Identity and Culture

I strongly agree with Manroe's statement that "ethnicity alone should not be taken as having predictive value. A teacher should not prejudge that an individual student will automatically produce a certain kind of narratives, basing that prediction solely on a student's ethnicity"(89). We, as teachers and researchers, should not attribute students' educational problems to a specific element of the social force(race, gender, or class) And here, of course, I am not belittling previuos research or refuting their results. What I want to get at here is that we live in a large discourse consisting of many elements each of which affect and contribute to our culture and, thus, to our identity. This, perhaps, acounts for the conflicting results of the previous research. some studies mentioned class as a cause for educational problems; others considered race and gender as direct reasons for them. In other words, no fixed and lasting reason exist.
It was always the concern of scholars to disclose the factors that affect our identity and form our culture. Classical and orthodox marxists, for example, relied on economic reductionism to do so. They argue that the base( economy) overdetermines our life(social relations, education, politics, etc...) Consequently, economy is the engine that generates everything in the society. This, of course, was refuted by cultural theorists who believe that our culture consists of " a relationship among levels [race, gender, class, etc...], constituted in relations reducible to a single essential one-to-one correspondence"(Slack,2007:117) Accordingly, our education is affected by all these levels, all of which contribute in one way or another to it. What remains is the degree of affect of each level.
( Sorry for being late, Malcolm. I have a cold)


References
Slack, Jennifer(2007)'The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies' in Morley, David and Chen, Kuan-Hsing (eds) Staurt Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge.