Learn: Unit 1 Exam practice questions - Sociocultural

Social Construction

An epistemological framework that explains how beliefs, values, meanings, identities, and group differences are created through historical, cultural, and social interactions.

Social Categorization

The process of creating categories that define groups as "us" and "other" and can contribute to structural inequality.

Reification

Treating humans or abstract ideas as things that can be quantified, commodified, or used for profit.

Oppression

Disadvantage or injustice produced through everyday practices, social structures, norms, institutions, and collective consequences.

Exploitation

The transfer of the labor results of one group to benefit another group.

Marginalization

A condition in which people are pushed to the edges of society or excluded from the labor system.

Contingent Marginality

Disadvantage caused by competitive inequality and economic, social, cultural, locational, or ecological limitations when dealing with the market.

Systematic Marginality

Disadvantage created through socially constructed and unequal relationships within a system where one group has greater power and control.

Powerlessness

A condition in which people are deprived of authority and power and are more likely to take orders than give them.

Cultural Imperialism

The universalization of a dominant group's experience and culture as the norm.

Violence

A pervasive violation of human rights that occurs in every society.

Anthropometry

The scientific measurement/study of the human body that was used in ideas about sexuality and race.

Biological Determinism

The idea that biological or physical characteristics determine important human differences.

Dominant Group

A group whose values, characteristics, and experiences are treated as the normal or neutral standard.

Stereotyping

Assigning simplified and generalized characteristics to members of a group.

Exoticizing

Representing people or cultures as unusual, strange, or different and treating them as objects of interest.

Social Construction of Race

The process through which physical differences such as pigmentation become categories that societies treat as meaningful.

Externalization

The process of creating cultural products or categories, such as turning biological sex differences into the social concept of gender.

Objectivation

The process in which cultural products begin to appear independently real or natural rather than socially created.

Internalization

The process of learning supposedly objective cultural facts through socialization and making them part of one's own consciousness.

Schooling

The institution through which individuals relate to society.

Functionalism

The theory that institutions exist because they serve important functions for society.

Functionalism and Schools

Schools socialize children, teach society's rules and values, train people for jobs, and sort people into appropriate roles.

Assortative Function

The function of schooling that sorts people into different positions or jobs based on criteria such as performance, beliefs, and values.

Socialization

The process through which people learn the rules, values, attitudes, and behaviors needed to participate in society.

Meritocracy

The idea that people should be evaluated and allocated based on universal standards and performance.

Parsons

Associated with the idea that classrooms socialize students and help prepare them for adult roles and manpower allocation.

Human Capital Theory

The theory that schools provide valuable skills and knowledge that increase a person's future economic value.

Human Capital

Skills and knowledge gained through education that have value in the economy.

Education as Handmaiden of the Economy

The idea that schools help produce workers and prepare people for the economy.

Marxist Theory

The theory that schools can reproduce existing class structures and allow elites to maintain social and economic advantages.

Marxist Theory and Schools

The idea that schools control knowledge, promote inequality, and help reproduce the existing class structure.

Cultural Capital

Knowledge, language, lifestyle, interests, and other cultural resources that can provide social and academic advantages.

Credential Inflation

The process in which increasingly higher educational credentials are needed to obtain positions that previously required less education.

Bowles and Gintis

Scholars who argued that schools reproduce the class system and that classroom relationships can mirror relationships in the workforce.

Symbolic Interactionism

The perspective that school practices and meanings are created through interactions between teachers and students.

Teacher Expectations

The expectations teachers have for students that can influence student behavior and achievement.

Pygmalion Effect

The self-fulfilling process in which expectations lead people to act in ways that make the expected behavior more likely.

Rosenthal and Jacobson

Researchers associated with the Pygmalion study of teacher expectations and student achievement.

Critical Theory

A theory focused on power, domination, empowerment, and the possibility of using knowledge to create change.

Critical Theory and Schools

The idea that schools can have both liberating and oppressive roles and that knowledge is connected to power.

Feminist Theory

A theory focused on women, education, social status, gender discrimination, and challenging patriarchal ideology.

Feminist Theory and Schools

The idea that schools can reproduce sexism through stereotypes, curriculum, school practices, course selection, and career counseling.

Institutional Theory

The perspective that societies are governed by accepted cultures, ideas, and norms that become built into institutions.

Institutional Theory and Education

The idea that education helps shape culture, transmit culture, and became more important as institutional ideas and norms changed.

Reformation and Education

The Reformation contributed to the expansion of mass education.

Culture

A socially shared system of motives, values, beliefs, identities, interpretations, meanings, and practices transmitted across generations.

House et al. Definition of Culture

Shared motives, values, beliefs, identities, and interpretations or meanings of significant events that result from common experiences and are transmitted across generations.

Cole's Definition of Culture

The socially inherited accomplishments of past human activities that serve current social groups and form a cultural toolkit.

Geertz: Systematic Culture

Culture is learned rather than inherited and is permeable.

Geertz: Communal Culture

Culture belongs to multiple communities, including ethnic, religious, gender, age, political, social class, and professional groups.

Geertz: Dynamic Culture

Culture changes over time and provides a context between universal human nature and individual personality.

Learning

The process through which knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.

Kolb's Definition of Learning

Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through transformation of experience.

Universalistic View of Learning

The view that all human groups perceive and reason in essentially the same way.

Nisbett's Cognitive Model

The idea that cognitive processes are embedded in culturally determined factors such as epistemology, metaphysics, attention, social structure, economy, and ecology.

Culture and Cognition

Culture influences how people receive, process, and act on information and experience.

Culture as a Learning Environment

Culture provides values, norms, accepted behaviors, and patterns that influence learning and information processing.

Triandis

Culture is transmitted between people as they interact, causing ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving to become automatic responses.

High-Context Culture

A culture in which much information is stored in the situation, environment, or shared knowledge rather than directly stated.

Low-Context Culture

A culture in which most information is explicitly included in the message and little is taken for granted.

High-Context Clue

People are expected to understand important information from the situation and shared background knowledge.

Low-Context Clue

People are given detailed information and instructions because little is assumed to be known.

Hall

Associated with the high-context and low-context framework for understanding information processing.

Culture and Communication

Cultural differences can affect listening, communication, teacher voice, body language, eye contact, and classroom interactions.

Social Construction Theory of Culture

Cultural categories and systems of inequality are created, objectified, and internalized through human interactions.

Sex to Gender Example

Externalization: biological sex differences are turned into the social concept of gender.

Pigmentation to Race Example

Externalization: physical pigmentation differences are turned into the social category of race.

Identity

The collective aspects of characteristics by which a person or thing is known or recognizable.

Personal Identity

Self-descriptive traits and behaviors that help define a person's sense of self.

Social Identity

Identity based on roles and membership categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, class, sexual orientation, and culture.

Deaux

Identified personal identities and social identities as different aspects of identity.

Micro Identity

The level of identity involving the individual, personal preferences, daily activities, and one's sense of self.

Meso Identity

The level involving schools, workplaces, streets, groups, and conflicts or contradictions between multiple identities.

Macro Identity

The level involving socially constructed categories, social roles, status, power, privilege, and structural inequality.

Identity as Multidimensional

The idea that people have multiple identities rather than one single identity.

Looking Glass Self

The idea that people develop their sense of self partly through reflection on how they believe others view them.

Identity Development

Identity begins developing in childhood, becomes especially important during adolescence, and continues throughout life.

Diffuse Identity

An identity status involving little or no exploration and no commitment.

Foreclosed Identity

A status involving commitment to roles or beliefs without exploring alternatives, often based on parents' choices.

Moratorium

A status involving active exploration without commitment.

Achieved Identity

A status involving strong commitment after a high level of exploration.

Marcia

Developed the four identity statuses: diffuse, foreclosed, moratorium, and achieved.

School and Identity

Schools can shape identity through educational goals, tracking, teaching strategies, teacher expectations, and peer norms.

Tracking

The selection or grouping of students that can affect proficiency and access to higher-status programs.

Teacher Expectations and Identity

Teachers' expectations can differ based on students' ethnic backgrounds and can shape identity and opportunities.

In-Breath Exploration

Exploring unfamiliar content or activities through hands-on experiences, visits, or new experiences.

In-Depth Exploration

Further exploring and specifying an existing understanding of oneself through experiences or role models.

Reflective Exploration

Reflecting on an existing understanding of oneself through reading and discussion.

Cross's Pre-Encounter Stage

Racial identity stage in which racial significance has not been realized and identity has not been examined.

Cross's Encounter Stage

A stage in which an event forces a person to recognize the personal impact of racism.

Cross's Immersion-Emersion Stage

A stage involving connection with Black peers and possible distancing from people who do not understand the person's racial experience.

Cross's Internalization Stage

A stage involving understanding and accepting one's racial identity.

Cross's Internalization-Commitment Stage

A stage involving acknowledgment of racism and responding effectively to it.

Helms White Identity Model

A model describing stages of White racial identity development and movement away from racism toward a positive racial identity.

Helms Contact Stage

A stage involving passive absorption of messages about race and limited contact with Black or Brown people.

Helms Disintegration Stage

A stage involving awareness of racism and White privilege that can create tension and a desire to act.

Helms Reintegration Stage

A stage in which relief can come through blaming people of color or directing anger and fear toward them.

Helms Pseudo-Independent Stage

A stage involving intellectual understanding of White privilege while still developing the ability to act on that understanding.

Helms Immersion-Emersion Stage

A stage involving development of a positive self-definition and seeking relationships with others further along in racial understanding.