ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we survey research that takes a sociohistorical approach to the remediation of reading dif culties, especially for students from non-dominant groups. This approach starts from the assumption that all people engage in rich repertoires of linguistic practice (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003) in their everyday lives and that those repertories of practice can be resources for learning in school (Lee, 2007; Orellana & Reynolds, 2008). Teachers can model literacy skills development on the cultural practices of their students in ways that leverage existing skills. Unlike de cit-based (Valencia, 1997; see also Gutierrez, 2007) approaches to remediating learning challenges faced by students from non-dominant groups, a Cultural Modeling framework values students’ actual histories, lived experiences, linguistic repertoires and participation in cultural practices; it does not call for prescriptive teaching based on “broad, underexamined generalities about groups” (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003, p. 20) nor does it equate “culture” with race/ethnicity or any categorical group membership. Cultural Modeling also differs from other approaches that draw connections between in-and out-of-school learning such as those that focus on correcting presumed “mismatches” between home and school cultural practices. Instead, Cultural Modeling researchers use ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods to identify analogues between everyday cultural practices and content knowledge. In this chapter we will examine the roots of a Cultural Modeling framework and consider how it has been used to re-mediate (Cole & Grif n, 1983) learning challenges, contrasting this with approaches to teaching and learning that follow from a cultural mismatch perspective.
