Constructing and De-Constructing Cultural Values: An Explanatory Model of Teaching Behaviours.

This paper presents an explanatory model of cultural behaviors, which resulted from a 4-year ethnographic study of the different academic attainments in English of indigenous Fijians and the Indo-Fijians in the Fiji Islands. Fiji is a natural laboratory for investigating differential cultural behaviors because of these two culturally distinct main ethnic groups. Their different cultural behaviors were found to serve different values within each culture. A three-construct grounded model of these different values emerged from observations and analyses of these behaviors. These constructs were then deconstructed to define and explain a fourth target construct of their "Differential Teaching Behaviours," which were contributing to the different academic attainments of the two cultures. The validity of the four-construct model was both empirically and quantitatively ascertained, and it is argued that the model can be used to predict culturally determined behaviors and educational outcomes in similar multicultural contexts. The model can be used by education policymakers when devising policies aimed at maximizing educational attainment for all sociocultural groups within multicultural societies served by a formal education system. (Contains 2 figures and 15 references.) (Author/BT)