Learning, culture, and learning culture

Even though adults have long faced the experience of learning to function in new cultural contexts, very little is understood about the processes of this sort of learning. This project approaches learning culture from the assumption that cultural knowledge is best understood in terms of situated cognition: Ways of knowing how to make sense of a situation, and how to interact in ways that will make sense in that situation, are inextricably linked to the situation. Contexts do not simply provide useful information in support of thinking and learning, but are inseparable from cognitive processes. Viewing culture in this way carries specific implications for understanding how a new culture is learned, and how it might be taught. In particular, learning culture can be seen as similar to gaining practitioner knowledge, and teaching culture can be modeled on the cognitive apprenticeship. The research reported here reflects my efforts to implement this model and to explore its implications in practice. The setting for research was The University of Iowa Intensive English Program; informants were international students enrolled in the program. As a teacher in this program, I have used the cognitive apprenticeship as an orienting framework for my teaching practice in an effort to support my students as they were learning to interpret and interact in the new culture they were immersed in. As a practitioner researcher, I have proposed specific criteria for maintaining the quality of practitioner research, and guided by these criteria, I have sought to determine particular effects of specific acts of teaching on my students' ways of making sense in this new culture. Research outcomes suggest that the cognitive apprenticeship is an attractive ideal, and appropriate for supporting learners of a new culture. However, features that make it most like an apprenticeship, such as being alongside learners to model and coach in situations of actual practice, required far more individualized attention and interaction than a full-time teaching practice allowed. Portfolios students assembled to demonstrate their learning clearly differentiated them from one another in terms of learning outcomes, but it remained difficult to specify why students learned differently.