I am a cultural worker, working in the context of community organizing and child care. As I cultural worker I help construct culture. I construct culture with others in the community, including with children and families.
Child care is cultural work, centred on the co-construction of childhood culture with children, families and other child care workers. Childhood culture is part of our community’s culture, both part of and distinct from our other cultural spaces. I believe that children are, and should be, the prevailing force in the construction of childhood as culture, without diminishing the place that adults have both within and beside this space. Culture is a complex concept, with different meanings from different vantage points. The cultural worker holds onto and constructs culture within all its meanings at once.
Below are several meanings of culture:
Culture as Identity
One meaning of “culture” overlaps with the meaning of its related concepts, such as the concepts of ethnicity, nationality, race or language. In this sense, when we ask “what is your culture” we might also mean “what is your cultural or ethnic identity, or your heritage”. Cultural identity can be more than ethnicity, nationality, race and language. People also identify by their family, region, political leaning, religion, sexual orientation, gender, age, occupation, class, historic time, style, interests, and many other characteristic groupings, all of which form cultures and sub-cultures and provide an base of identity.
Culture as What Makes Us Human
Culture is also a concept used to understand and describe universal characteristics of human beings. In this sense culture is used to explain theories for how and why people behave as we do. Culture is the stuff of human life. It is the things, symbols, words, actions, stories, beliefs, rituals, songs, ideologies, and values that people use in daily life. We learn about human nature by studying cultural universals and cultural differences, between individuals and groupings of people of all sizes. At one level is each person, whose behavioural patternscan be understood in terms of cultural components, which can then be compared to the patterns of others.
From this understanding of culture we can compare the patterns of people of one ethnic or national identity group to people of another such group, or compare patterns of people in different regions, different time periods (in history), different families, ages, genders, sexual orientations, etc. These comparisons are useful for a number of reasons, such as to understand what about people is learned (as culture is usually defined as learned behaviours and beliefs) and what is innate (and therefore not related to culture, but to “human nature”). Cultural comparisons can also provide insights to resolve conflicts, or to relate better to people who different from ourselves, with cultural background providing a way to understand these differences.
Culture as Knowledge and Idea Collections
Another way to understand culture is as collections of knowledge and ideas, which are organized into subjects or disciplines. Examples of these collections include disciplines of science and mathematics, political ideologies, religions, literature/drama and history, music and movement, fashion, culinary arts, and the visual arts. In addition to the arts and sciences, professional knowledge is related to this concept of culture, which is organized into professions. One example is the profession of early childhood educator, which is defined as a profession through cultural processes similar to those that define the arts and sciences. Universities, libraries, school systems, professional boards and association, governments, corporations, museums, school systems, cultural industries and other institutions, especially those in power or seeking to be in power, work to define what is and is not considered to be favoured, or included, within one of these groupings.
Culture as Creative Toolbox
Another way to understand culture is in terms of cultural creation, or the construction of culture. In this sense culture can be thought of as a technology or tool. There are specialists at understanding culture, who study how the components of culture influence behaviour, or drive action in human social life. With this knowledge, be it intuitive or otherwise, cultural creators not only combine the components of culture, but also have the power to do in ways that drive society, or other groupings, in directions intended by the creators.
This work is usually carried out through institutions, or collectives of cultural creators, who work with others to achieve goals realized through cultural construction. Goals can range from acquiring personal wealth or power, advancing values and ideologies, promoting religious beliefs, improving health and well-being, achieving glory and honour or any number of other goals. Cultural constructors include visual and performing artists, makers of mass media, advertisers and markers, designers, public relations specialists, propagandists, politicians, managers, capitalists, leaders, writers, storytellers, scholars and academics, scientists, clerics, singers, and educators. Some would argue, myself included, that we are all cultural constructors, even if we are not all specialists in the construction of culture or intentionally aware of our role in creating and sustaining cultural life.
The palette of cultural construction centres on the tools of time, place, symbol, narrative, image, colour, movement, beat, rhythm, taste, ritual and identity. Recent technologies of cultural construction include nationalism, ideologies, economic ordering systems and power projection devices.
If we view child care in the widest sense to include the work of parents (including step-parents, foster parents, and other performing the role of parenting), extended families, communities, neighbours, nannies, child care workers, early childhood educators, school teachers, governments, corporations, faith institutions and everyone else who contributes to children’s care, then the cultural lens of this work leads to several questions that take us beyond the realms of learning and development, or the traditional lens of child care and early care and education theory.
First, this lens leads to the question of what is the role of children, as individuals and as participants in groups, in the creation of culture. How and why do children construct culture, and how is this similar or different from that of adults who construct culture? Do children have a special role in cultural construction? What palettes do children as cultural constructors draw from when creating culture, and what aspects of culture are of particular interest to the child as a constructor, or creator, of culture? Second, what is the role of child care workers (in the broadest sense of this occupational grouping, including parents, educators, neighbours, nannies, etc.), and of child care work, in the construction of culture, both at the level of children’s cultures and of culture in a more general sense?
I consider myself, as a child care worker, to be a cultural worker first and foremost, which is to say that what I do as a child care worker is construct culture. I work with children and families to create cultural spaces and experiences using cultural tools. We create culture together, which is most evident at the level of the culture in the learning space, or the classroom. But culture lives in people, not spaces, and therefore the work of the cultural worker extends far beyond the classroom or other space where she works.
I think that it is important for cultural workers to work with culture at all its levels, especially if we propose to create lasting, enriching, joyful, human centred cultures that reflect the human rights values of respect, dignity and sanctity of human life. Cultural creation that does not take into account how different cultural backgrounds shape meaning and understanding, and provide people with comfort and support, will leave people out, not provide for people’s needs, and not reflect the values which I believe should be at the foundation of cultural life. Cultural creation that does not take into account human nature in relation to culture will be jarring and empty, confusing and un-human-like. Cultural creation that fails to reflect the centrality of culture to being human risks stepping above creation of culture to engineering of humanity, stepping beyond what I think are the ethical bounds of cultural work.
Finally, I think that cultural workers benefit from knowing how to work with all the essential elements of cultural creation, and should use these elements to create rich and living, vibrant and dynamic cultural spaces. Cultural spaces that build on ritual, song, story, texture, taste, colour, beat, rhythm and other cultural elements are alive, deep, nurturing and human.
