Transcultural Education for Clinical Psychologists, Part #2

Curriculum: The Linguistic Turn

The position from which my proposed multicultural curriculum emerges is located in the ideas generated since the “linguistic turn” in the humanities and certain branches within the social sciences, including psychology. For the sake of brevity, I will quote Stuart Hall’s definition. The linguistic turn is,

"[a conviction of ] the crucial importance of language and of the linguistic metaphor to any study of culture; the expansion of the notion of text and textuality, both as a source of meaning, and as that which escapes and postpones meaning; the recognition of the heterogeneity, of the multiplicity, of meanings, of the struggle to close arbitrarily the infinite semiosis beyond meaning; the acknowledgement of textuality and cultural power, of representation itself, as a site of power and regulation; of the symbolic as a source of identity" (Stuart Hall, as cited in Chrisman, 2003, pp. 148-149).

In the following section, I will introduce two interrelated, interdisciplinary, humanities disciplines, Culture Studies and Postcolonial Theories, both of which are legacies of the linguistic turn and could provide conceptual frameworks for multicultural education.

Culture Studies

Culture can be conceptualized as a way of life made up of the relationships between all its elements (Golby & Purdue, 1999), or more discursively as “the constant process of producing meanings of and from our social experience, and such meanings necessarily produce a social identity for the people involved” (Fiske, 2000, p. 1). Culture studies seem most interested in understanding how culture is made; how it shapes and is shaped by people various locations and historical settings, its contradictions and its systems of power relations.

Three foci may characterize a critique based on contemporary culture studies. First, it would address the junctures of language, meaning, and power in the construction of cultural meanings and in material practices (Barker & Galasinski, 2001; di Leonardo & Lancaster, 1997). That is, culture studies are in the tradition of poststructuralist thought, which conceives of discourse as the structure through which we perceive reality and views social realities as “organized by signs and meanings patterns in relations of identity and difference” (Seidman, 1997, p. 67). Institutions and social practices are produced by and founded within discursive formations, and are the basis upon which knowledge, values, and norms are justified (Edgar & Sedgwick, 2002). Discourses can and do have hegemonic (repressive) functions. Hegemony, as conceived by Gramsci (2000), is the regulation of social relations by the dominant class through forms of culture. Morag Shiach clarifies:

Gramsci offers us another explanation of the nature of dominant culture. It can be understood as the site of hegemonic representations: those which ‘foster forms of consciousness which accept a position of subordination’. It is also, therefore, a sphere that must be won over by any social group aspiring to social leadership: struggles over definition of culture can thus be seen as struggles for intellectual, moral and philosophical hegemony.” (Schiach 17)

Similarly, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of the unequal distribution of “cultural capital” (the collection of accepted and esteemed cultural resources) reveals how social hierarchies are reinforced and reproduced in cultural forms. He argues, far from being a neutral expression, cultural consumption is the “means by which [distinctions and differences in social classes] are produced, maintained and reproduced” (Storey, 1999, p. 44). Michel Foucault understands discourse as both “an instrument and effect of power” (Foucault, 1978, pp. 100-101), no matter what one’s social standing is, individuals are both subjects of and subject to discourses. Foucault’s understanding of power as relational rather than material extends the reach of a critique of dominant discourses to resistant “reverse” discourses, the structural necessities of dominant discourses.

Second, a culture theorist is likely to focus in on specific events, intimate relationships, and experiences in relation to their historical contexts, including “changes in production, consumption, technology, and law that set the stage for everyday life” (di Leonardo & Lancaster, 1997) as influenced by Foucault’s geneology of subjectification, which

"focuses directly on the practices that locate human beings in particular ‘regimes of the person’. It does not write a continuous history of the self, but rather accounts for the diversity of languages of ‘personhood’ that have taken shape . . . and the norms, techniques, and relations of authority within which these have circulated in legal, domestic, industrial, and other practices for acting upon the conduct of such persons."

Third, a culture studies critique would incorporate a focus on the co-production of popular culture by consumers, because ideological implications in cultural discourse do not translate automatically into ideological effects. The Italian Marxist, Gramsci (Forgacs, 2000) wrote that, in order for hegemonic forms to be taken in by the subordinated, they had to be chosen, not passively interpolated. Michel Foucault’s theory of power has particular relevance for exploring the boundary phenomenon of popular culture consumption (Foucault, 1978). He conceptualizes power as relations that are immanent in all interrelationships, non-binary and rooted in “local oppositions” and differences (p. 94), “intentional and nonsubjective” (p. 94), and as always co-generative with resistance.

The approach explores the webs of power in both the producers of official and mass discourses and the consumers. Resistance to the oppressive psychological and material effects of the dominant culture for the unprivileged begins with education as critique, as with Friere (2000), including that the persistence of hegemonic power in discourse relies upon everyone’s complicity, and discourse’s multisemic characteristics provides openings for resistance through deconstruction. The culture studies view of the audience has direct relevance for how those of us in the West objectify and erase the Other; we underestimate their powers of resistance because we assume the superiority of our epistemology. The assumed radical potency of Culture Studies lies in the power attributed to making meaning or, to use Foucault’s words, discovering and applying the power of reverse discourses.

Training Clinical Psychologists for a Mulitcultural World

If there could be professional psychology training programs in which the explicit commitments to social justice, where the unpacking and critiques of the values, assumptions, and practices (Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2001) in psychology were incorporated into in their curriculum, what would they look like? What would such programs contain, both in their coverage of theories and research and in their transformative practices (praxis)? I could begin at any number of points, but for now I will consider the competency of Diversity.

Multicultural Education for Social Justice

. . . multiculturalism is about social justice, cultural democracy, and equity. (Sue, Carter, Casas, Fouad, Ivey, Jenson, et al., 1998, p. 5)

In this section, I will begin by introducing some criticism of the current state of multicultural education, the thrust of which is that what began as a transformative endeavor has become controlled and diluted affirmation. I will then emphasize the importance of liberation pedagogy as praxis for social justice. The last two sections recognize the necessity of acknowledging the linguistic turn in theories of oppression and the transformative potential of postcolonial criticism for our contributions in a globalized world.

Critique of contemporary multicultural education

Multicultural education, envisioned at its inception during the 1960s civil rights movement as “an effective counter-hegemonic strategy to reverse centuries of racialized domination in the United States” (Baltodano, 2006, p. 123) has failed to achieve its goal. Baltodano mourns that,

"what began as a politically inspired counterhegemonic movement was gradually appropriated and soon became merely another mainstream policy, more and more defined by the interests of the dominant class. . .Consequently, the institutional and social policies of the multicultural project stagnated, leaving untouched the complex economic conditions that transformed the welfare state of the 1960s to the transnational, global economy of the 21^st century. (2006, p. 124)"

Stephen May (1999) concurs that multicultural education has not resulted in significant improvements for minority students, has not effectively altered majority students’ racism, nor replaced “the inherent monoculturalism of school practice;” further, multicultural education has seemed to have little or no impact on our society’s racial inequities (p. 1). The failure of multiculturalism, according to some, was its oversimplification of social power relations, its “deracialized” conceptualization of education, “an educational approach which reifies culture and cultural difference, and which fails to address the central issues of racism within society” (May, 1999, p. 2). In addition, there has been little “substantive change in the structure of teacher education and in the attitudes of teachers toward cultural diversity” (Baltodano, 2006, p. 124).

On the other hand, there are problems related to a program based on race-oppression alone. For one thing, the focus on color reinforces the binary dimension of black and white, and is thus requires a perpetual bond with its uniformly constructed oppressor. There is also the likelihood that the privileging of race obscures other potentially involved marginal subjectivities, such as gender, class, and religion (May, 1999, p. 2).

The Critical Pedagogies, as articulated by Paolo Friere, Henry Giroux and Peter Mclaren, have introduced a non-racist, theoretically sophisticated, transformative model they have linked to

"wider issues of socio-economic and political inequality. The ongoing ravages of late capitalism-particularly on the poor and the marginalized-are increasingly being addressed and contested by critical multicultural educators, again most notably in the US. . .In the process, the inexorable globalization of capital, its effects on the economies of nation-states, its links with historical and contemporary forms of racism and colonialism, and its impact on the changing nature of work and patterns of employment are also being critically examined."

The critical multiculturalists influenced by Freire and others have been criticized for their failures to effective link their theories to actual educational programming or policies.

Finally, all of the above have stayed within the boundaries of specific western nationalities, addressed themselves to “national markets with their own particular historical and ideological emphases. Little, if any, reference is made to developments elsewhere and attempts to build a cross-national perspective have been extremely rare” (May, 1999, p. 5). In my next post, I propose a shift to a transcultural education for clinical psychologist of the 21^st century.