. In chapters 3-5, he develops an analysis of the nine major conceptions of culture featured in the foundational literature of multicultural education. In the final chapter, Wren describes how these conceptions of culture provide a tool for the future analysis of the concept of culture in global society. Conceptions of Culture is a valuable resource for teachers and students of multicultural education as they explore conceptions of culture in multicultural education in times of cultural hybridity in the classroom. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.