ABSTRACT
In the Spring of 1991, in a classroom at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Education 270H (“Culture and Learning: Anthropological Approaches to the Under standing of Culture”), George and Louise Spindler are talking about the implicit cultural biases that teachers often bring to a classroom. The classroom is relaxed; questions, comments, and laughter come easily. GS is discussing the pseudonymous “Roger Harker” (G. and L.Spindler I982b), an American teacher he met in 1951 while doing research in West coast elementary schools, who seemed to meet the ideal standards of effective leaching (“fair,” “organized,” “knows his subject,” and so on)—except that he was totally insensitive to cultural diversity, and rewarded only those students similar to him in sociocultural background.
