Learning, Schooling, Culture, and Identity

Learning and Culture

Many disciplines have recognized the strong link between learning and culture, including anthropology, sociology, linguistics, education, and psychology. These disciplines examine the cultural and contextual nature of learning and human development. Much of the work related to the link between learning and culture, both theoretically and empirically, is grounded in a sociocultural perspective, which examines how the range of personal values, experiences, and dispositions interact and need to be taken into account. Albert Bandura, a well-known psychologist, proposed that three factors of influence—behavior, cognition, and personal elements—interact with the environment to produce a cognitive self that is not disembodied from social influences. Therefore, in Bandura's view, studies of cognition should not be separated from contexts of everyday life.

The effects of being in different social settings, and of “boundary crossing” from one setting to another, depend in part on what the individual brings to these experiences. A good example of this involves different approaches to, and effects of, traveling to foreign places and settings. Travel not only introduces us to things that are new and important, but can also eventually change what we notice in our own lives when we return home. The traveler can be a researcher, teacher, parent, or incarcerated youth. This fits an idea that the French novelist and essayist Marcel Proust expressed: that once you travel, you can never truly go home again, because part of the value for travelers is what they learn from other people, and the places to which they have traveled help them to see their familiar cultures with different eyes. For example, learning about ourselves and learning about others helps make tacit beliefs, values, and routines explicit, thereby positioning both teachers and learners to better support one another for success. However, not everyone learns the same kinds of things from travel. As contemporary essayist Pico Iyer notes, travelers keep their eyes open and seek to learn from diversity, which often involves moving outside existing comfort zones (hence the connection of travel to travail). Tourists often take [Page 1357]more of a complaining attitude about things that are not like their everyday lives.

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