Cultural Appreciation in Schools: An Exploration of Power by Masumi Hayashi-Smith, Aiyana Masla, and Joaquin Muñoz

Cultural Appreciation in Schools: An Exploration of Power

Cultural Appreciation Series #1

By Masumi Hayashi-Smith, Aiyana Masla, and Joaquin Muñoz

We at Alma Partners have noted that many teachers are carrying similar questions and concerns about sharing elements of culture in their classrooms and schools. Some are holding themselves back from taking risks that could lead to growth, afraid that they will cause harm or that they have already caused harm, and concerned with how to move forward. Some teachers have heard the term “cultural appropriation” but don’t know exactly what it is or how it relates to their work. Some teachers feel overwhelmed by the task of sharing songs or stories from outside their own culture. We hope to offer support, structure, and resources for teachers to authentically deepen their inquiry and expand their offerings.

In this article, the first of a three-part series, we will begin by sharing guidance for identifying cultural appropriation, deepening our understanding of why and how it is harmful. From here, we will share two additional articles in upcoming issues of the magazine that will focus on practices and practical tools that teachers can engage with to counter this harm. Our hope is that, by working with these practices and continuing to deepen our collective understanding, we will be able to offer our students and families respectful, authentic portrayals of the beautiful and diverse world in which we live.

It is a fresh winter morning in the music classroom. Students have arrived from their break outside, and the music teacher starts a new song: “Land of the Silver Birch.” The lyrics are evocative of a rich Canadian landscape, referencing the local animals and trees. In the air, there is a feeling of electricity and even reverence as the children learn the song and sing it with the teacher. Over the next few months, this song becomes part of a beloved canon in the classroom, swelling with familiarity and ownership. However, as the seasons turn toward spring, the teacher receives an article from a colleague about this song and how some schools have stopped performing it. The words “cultural appropriation” come up, and the teacher is flooded with a sense of shame and an urgency to make changes. They don’t know what to do.

This teacher was me, Masumi. Back in my early years as a music teacher, I taught countless songs that I later realized were sending unintentional and harmful messages to my students about culture and power. In the case of “Land of the Silver Birch,” I had taught a song that brought in Indigenous tropes (ex. “wigwams”) yet did not come from any specific Indigenous traditions. While there was a feeling of reverence as we sang this song (reverence being an important part of cultural exchange), there was no awareness nor recognition of power, nor was there relationship to the culture and culture bearers. When I brought this song to my students, I perpetuated the stereotype of a generic, generalized Indigenous culture and missed out on an opportunity to connect my students to actual Indigenous cultures. When I look back on the songs I have since replaced in my repertoire, I find many that are examples of cultural appropriation, a term that can be murky but is actually an incredibly helpful lens.

In this article series, we will further elaborate on what cultural appropriation is, and how to move away from it. When I first re-examined my repertoire with a lens of cultural appropriation, I felt lost, confused, and alone. However, as I have found community with other teachers who had similar concerns as me, I felt bolstered and supported in providing students with a robust model of cultural exchange and cultural appreciation.

Culture and Power

To better understand what cultural appropriation is and why it can cause so much harm, we need to be familiar with two key ideas: culture and power. These two concepts interact in crucial ways to produce cultural appropriation, and they also offer ways to recognize and repair harm.

To start, culture is shaped by the patterns of shared basic assumptions, behaviors, and experiences within a group of people. They are learned and taught. Every single culture that has ever existed has created patterns with internal logics that make them function for survival and thriving. Some of these behaviors produce technologies like housing, musical instruments, food preparation, and consumption. Some patterns include sacred practices and beliefs. If we approach these cultural practices with a deep respect and reverence for their meaning—a way of thriving and understanding the world—we are better equipped to see when cultural appropriation might be happening and avoid it or repair it.

In order to examine the way power works in relation to cultural appropriation, we need to first define power. Alma Partners uses the following definition: Power is the ability to decide who will have access to resources; the capacity to direct or influence the behaviors of others or oneself and/or the course of events (thanks to SEEDS for this definition). In this context, power has a lot to do with determining the overarching ideas and beliefs about people and their cultural practices. When we consider and inquire about power, we are asking questions like:

What are our ideas and practices about superiority and inferiority of cultures?

Do we positively frame multiple cultural expressions and experiences, or do we only present one cultural frame as being correct or legitimate?
Do we question (and teach students to question) the presence of bias in information and ideas, or do we offer perspectives without critical examination?

What are our ideas about sharing cultural knowledge in our classrooms?

Am I contributing to, and appropriately compensating, the work of legitimate experts in the field, or am I relying solely on other, non-cultural member accounts of the cultural knowledge?
Are we using our classroom practice to contribute to continuous support and relationship to the community we are sharing from, or are we looking for decontextualized projects and artifacts to share with children?

What are our beliefs and practices in relation to larger, societal perspectives on cultural expressions?

Are we approaching cultural knowledge with respect, reverence, and humility, bringing awareness to learned (harmful) beliefs that we are entitled to people’s cultural knowledge?
Do we know about, and are we actively counteracting, historic misrepresentations or misattributions of cultural knowledge and practices to help students understand the diversity of origins for ideas and beliefs?

Understanding power in these ways can help us identify practices of cultural appropriation more clearly and consider how we might engage differently.

Cultural appropriation

In the Alma Partners glossary, we define cultural appropriation as:

Theft of another culture’s cultural elements for one’s own use, commodification, or profit. This includes symbols, art, language, customs, etc.—often without understanding, relationship, citation, acknowledgement, or respect for its value in the original culture. Cultural appropriation is exploitative, and results from the assumption of a dominant culture’s right to take another’s cultural elements and use them to its own benefit, profit, and enrichment.

Experts like Susan Scafidi and Maisha Z. Johnson have defined cultural appropriation and remind us that, because of history related to power and privilege imbalances (like beliefs that certain cultures contributed more to the world than others, or that certain cultures are “less developed” or “more primitive” than others), we must always be thinking about power and its relationship to cultures. Power is an effective way of determining whether something is appropriation or not.

We can then begin to look at ourselves and our interactions with power and privilege, which will direct us to the ways we might bring in ideas, practices, and ways of being from other cultures into the classroom and how we can do this in a respectful way. If we are members of dominant cultures, we can look at how we might bring in culture components from historically, persistently, and systematically marginalized groups. Bringing in these cultural components in a thoughtful way—that is, in a way that is not cultural appropriation—means that we must be aware of how cultural appropriation can still happen, even with the best of intentions. There are three common practices that teachers may inadvertently engage in that may be perceived as cultural appropriation:

The obvious one: the outright taking of cultural elements and monetizing them ourselves. Monetizing does not always mean making money directly. It can also mean getting credit, prestige, respect, or accolades for practices that are taken from others, without appropriate compensation or credit.
The “Beat Up”: when elements of a culture are shared, free of the risk of ridicule or punishment that the originators often experienced or experience. Put another way: “It's ok when I do it; it is a problem when you do it.” Examples of this include learning a second language (those learning English as a second language are often considered in deficit terms) or fashion or hairstyles (box braids being rebranded “Bo Braids” after Bo Derek, rather than being attributed to African and African American communities).
“Cherry Picking”: when elements of history or culture are selected strategically, rather than with the whole story or experience in mind. Indigenous peoples’ stories or experiences may be brought into a classroom without attention to settler colonialism, displacement, or ongoing challenges to Indigenous sovereignty.

When we understand some of the history and experiences of historically, persistently, and systematically marginalized groups, we can become better equipped to identify possible acts of cultural appropriation and work to remedy them.

Exploring the different ways that culture manifests is essential to deepening cultural exchange. Awareness of power is a foundational step in identifying cultural appropriation, repairing the harm it causes, and in transforming how we teach and represent the culturally diverse world we live in. In the case of Masumi’s story, attentiveness to the role of culture would have helped them question the origins of the song they brought and led them to choose repertoire that they could contextualize for their students through sharing the history of the song, teaching about the culture that the song came from, and inviting in culture bearers. A deeper awareness of power would have supported them to think about the impact of bringing generalized Indigenous music with unknown origin and how that contributes to a trend of erasing existing Indigenous culture.

Holding the important roles of power and culture in mind will bring us to deeper questions about what we want to actively cultivate, rather than just avoid. Oriented in respect and reverence, relationship-building has the capacity to deepen our understanding of cultural significance, permission, honoring, impact, and reciprocity. We will explore the importance of building and maintaining respectful relationships in the next article in this series, followed by an article on reciprocity, which is what sustains and strengthens these relationships and is foundational to the ongoing practice of cultural appreciation.

Joaquin Muñoz, Aiyana Masla, and Masumi Hayashi-Smith are associates with Alma Partners. Alma Partners is a diverse, multiracial, multigenerational group of 11 experienced consultants and facilitators who offer workshops, courses, Student Leadership Conferences, individual and group consultation, strategic planning, curriculum review and development, and more for schools and other organizations, bridging the gap between ideals and actions. You can find out more at almapartners.net