Culture In Education And Education In Culture

In a world where the global engagement and international dialogue intensifies, some areas of cultivated knowledge suffer from this dialogue and this has consequences for people and communities. We propose education to be such a case. The global dialogue in education tends to be restricted to and mediated by standardized measurements. Such standards are meant to measure qualities of education and of student behavior and create the sought for condition for normative comparability and competition. The obvious drawback is that cultural variability – in local living as well as in education – is rendered irrelevant. Are there alternatives? The book insists on maintaining the discussion about education on a global level, but rather than moving towards homogenization and standardization of education, the attention is drawn towards the potential for learning from creative fits - and misfits - between concrete local cultures, institutional practices and global aims and standards of education. This work brings together a group of educational and developmental researchers and scholars grappling to find culturally informed and sensitive modes of educating people and communities. Case studies and examples from four geographical contexts are being discussed: China, Brazil, Australia and Europe. While being embedded in these local cultures, the authors share a conceptual grounding in cultural developmental theorizing and a vision for a culturally informed globalized perspective on education. As the theme of the book is learning from each other, the volume also includes commentaries from leading scholars in the field of cultural psychology and education.

This book explores the fascinating and complex interactions between the ways that culture and education operate within and across societies. In some cases, education is imagined as an integrated part of general cultural phenomena; in others, educational interventions become the means for transforming the cultural circumstances of different populations. The contributors to this volume show how certain educational practices produce new cultural and professional knowledge; discuss the impacts of initially foreign educational ideas and institutions on established cultural institutions in very different societies; and explore the impacts of modernity and modern educational ideas on more traditional gendered and religious practices and communities. The book also provided striking examples of when these impacts were not benign. Increasingly powerful twentieth-century governments attempted to use education and schools to produce new, reformed citizens suitable for their newly created colonial, national, socialist, and fascist states. The expectation was that cultural and social transformation might be engineered, in major part, through schooling. This book was originally published as a special issue of Paedagogica Historica.

What we don't know about learning could fill a book--and it might be a schoolbook. In a masterly commentary on the possibilities of education, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner reveals how education can usher children into their culture, though it often fails to do so. Applying the newly emerging "cultural psychology" to education, Bruner proposes that the mind reaches its full potential only through participation in the culture--not just its more formal arts and sciences, but its ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and carrying out discourse. By examining both educational practice and educational theory, Bruner explores new and rich ways of approaching many of the classical problems that perplex educators. Education, Bruner reminds us, cannot be reduced to mere information processing, sorting knowledge into categories. Its objective is to help learners construct meanings, not simply to manage information. Meaning making requires an understanding of the ways of one's culture--whether the subject in question is social studies, literature, or science. The Culture of Education makes a forceful case for the importance of narrative as an instrument of meaning making. An embodiment of culture, narrative permits us to understand the present, the past, and the humanly possible in a uniquely human way. Going well beyond his earlier acclaimed books on education, Bruner looks past the issue of achieving individual competence to the question of how education equips individuals to participate in the culture on which life and livelihood depend. Educators, psychologists, and students of mind and culture will find in this volume an unsettling criticism that challenges our current conventional practices--as well as a wise vision that charts a direction for the future.

This book analyzes equity and diversity in schools and teacher education. Within this broad and necessary context, the book raises some critical issues not previously explored in many multicultural and urban education texts.

The twenty-first century is a world in constant change. In A New Culture of Learning, Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown pursue an understanding of how the forces of change, and emerging waves of interest associated with these forces, inspire and invite us to imagine a future of learning that is as powerful as it is optimistic. Typically, when we think of culture, we think of an existing, stable entity that changes and evolves over long periods of time. In A New Culture, Thomas and Brown explore a second sense of culture, one that responds to its surroundings organically. It not only adapts, it integrates change into its process as one of its environmental variables. By exploring play, innovation, and the cultivation of the imagination as cornerstones of learning, the authors create a vision of learning for the future that is achievable, scalable and one that grows along with the technology that fosters it and the people who engage with it. The result is a new form of culture in which knowledge is seen as fluid and evolving, the personal is both enhanced and refined in relation to the collective, and the ability to manage, negotiate and participate in the world is governed by the play of the imagination. Replete with stories, this is a book that looks at the challenges that our education and learning environments face in a fresh way. PRAISE FOR A NEW CULTURE OF LEARNING "A provocative and extremely important new paradigm of a 'culture of learning', appropriate for a world characterized by continual change. This is a must read for anyone interested in the future of education." James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus, University of Michigan "Thomas and Brown are the John Dewey of the digital age." Cathy Davidson, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University "A New Culture of Learning may provide for the digital media and learning movement what Thomas Paine's Common Sense did for the colonists during the American Revolution- a straightforward, direct explanation of what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against." Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor, USC "A New Culture of Learning is at once persuasive and optimistic - a combination that is all too rare, but that flows directly from its authors' insights about learning in the digital age. Pearls of wisdom leap from almost every page." Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries, University of Michigan "Brilliant. Insightful. Revolutionary." Marcia Conner, author of The New Social Learning "Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown portray the new world of learning gracefully, vividly, and convincingly." Howard Gardner, Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education "Thomas and Brown make it clear that education is too often a mechanistic, solo activity delivered to the young. It doesn't have to be that way-learning can be a messy, social, playful, embedded, constant activity. We would do well to listen to their message." Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus "Anyone who fears, as I do, that today's public schools are dangerously close to being irrelevant must read this book. The authors provide a road map-and a lifeline-showing how schools can prosper under the most difficult conditions. It is a welcome departure from all the school bashing." John Merrow, Education Correspondent, PBS NewsHour "American education is at a crossroads. By illuminating how play helps to transform both information networks and experimentation, and how collective inquiry unleashes the power of imagination, A New Culture of Learning provides an irresistible path to the future." Joel Myerson, Director, Forum for the Future of Higher Education.

Education in Popular Culture explores what makes schools, colleges, teachers and students an enduring focus for a wide range of contemporary media. What is it about the school experience that makes us wish to relive it again and again? The book provides an overview of education as it is represented in popular culture, together with a framework through which educators can interpret these representations in relation to their own professional values and development. The analyses are contextualised within contemporary, historical and ideological frameworks, and make connections between popular representations and professional and political discourses about education. Through its examination of film, television, popular lyrics and fiction, this book tackles educational themes that recur in popular culture, and demonstrates how they intersect with debates concerning teacher performance, the curriculum and young people’s behaviour and morality. Chapters explore how experiences of education are both reflected and constructed in ways that sometimes reinforce official and professional educational perspectives, and sometimes resist and oppose them. Education in Popular Culture will stimulate critical reflection on the popular myths and professional discourses that surround teachers and teaching. It will serve to deepen analyses of teaching and learning and their associated institutional and societal contexts in a creative and challenging way.

This book offers insights into the exciting dynamics permeating creative arts education in the Greater China region, focusing on the challenges of forging a future that would not reject, but be enriched by its Confucian and colonial past. Today’s ‘Greater China’ – comprising China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan – has grown into a vibrant and rapidly transforming region characterized by rich historical legacies, enormous dynamism and exciting cultural metamorphosis. Concomitant with the economic rise of China and widespread calls for more ‘creative’ and ‘liberal’ education, the educational and cultural sectors in the region have witnessed significant reforms in recent years. Other factors that will influence the future of arts education are the emergence of a ‘new’ awareness of Chinese cultural values and the uniqueness of being Chinese.​

This book provides a critical commentary on key issues around learning in the digital age in both formal and informal educational settings. The book presents research and thinking about new dynamic literacies, porous expertise, digital making/coding/remixing, curation, storying in digital media, open learning, the networked educator and a number of related topics; it further addresses and develops the notion of a ‘third space literacies’ in contexts for learning. The book takes as its starting point the idea that an emphasis on technology and media, as part of material culture and lived experience, is much needed in the discussion of education, along with a criticality which is too often absent in the discourse around technology and learning. It constructs a narrative thread and a critical synthesis from a sociocultural account of the memes and stereotypical positions around learning, media and technology in the digital age, and will be of great interest to academics interested in the mechanics of learning and the effects of technology on the education experience. It closes with a conversation as a reflexive ‘afterword’ featuring discussion of the key issues with, amongst others, Neil Selwyn and Cathy Burnett.