Who is culturally literate

It: Reduces prejudice and inequality based on culture Increases the value placed on diversity and difference Increases participation in social and community practices, like visiting museums, attending performances and accessing community programming Anning, B.

The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education. Participating in cultural activities, such as visiting museums, can help improve cultural literacy. Museums tend to pull in visitors with higher literacy levels. Audience surveys show that even when the number of museum visitors increases, these visitors tend to belong to the most educated social groups No qualifications needed: Museums and New audiences, Nicoletta Gazzeri and Pete Brown, Learning at the Museum Learning at the Museum aims to increase learner confidence in cultural activities by making cultural spaces more accessible through workbook-based workshops.

How to create an inclusive learning environment. Knowledge of and ability to discuss the history of and major concepts underlying a culture, particularly one's own and those of one's peers. Cultural literacy is a term coined by E. Hirsch, referring to the ability to understand and participate fluently in a given culture.

Cultural literacy is an analogy to literacy proper the ability to read and write letters. A literate reader knows the object-language's alphabet, grammar, and a sufficient set of vocabulary; a culturally literate person knows a given culture's signs and symbols, including its language, particular dialectic, stories, entertainment, idioms, idiosyncrasies, and so on.

The culturally literate person is able to talk to and understand others of that culture with fluency, while the culturally illiterate person fails to understand culturally-conditioned allusions, references to past events, idiomatic expressions, jokes, names, places, etc. Cultural literacy is familiarity with and ability to understand the idioms, allusions, and informal content that create and constitute a dominant culture. From being familiar with street signs to knowing historical references to understanding the most recent slang, literacy demands interaction with the culture and reflection of it.

Knowledge of a canonical set of literature is not sufficient in and of itself when engaging with others in a society, as life is interwoven with art, expression, history, and experience. Cultural literacy requires familiarity with a broad range of general knowledge and implies the use of that knowledge in the creation of a communal language and collective knowledge. The numerical value of cultural literacy in Chaldean Numerology is: 3. The numerical value of cultural literacy in Pythagorean Numerology is: 3.

We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse. We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.

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Term » Definition. It is inherently progressive. Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated. But why a list, one might ask?

Well, yes and no. It is true that lists alone, with no teaching to bring them to life and no expectation that they be connected to a broader education, are somewhere between useless and harmful.

Lists that catalyze discussion and even debate, however, are plenty useful. In fact, since I started writing this essay, dipping into the list has become a game my high-school-age daughter and I play together. Consider, from pages and This of course is not a good way for her teachers to teach the main content of American history or English. But it is definitely a good way for us both to supplement what school should be giving her. And however long we end up playing this game, it is already teaching her a meta-lesson about the importance of cultural literacy.

Sometimes she does so proudly, sometimes with a knowing look. My bet is that the satisfaction of that ownership, and the value of it, will compound as the years and her education progress.

They were displaced, as time passed, by sayings and songs of people from other places. Which brings us back to why diversity matters. The same diversity that makes it necessary to have and to sustain a unifying cultural core demands that Americans make the core less monochromatic, more inclusive, and continuously relevant for contemporary life. It is an evolving document, amendable and ever subject to reinterpretation. Americans need a list made new with new blood. Americans are such a list.

What, then, are the 5, things that an American in should know? The assumption was that multiculturalism sits in polar opposition to a traditional common culture, that the fight between multiculturalism and the common culture was zero-sum.

Dead White Men against Afrocentrists. But that was a profoundly artificial dichotomy. As scholars like Ronald Takaki made clear in books like A Different Mirror , the dichotomy made sense only to the extent that one imagined that nonwhite people had had no part in shaping America until they started speaking up in the second half of the twentieth century.

The truth, of course, is that since well before the formation of the United States, the United States has been shaped by nonwhites in its mores, political structures, aesthetics, slang, economic practices, cuisine, dress, song, and sensibility. Yes, America is foundationally English in its language, traditions of law, social organization, market mindedness, and frames of intellectual reference.

But then it is foundationally African as well—in the way African slaves changed American speech and song and civic ideals; in the way slavery itself formed and deformed every aspect of life here, from the wording of the Constitution to the forms of faith to the anxious hypocrisy of the codes of the enslavers and their descendants.

As the cultural critic Albert Murray wrote in his classic The Omni-Americans , the essence of American life is that it relentlessly generates hybrids. American culture takes segments of DNA—genetic and cultural—from around the planet and re-splices them into something previously unimagined. The sum of this—the Omni—is as capacious as human life itself, yet found in America most fully. This is jazz and the blues.

This is the mash-up. This is everything creole, mestizo, hapa. It simply claimed that the omni-American story—of diversity and hybridity—was the legitimate American story. Yes, it is true that in a finite school year, say, with finite class time and books of finite heft, not everything about everyone can be taught.

There are necessary trade-offs. But in practice, recognizing the true and longstanding diversity of American identity is not an either-or. It is additive. It brings more complexity and fosters a more world-ready awareness of complexity. Which brings us back to the list. The list, quite simply, must be the mirror for a new America.

It needs new references that illuminate how Hindus worship, how Koreans treat elders, what pieces of African custom were grafted onto what pieces of Scots-Irish custom to form what kinds of Southern folkways. It needs more than just words, because literacy in this mediated age is not only verbal. It needs images braceros on ranches, ballplayers in internment camps. It needs iconic sounds Marine Corps cadence calls, a sustained Sinatra note.

It needs the lingo of poor and working-class communities Southie and Crenshaw as much as the argot of elite precincts. So we need a list. And not the list that Hirsch made in What, then, would be on your list?

It turns out to be the key to rethinking how a list should even get made.