This article would be of interest to scholars who work on refining the Standards and to reflective classroom teachers. The author critiques the Standards approach to describing culture(s) as promoting an inherent "essentialism" (the notion that there a culture has one pure, true identity) and a bias towards viewing stereotypes as only negative. In its place, the author proposes a more productive approach to learning about cultures, replacing the Standards with the four Ds: descriptive (rather than prescriptive notions of culture), diversity (to counter the tendency to promote a homogenized view of a culture), dynamic (to emphasize the changing nature of cultural phenomena), and the discursive construction of culture.#3.Connections #Substantialmention #All #2.Cultures #Curriculum #TheoriesandMethods #ClassroomExamples #JournalArticle #All #Japanese #Research #Standards #LearnersandLearning #4.Comparisons