Social Foundations of Curriculum

In education today, teachers hear a lot about gaps in education—achievement gaps, funding gaps, school-readiness gaps. But the largest gap that is rarely talked about is the cultural gap between students and teachers. Most in the education profession are white, middle-class, English speaking individuals. However, the same does not hold true for our students. We often stand before our classrooms and the faces looking back at us do not look like our own. We are taught to try and bridge the gap, the difference, with an embrace of color-blindness by treating others the way we would want to be treated. But the honest truth is: culture matters. We often think of culture as just a list of holidays or shared recipes, shared traditions or language. But culture is a lived experience that is unique to every individual and to truly engage our students, we must reach out to them in ways that culturally and linguistically appropriate, we must examine the cultural assumptions and stereotypes we bring into the classroom that may hinder the learning process.

The primary goal of culturally responsive education is to help all students become respectful of the masses of cultures and people that they’ll interact with once they exit school. This can often make being an educator difficult given that the world at large is substantially more complex and diverse than the environment that the student inhabits. Most students are comfortable interacting with people, behaviors and ideas that they are familiar with but react with fear and apprehension when faced with the unfamiliar. Among its other goals, instruction that is culturally responsive should aim to teach student that difference in viewpoint and culture are to be valued and appreciated rather than judged and feared. The classroom should not be a place where students must restrict their feelings and emotions and instructional activities should not be divorced of human feelings and emotions.

Social foundations of curriculum are essential because such foundations have always have major influences on schools and curriculum decisions. Comprehending those forces in society at large and locally enable educators to determine what aspects of society to transmit to current and future students and what dimensions of society require reinvention (Ornstein & Hunkins, 2013).

According to Ornstein & Hunkins family relationships constitute a child’s first experiences of social life and peer group interactions. From play group to teenage clique, the peer group affords young people many important learning experiences: how to interact with others and how to achieve status in a circle of friends. Peers are equals in a way that parents and their children (or teachers and their students) are not. A parent or teacher can pressure and sometimes force young children to conform to rules they neither understand nor like, but peers do not have formal authority to do this; thus, the true meaning of fairness, cooperation, and equality can be learned more easily in a peer setting (Ornstein & Hunkins, 2013).

Culturally responsive educators must push against human nature’s natural aversion to the unknown and help student become more respectful of cultures with different