A cultural embrace

In Pitta-Pantazi, D. & Philippou, G. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME – 5). Larnaca, Cyprus, February 22 – 26, 2007. CD-ROM, ISBN – 978-9963-671-25-0, pp. 1782-1797., 2007

In this paper I sketch a theory of teaching and learning that takes its inspiration from some anthropological and historico-cultural schools of knowledge the Theory of Knowledge Objectification (TKO). The TKO rests on five main interrelated constructs. The first construct deals with the psychological concept of thinking. Drawing on this concept, the other constructs serve to formulate the problem of learning in a way that does not commit the TKO with rationalist views of cognition and social interaction. The TKO posits the problem of learning as the progressive acquisition of cultural forms of reflection that are objectified as the student engages in joint social activity. Learning, it is argued, arises in the course of sensuous mediated cultural praxes embedded in historically formed epistemes and ontologies.

British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2012

Rethinking culture and education begs the question: why? Anyone familiar with Claude Lévi-Strauss' anthropological works might quickly respond, perhaps tautologically: 'Because culture and education are good to think with.' The phrase 'good to think with' is a virtual mantra within schools of anthropology that stress the value of critical scholarship for understandingand changingsocial life. Authors as different as Jean Comaroff (Comaroff and Kim 2011) and Elsie Rockwell (2011) have invoked Lévi-Straussian ideas to call for a more engaged scholarship. Although Lévi-Strauss was a basic not engaged anthropologist, and was speaking of the value of animal categories not social theory for structuring human thought (Lévi-Strauss 1963), his argument that ideas and concepts themselves nourish the human mind points to the very educative qualities of the social sciences and humanities that I wish to focus on and endorse here. In other words, social theorizing, like animal categories, is good to think with. It is educative, it is structuring, and it is constitutive of reality.

Culture & Psychology, 2016

In this theoretical essay, we examine four conceptual gestalt approaches to culture and education: “culture as pattern,” “culture as boundary,” “culture as authorship,” and “culture as critical dialog.” In the “culture as pattern,” education aims at socializing people into a given cultural practice. Any decline from culturally valued patterns becomes a deficit for education to eliminate. In the “culture as boundary,” encounter with other cultures highlights their arbitrariness and equality. Education focuses on celebration of diversity, tolerance, pluralism, social justice, and equal rights. The “culture as authorship” is about authorial transcendence of the given recognized by others. Education promotes dialogic creativity and authorship. Student/author is the final authority of his/her own education. “Culture as critical dialog” promotes testing ideas, opinions, beliefs, desires, and values. Critical dialog is inherently deconstructive, promoting never-ending search for truth. Edu...

2018

2021

This paper zeroes in on the role of sociocultural issues in instructed learning, as part of a larger, exhaustive discussion—presented as the ‘Molenda–Subramony Framework’—of the myriad proximal, distal, and environmental factors impacting the latter. Given that human society comprises a multitude of individual and institutional actors operating within multiple, overlapping environmental settings and contexts, our Framework features key actors—the learner, the facilitator, the learner’s home/family members and peers, and the media—operating within the setting of classroom and school environments, important frame factors, and the larger sociocultural environment. This paper is devoted to examining in detail the sociocultural issues, aspects, and dimensions pertinent to each of the aforementioned key actors and settings.

Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 2008

2002