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cultural nature of education has gained greater attention, especially after immense demographic changes in US schools, where cultural, linguistic, and ability differences create barriers as grounds for different rights, privileges, and outcomes. Children and youth bring complex sets of abilities and experiences that may or may not fit the expectations and dispositions they encounter in school. Consider the ways in which some racial minority students, specifically African American students, are punished more severely for less serious, more subjective reasons such as disrespect (Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002). Explanations for racialized school discipline practices involve issues related to the socio-historical cultural practices designed to control and punish (eg, the use of exclusionary discipline) and lack of available professional development opportunities for developing culturally responsive teaching and classroom management practices. Racial minority students’ experiences and cultural and linguistic practices (ie, ways of knowing, behaving, and being) are often devalued and/or pathologized, so that for example, academic identities of racial minority students may be constructed as disruptive, resistant, outcast, and unlikely to succeed (Wortham, 2006). Yet, individual cultural identities are only a part of the cultural construction of learning and development. It is in the interaction itself that culture emerges, hybridizes, and evolves. Learning and development are cultural processes that are socially, historically, and geographically situated.

Children’s behaviors and learning, whether in or out of school, are mediated by cultural contexts and …