A cultural view of learning challenges the normative view that tends to dominate educational thinking and practice.
One way to explore issues of equity in the learning sciences is to pay close attention to the nature and organization of settings where students are learning successfully… Learning happens in a wide range of activities outside of school…A key part of scaffolding in out-of-school learning involves organizing participation in ways that address basic human needs for safety, belonging and identification, self-esteem and respect… Although it seems fairly obvious that learning requires a sense of physical safety, psychological safety can be defined as a sense of comfort, willingness to take risks and be oneself, and a feeling of acceptance. Successful learning contexts also attend to student’s need for a sense of belonging and identification.
In mathematics, studies have shown how sophisticated mathematical thinking has occurred across multiple repertoires of practice for nondominated students. …African American high school basketball players learned concept of average and percent as part of calculating their own and others’ game statistics. …Participants rarely view what they are doing as mathematics and often claim to be very poor in math.
…In order to see robust, authentic connections between the everyday knowledge and practices of youth from nondominant groups and those of academic disciplines, we must look beyond the typical connections made in school curricula and identify important continuities of practice. By identifying and then using practices such as imagining…we not only create spaces in which students can participate in academic disciplinary practices, but we also put ourselves in a position to better understand the role such practices play in learning.
Learning to see heterogeneous – and often unfamiliar – meaning-making practices as being intellectually related to those in academic domains entails two related moves: expanding conventional views of these domains and deepening understanding of the intellectual power inherent in varied discursive and reasoning practices that youth from nondominant groups bring to school… Particular configurations of race, ethnicity, and class require that youth wrestle with pervasive challenges – and that designing learning environments for these students must address multiple (and often neglected) elements of learning , including identity and affect.
This argument has important implications both for the practice of designing learning environments and for the development of learning theory. With regard to practice, the perspective – argues for a radical restructuring of the way we organize learning in school and of the assumptions that we make about learners’ relevant knowledge. – changing our collective understanding of the routine language and social practices of academic disciplines… and designing classrooms to accommodate the myriad, multiple pathways which learning can proceed.
Citation: Nasir, N. S., Rosebery, A. S., Warren B., & Lee, C. D. (2006). Learning as a cultural process: Achieving equity through diversity. The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 489-504). Cambridge University Press.