Excerpted from Chapter 1 of Culture in Special Education: Building Reciprocal Family-Professional Relationships, by Maya Kalyanpur, Ph.D., & Beth Harry, Ph.D.

Copyright © 1999 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Beth's Story

On a trip to Albuquerque in the middle of winter, I had the disconcerting experience of boarding a plane at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport and, within minutes, being asked to deplane. Back at the departure gate, I waited with other anxious passengers for some information regarding the status of the flight. After about a half an hour's wait came the following announcement: "Passengers on the flight to Albuquerque, please be advised that we will be boarding in about an hour's time, since a new piece of equipment will soon be arriving from Philadelphia."

Being a very phobic air traveler and knowing nothing about the mechanics of any kind of vehicle, I reacted to this announcement with some consternation. I thought, "A new piece of equipment? What could it be? A wrench? A new steering wheel? Some new radar equipment? Does this mean that we'll have to wait while they fix it or replace some part? Shouldn't they just give us a new plane?" I went to the desk and asked the attendant what the announcement meant. The reply was, "It said they're sending a new plane."

This was about 4 years ago, and I still remember vividly my annoyance at what seemed to me the use of language as a subterfuge. Since then, I have repeated this story to many people, asking their impression of the meaning of this language event. Everyone agrees that it is a prime example of jargon, in which a group of people who belong to a particular field of work use language in a way that differs from the way that it would be used by the population at large. It also is an example of how people use jargon that is specific to their field without even being aware that they are doing so.

My main concern is the effect that such language might have on the uninitiated. This depends on the perspective that any individual has regarding airplane travel. For me, connotations for the word equipment as compared with airplane reflect my fear of flying; thus, the following associations with equipment come to mind readily: a tool, a large class of technical items, something neutral, something made and manipulated by human beings. Associations for airplane rush in just as quickly: something that takes you up into the sky, defying the laws of gravity; something huge and powerful that carries large numbers of people at once; something that can come crashing down to Earth and kill those large numbers of people. Thus, to refer to an airplane as a "piece of equipment" is to minimize, neutralize, and mitigate the features that, for me, are dominant: its power and its danger. A piece of equipment is, after all, within human control — simply a tool at our disposal — whereas an airplane in its totality seems, somehow, more than the sum of its parts. Someone who finds flying safe and exhilarating might have interpreted this kind of communication quite differently. My point is that language is more than denotative: It is connotative, and connotations evoke emotions that are beyond rationalization.

In the departure lounge at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport, the language of the announcement reflected a technological culture with which the airplane experts probably identified. Within that culture, such use of the word equipment is probably commonplace and not thought of as having any particular effect. As an anxious passenger, however, I was a total outsider to that culture.

In much the same way, we, the authors of this book, came as outsiders to the culture of special education in the United States. We had not, of course, expected to see it in that way. In our home countries, Jamaica and India, we had assumed that disabilities were factual phenomena and that specialized education for people with disabilities would, somehow, reflect a universality of meaning, of affect, or, at the very least, of value. That is not to say that we thought that we already knew the answers or even all of the questions. Certainly, we expected to be introduced to new theories and new instructional approaches, but neither of us had conceived of the coming experience as a cultural event, the underpinnings of which would take several years for us to "unpack."

Cultural Identity and the Acculturation Process

What do we mean by the "culture of special education"? In its larger meaning, the term culture denotes the shared implicit and explicit rules and traditions that express the beliefs, values, and goals of a group of people. Let us consider, first, the meaning of cultural identity.

Children are raised within a cultural framework that imposes rewards and sanctions for efficient learning of the group's norms and expectations. According to the traditional view of culture, most individuals have been brought up within one such framework, and the process of acculturation involves being introduced to a new system and gradually accommodating to it. Thus, at a given point in time, one's acculturation might be at any point on a spectrum, such as that described by Ramírez and Castañeda (1974), who identified three points — traditional, dualistic, and atraditional — or Leung's (1988) framework, which specified "marginality" as the transition between traditionalism and biculturalism and conceived of the fourth stage as "overacculturation," whereby the traditional elements have been totally rejected. To this, Red Horse (1988) added a fifth stage, which he called "pan-renaissance," in which a group seeks a revitalization or revival of the traditional culture, such as that sought by African Americans in the 1960s or by some North American Indian tribes in the United States and Canada.

The foregoing "stage" theories suggest that cultures are somehow discrete, that acculturation is a process of change over time, and that an individual can be no more than "bicultural" — a state that is often metaphorically described as "walking in two worlds" (Henze & Vanett, 1993, p. 116). A further implication that is based on historical analysis is that the individual who does not belong to the dominant group is expected to undergo this process of acculturation. Wright, Saleeby, Watts, and Lecca (1983), taking a similar theoretical stance, addressed three views of how cultural groups might interact in a multicultural society. These theorists examined both the pluralistic model and the assimilation model and proposed, instead, a goal of "cultural integration". According to Wright et al., the pluralistic model is represented by the metaphor of the "mosaic," which suggests that cultural groups remain separate but mutually respecting; they argued that this continues to encourage groups to remain separate and may actually promote mutual stereotyping rather than understanding. The assimilation model, by contrast, is represented by the metaphor of the melting pot, which Wright et al. saw as culture killing in that key features of a culture are transformed through the process of blending with others. Rather than either of these two models, then, Wright et al. recommended "cultural integration," which would be accomplished through cultural exchange and mutual influence.

In contrast to the foregoing traditional views of cultural groups as manifesting definite boundaries that give way through acculturation, Banks (1997a, 1997b) suggested a more fluid and less discrete way of thinking about cultural identity. Banks's theory is applicable to multicultural societies such as the United States, in which there is a "national culture as well as ethnic and other subsocieties and institutions" (1997b, p. 6). Banks described a complex picture of macro and micro levels of culture, whereby the macrocultural framework is an overarching national frame that includes many microcultural groups, each of which participates to varying extents in the macro culture, while simultaneously retaining varying amounts of its original cultural traditions. Thus, the cultural identity of any individual may reflect features of the macroculture, of one's original microculture, and of any other microcultural groups within the society. Factors such as race, ethnicity, nationality, language, social status, and geographical location are key ingredients in the pattern of identity that emerges.

Furthermore, individuals may develop affiliations with professional or personal interest groups that have their own norms and rules, and these features also feed into cultural identity. As Banks (1997a, 1997b) noted, each individual belongs to several groups at the same time and may experience stronger or weaker identification with the tenets of one group as compared with another, based on the extent of socialization that is experienced within each group. It is also interesting to note that a "group" may be explicitly identified as such by means of well-defined beliefs and practices, such as a religion, but it also may be a group by virtue of some particular experience, such as being the parent of a child with a disability. Cultural identity, then, is multifaceted and highly individualized.

Both of us can readily cite affiliations with several microcultural groups, while simultaneously participating in the American macroculture. These affiliations are strong enough to require sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes conflicting sets of rules for conduct. Both of us identify with the academic community, with women, and with other parents; in particular, I feel affiliated to others who have children with disabilities. My primary ethnic affiliation is Caribbean and also Black in a broader sense, whereas Maya identifies herself as Indian and Hindu.