Blog #3

Salsbury, D. (2008). A Strategy for Pre-service Teachers to Integrate Cultural Elements within Planning and Instruction: Cultural L.I.V.E.S. Journal of Social Studies Research, 32(2), 31-9. Retrieved June 12, 2010 from Education Full Text database.
http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com.libproxy.chapman.edu/hww/results/getResults.jhtml?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.33

In this study, researchers examined teachers understanding of their own culture. It is important for teachers to identify cultural elements and to understand the culture of their students but first they need to identify cultural elements of their own culture. Once they understand those elements, they can integrate it into the classroom instructions. Researchers used pre-service teachers and helped them to identify five cultural elements using acronym L.I.V.E.S. Strategy. Each letter represents one cultural element, L for language, I for institution; V for value systems, E for equipment, and S for survival. In addition, researchers provided definition and examples for each element. This easy to remember acronym helped participants to isolate various cultural characteristics from standards-based social studies concepts.

Those teacher candidates were all white. They attended classes over 3 semesters; the course consists of practicum experiences in an elementary social studies classroom and peer observation. The intention of the study is to examine whether L.I.V.E.S. would help pre-service teachers to identify elements to integrate into instructions or not.

However researchers found that there is a clear difference in participants’ definition of culture after the use of L.I.V.E.S. strategy, more practice was needed for teachers to ensure that they learned how to integrate culture in lessons.

In my opinion, this training will be helpful for all teachers to understand their students’ culture especially in USA because most of our schools consist of multi-cultural classrooms. In my experience, integrating cultural aspects into second language learning classes enrich the learning environment particularly when we compare and contrast students’ cultural characteristics and those of the target language.