Mike asked:
I am curious about the relationship between your enculturationalist
perspective and what once was referred to as cognitive apprenticeship.
And Peter asked:
I would be interested to hear how you would describe the "underlying
learning metaphor" addressed by the "activity school" (say, the Russians
from Leontiev on through Davydov) together with its "pedagogical
guidance." And what is its overlap with the guidance expressed by the
very clear Vygotsky quote we've been discussing?
Mike and Peter, I'm appending some text from a paper I'm preparing that
addresses your questions. In it I describe two pedagogical approaches that
relate to the metaphor of learning as enculturation. The first is a student
centered enculturationist pedagogy, the second a teacher centered
enculturationist pedagogy. (The full framework has 6 pedagogical methods, a
student centered and teacher centered pedagogy for each of three metaphors
for learning: habituation, construction, and enculturation.) At the end of
the passage I touch on Mike's question about situated cognition. One
legitimately can look at concepts as being enculturated. However, it is
only in a constructivist pedagogy that the teacher can target specific
concepts and directly support their achievement. Cognitive apprenticeship
is similar to other integrative approaches that attempt to attend to more
than one form of learning simultaneously. The problem is that this
integration elides the tensions and contradictions inherent in the
underlying framing pedagogies.
David
____________________________
Enculturation
All of these pedagogical methods are conceived within the dominant
discourse focused on individual student learning. However, enculturationist
learning techniques also turn out to be central to critical pedagogies that
aim for social transformation. Thus, following is an extended introduction
to this learning metaphor and its associated learning pedagogies.
Enculturation is the process of acquiring cultural dispositions through
enmeshment in a cultural community. I interpret dispositions broadly as
inclinations to engage with people, problems, artifacts, or oneself in
culturally particular ways. Thus, for example, the NCTM’s (1991) objectives
that students come to “explore, conjecture, reason logically; to solve
non-routine problems; to communicate about and through mathematics ... [as
well as] personal self-confidence and a disposition to seek, evaluate, and
use quantitative and spatial information in solving problems and in making
decisions” (p. 1) all reflect an enculturationist learning agenda. (Recall
that the cognitive dispositions like critical thinking and problem solving
are understood as culturally located in the crossdisciplinary framework,
and hence are addressed through enculturationist/acculturationist
pedagogies.)
A paradigm example of enculturation is explored by social psychologists
under the rubric of proxemics (Hall, 1966; Li, 2001). Proxemics, or
personal space, is the tendency for members of different national cultures
to draw differing perimeters around their physical bodies for varying
social purposes. Thus, natives of France tend to prefer closer physical
proximity for conversation than do Americans (Remland, Jones, & Brinkman,
1991). I count coming to participate in this cultural norm a particularly
pure instance of enculturation because it is accomplished without
volitional participation. Generally people within a national culture
acquire proxemic dispositions through culture enmeshment without intending
it, and even without awareness of the cultural norm.
This pure form of enculturation is possible in a unitary culture in which
only a single dispositional variation is present. However, one also can
come to be enculturated into a subculture whose dispositional
characteristics are distinctive among a range of other subcultures’ (e.g.,
being a scientist, being a punk rocker, etc.). In such instances, inductees
often seek to actively acculturate themselves to a subculture, thereby
bringing volitional resources to the task of acquiring the subculture’s
dispositional characteristics. Acculturation is intentionally “fitting in”
to a cultural milieu by emulating the cultural dispositions displayed
therein. However, this process needs to be understood as supplementary to
the more basic unconscious processes of enculturation going on around it
all the time. A cultural milieu is constituted of innumerable cultural
dispositions, of which only a limited number can be consciously addressed
through strategies of acculturation.
Enculturationist Pedagogy: This distinction points to two pedagogical
strategies that can be discerned in the education literature. In
enculturationist (student centered) teaching, the teacher begins by
identifying a target culture and target dispositions within that culture.
The instructional focus is on the classroom microculture, which the teacher
works to shape so that it comes to more closely resemble the target culture
with respect to the target dispositions. In a pure enculturationist
pedagogy, students “learn” through their enmeshment in the cultural milieu
of the classroom rather than from motivated efforts at becoming
acculturated to some other cultural milieu for which the classroom
interaction is an entryway.
Often disciplinary cultures are targeted in enculturationist pedagogy. For
instance, Sexias (1993) sought to organize instruction to establish
“criteria for historical evidence, methods of determining historical
significance, and limits on interpretive license” (Windschitl, 2002, p.
149)–dispositions of historiographers. Similarly, Lampert (1990) and
Schoenfeld (1994) have worked to establish mathematical communities in
their classrooms so that students can acquire characteristically
mathematical modes of argumentation and problem solving, as well as other
mathematical dispositions. Yackel and Cobb (1996) most clearly articulate
an enculturationist pedagogical agenda in their discussion of
sociomathematical norms as the targeted dispositions of mathematical
culture (e.g., the preference for mathematically elegant solutions) that
come to be “interactively constituted by each classroom community” (p.
475). Implementing this kind of pedagogy requires sensitivity to the
current dispositional character of the classroom microculture relative to
the target dispositions, and the ability to work over an extended period of
time (the duration of a course) to nurture increasingly sophisticated
cultural norms.
Acculturationist Pedagogy: Often the enculturationist teacher helps develop
the dispositional character of the classroom by positioning her or himself
as a central participant in the evolving classroom microculture (for
example, by regularly signaling deep appreciation of student solutions that
tend toward mathematical elegance). However, the teacher need not signify
as a representative of the target culture for such cultural dispositions to
take root within the classroom microculture. Students are learning from
their enmeshment in the classroom microculture, not from their efforts to
acculturate to the disciplinary norms. This can be distinguished from
acculturationist pedagogy in which the teacher overtly models cultural
dispositions for the benefit of students who are culturally identified with
the target culture. For instance, a science teacher may stress the lab
procedures he/she is modeling are the authentic methods of science, so that
students who are self-identified as novice-scientists can have access to
these valued cultural practices to further their own scientific
acculturation. Or acculturationist pedagogies may seek to encourage
cultural identification, for instance by positioning students as experts on
a particular scientific topic and involving them in email collaboration
with actual scientists (Brown & Campione, 1996). Concern for “authentic
practice,” (e.g., in apprenticeship models of pedagogy inspired by situated
cognition theory, Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989, p. 34), is a hallmark of
an acculturationist agenda (though cognitive apprenticeship also employs
enculturationist strategies).
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