Culture and Learning (Perspectives in Education)

Traditional notions of learning do not account for the cultural heterogeneity of learning practices. Looking at the history of the learning sciences, it can be said that ideas on learning and education have long been based on the optimal design of learning environments and on identifying key features of these designs that lead to effective or long-lasting learning. Implicitly this vision is “acultural” as the assumption is that these features [Page 569]are universal and can be transferred from one educational setting to the other. At the same time, there is currently more awareness of the need for knowledge of and visions on learning that are not based on designed learning settings. This is partly related to the fact that access to key information and the ability to learn new skills is increasingly offered outside educational institutions. For instance, claims are made that in our contemporary information and knowledge societies, strategically important competences (such as the ability to handle increasingly complex semiotic processes that result from being involved in multiple, widely distributed communities) are learned not in schools but through accessing the Internet. This has caused a new interest in situated and sociocultural perspectives on learning because these traditions have traditionally been open to the study of learning that happens in more complex, diverse, and open ecologies.

According to sociocultural perspectives on learning, intelligent actions take place in the midst of culturally defined, complex environments and depend on joint actions with others as well as on complex tool systems. A sociocultural perspective on learning means that learning is seen not as happening according to a set of principles, lifted out of its sociocultural context, but as inherently interwoven with the social setting in which it takes place. Cognition, interaction, and learning are the result of and happen with the help of historically formed and culturally informed technologies, texts, and tool systems, so they are inherently cultural in nature. This means that learning experiences are not socially neutral or semiotically empty, but rather represent particular culturally informed ways of acting on and with the world.