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A Study On The Ethnic Minority Culture Curriculum In The United States

Posted on:2017-01-10Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:L ChuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1107330485455755Subject:Chinese minority education
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
The human existence mode would be eventually stereotyped as a formula through interactions between man and man, or man and nature for ages. The formula concerning thinking or behavioral preference that human beings understand, ponder, and solve problems, may be collectively referred to as culture. Multiple individuals culture integrate common culture, and conversely, the culture may intervene individual’s consciousness and custom as well. People from different regions create diverse cultures owing to they confront different people or things, but based on the certain degree of similarities as their natural properties, there are very difficult to exist the absolute sense disparity. Therefore, the cultures of various ethnic groups in the world exhibit both diversities and similarities. Against the background that all countries compete with one another for development, cultural inheritance is the core of ethnic identification and national independence. Or alternatively, cultural diversities mark the national identities, establish the national self-esteem and pride. However, with the promotion of world integration and economic globalization, the fusions and collisions among diverse cultures make a new characteristics of the time. Blind pursuit of the cultural diversity would cover the national culture, decline the interactions between different cultures and the activities of cultural development. Therefore, proper integration between cultural similarities and cultural diversities is the key to ensure national culture independence and blossom.Cultural evolutionism and cultural relativism in cultural anthropology guide human society to select and preserve their cultures with different cultural value orientations. The former helps human beings select culture consciously on the basis of cultural advancement and make the trend into unity and similarity, which helps human break the dilemma of passive evolution and oppress the inferior culture. The latter helps all nations find ways to preserve their cultural kernels, putting human society into cultural diversities, which maintain the understanding, respect, collision, conflicts of all nations and lead to cultural individualism and diversity. The debating on cultural evolutionism and relativism from various standpoints for hundreds of years put them almost on a par, which gives us a more comprehensive view to seek for the proper cultural inheriting manners. From the perspective of cultural evolutionism and relativism, interpreting and balancing these two factors and exploring a proper way are conductive to the blossom of culture.During the process of globalization, all nations are finding ways to preserve their own cultures, especially the ethnic minorities. They have to inherit the traditional cultures of their own groups, meanwhile adapt to the mainstream culture. Finding a proper way to balance two cultures is of vital importance to the ethnic minorities. Thus, the problems of culture content selection, inheritance manner and the culture development of inheritors are waiting to be solved. Preschool education for ethnic minorities is a period of normalized, purposeful and systematic cultural inheritance, which exerts an important influence on cultural identities to children in minority groups. Preschool ethnic culture curriculums are direct ways to conduct educational activities. Thus, research on the curriculum standards, course objectives, instructional mode and course evaluation is crucial.It is an effective way to seek the reference for our country’s preschool ethnic culture curriculum development from the comparative perspective. In the multicultural environment of the United States of America, American Jews have remarkable achievements in both internal inheritance and external dissemination of their ontology culture. From the view of American social-culture, the white culture and multi-culture constitutes the main body of its social-culture. From the view of American Jewish culture, the Jewish religious culture and the "everyday" cultural heritage of Jewish construct the core of the Jewish minority culture. From the view of American Jewish preschool ethnic culture curriculum, its curriculum theory is to integrate culture into daily life and its cultural stance is to advocate that both majority and ethnic minorities should have no prejudice against different cultures. In terms of curriculum standards, the federal government of the United States, state, local, social groups and the like have formed an up and down associated and localized standard system. In terms of curriculum goal, the goal system of the American Jewish preschool curriculum is formed based on the Hauenstein’s Classification Framework of Educational Goal. As for the course content, the American Jewish culture has been classified and selected by the cultural dichotomy of the explicit and implicit culture. Regarding curriculum implementation mode, American Jewish kindergartens complete their cultural content of teaching activities via the following ways:their own class teachers are responsible for organizing circle activities, group activities, journal documenting, learning centers, etc. and other teachers are in charge of organizing the course activities in other educational fields, and to create a Jewish kindergarten environments the supplementary of social and cultural education, etc. With regard to curriculum evaluation, under the guidance of formative evaluation with combination of summative evaluation, they evaluate the pre-school cultural curriculum by employing Smarter Balanced Assessment tools and curriculum standards supporting evaluation tools and so on. Reflecting on and learning from the experience of the adaptive development of American Jewish culture and the Jewish preschool ethnic culture curriculum, we should popularize the mainstream culture and develop the culture of ethnic minorities at the same time; both mainstream ethnic groups and ethnic minorities should treat different cultures without prejudice; all ethnic groups need to take the initiative to know and understand other cultures, and also to integrate the traditional culture with the modern civilization; bilingual and bicultural education is effective for the completion of multi-culture heritage. In China, all the above arguments with localization can be applied to the development of preschool ethnic culture curriculum standards, content selection, and suitable evaluation method etc. As far as the theoretical reflection and construction of cultural heritage are concerned, the current study, by revealing the essence of preschool ethnic cultural curriculum of American Jewish, from the perspective of cultural evolutionism and cultural relativism, with cultural equilibrium theory as the basis, multicultural education as the background and cultivating the inter-subjectivity-based concept of cultural equilibrium practice as its starting point, has presented cultural position and choice in the field of American Jewish pre-school education, and then interpreted the possibility and way of cultivation of ethnic children’s cultural equilibrium practice concept and consciousness in our country’s preschool ethnic culture curriculum by combining our ethnic culture background and realistic culture development requirements, and finally to provide an appropriate theoretical framework for the cultural heritage of ethnic preschool education.
Keywords/Search Tags:American Jews, Greater Hartford Area in Connecticut, Ethnic Culture Curriculum in Preschool and Kindergarten
PDF Full Text Request
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