Critical culturalized comprehension: Exploring culture as learners thinking about texts

Abstract

We examine the role of culture in comprehension. Prominent theories of comprehension conceptualized the outcome of reading as learners’ construction of a cognitive representation of texts. We emphasize that such representation reflects not only texts’ content, but also individuals’ understandings of the real world, as described in texts. We suggest that, thus, individuals should be supported to question and analyze the mental representations that they form; we use the term “culture” to capture such questioning and analysis. Rather than an individual difference factor, we argue for conceptualizing culture as a way of thinking, or as individuals’ reasoning about the commonalities and differences in their and others’ worldviews and the linking of these to underlying values. When such reasoning is engaged in reference to texts, we refer to this as culturalized comprehension; when such reasoning is further engaged to resist or recast the values introduced in texts to generate counternarratives, we refer to this as critical culturalized comprehension. In emphasizing the importance of culturalized and critical culturalized comprehension and describing the set of cognitive processes involved, we argue for research in educational psychology to examine how learners may be consciously, reflectively, and critically engaged in using texts to understand their world.

Acknowledgments

We are immensely grateful to Jeff Greene and three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript. Their comments were indispensable in helping us to develop the ideas introduced in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Throughout this manuscript, we refer to individuals’ religious, ethnic, racial, and national identities using the same terms as were used by the authors cited.

2 Ladson-Billings (1995) in her description of highly effective teachers of African American children likewise wrote: “Perhaps I could argue, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, that the kind of teaching that is culturally occurring in public classrooms IS culturally relevant. However, the culture to which it is relevant—white, male, middle-class—is not the culture of reference for increasing numbers of students” (p. 112); exemplifying the use of the work “culture,” to connote difference (e.g., between African American students’ home backgrounds and the classroom).

3 Because we are informed by theories and studies of reading comprehension, we primarily focus on students’ learning from text(s). Culturalized comprehension and critical culturalized comprehension can be engaged in reference to other resources as well (e.g., images, videos). However, the culturalized and critical culturalized comprehension of information of different modalities requires further examination and lies beyond the scope of this manuscript.

4 Although, even in these cases, individuals’ culturalized comprehension of single texts was likely still influenced by their experiences with prior texts, a phenomenon referred to as intertextuality (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Goldman, 2004).