Cultural tools and institutions
These notes are part of a series for the book. This paper is about the ways community and culture affect thinking.
Note: I reference this article in my essay, The duality of participation and reification, and a little Bolero.
Outline
- Cultural values of intelligence and maturity
- Familiarity with the interpersonal relations used in tests
- Varying definitions of intelligence and maturity
- Generalizing experience from one situation to another
- Learning to fit approaches flexibly to circumstances
- Cultural tools for thinking
- Literacy
- Math
- Other conceptual systems
- Distributed cognition in the use of cultural tools for thinking
- Cognition beyond the skull
- Collaboration hidden in the design of cognitive tools and procedures
- Crediting the cultural tools and practices we think with
Notes
Terms
Cultural tools: Mediational means; these shape activity. Wenger uses the word “reification” while socioculturalists use the phrase “cultural tool” to mean the same thing except Wenger includes language and sign systems in “reification” while some socioculturalists exclude them from “cultural tools”.
- See also: Wenger, E. (1998) ‘Ch. 1, Meaning’.
If you develop through participation, then there cannot be a “transfer of knowledge”.
Cultural differences and values
Cultural differences
Cultural differences may influence test-takers (of cognitive tests). For example:
- Is it a trick question?
- Don’t want to seem foolish
- Values – should always ask others to help and/or should be seen and not heard
- Value of speed versus carefulness when solving problems
- Personal values as part of being “educated” and how social conduct corresponds with intelligence
Cultural values
Western assessment practices show a value for individualism and a symbol-processing approach. However, Rogoff lists other (non-Western) cultures in which intelligence is not separated from emotion and affect — intelligence in these cultures is acting in specific ways socially. Her view is supported by neuro-scientific research into the role of feelings or emotions on learning.
Rogoff believes that learning involves school structure and family and community practices and values. Achievement is part of the cultural tool, reflecting what the community values.
Generalizing, adapting, and abstracting
Adaptive expertise
How do we generalize information about something and apply it to something else?
- Appropriate generalization
- Conceptual understanding
- Discerning relevance in new situations
This is adaptive expertise. It is supported when people understand the goals and principles of activities and have varied experiences in achieving the goals.
- See also: Compare this discussion of adaptive expertise with Wenger’s idea of reconciliation, Wenger, E. (1998) ‘Ch. 6, Identity in practice’.
- See also: A related discussion is in Sfard’s discussion of the weaknesses of the participation metaphor for learning, Sfard, A. (1998) ‘On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One’
Appropriate generalization
Appropriate generalization is discerning the relevance of prior knowledge in a new situation, which means understanding how they are related.
To help, teachers can make bridges between what the learner does in their everyday life and how it relates to the new knowledge. Be sure to provide context when teaching principles, so that learners can get a “feel” for the right answers when generalizing their learning. This can be contrasted with Roth and Lee’s recommendations at the end of their article.
Appropriate behavior for differing circumstances
Another important part of cognitive development is learning appropriate behaviors for differing circumstances. For example:
- Working together harmoniously versus being competitive
- Being teasing versus being consistent
- Maintaining eye contact versus averting eyes
Abstraction
The author contrasts this with abstraction: being able to apply knowledge across situations (a symbol-processing view).
Cultural tools and conceptual tools
If you separate the tasks to be learned from their context, you prevent the learner from engaging in reification. The result is that they cannot appropriately generalize the information to provide solutions to different settings. Rogoff gives math study as a common example of this — often, students are taught algorithms without being taught the thinking behind them, and thus the students don’t always understand the procedures.
Language, literacy, and math as cultural tools
Cultural tools: One example is the lingo or jargon of a community or CoP — how we talk and write about our subject of interest.
Rogoff contends that literacy and math are cultural tools. How the society defines literacy, and the type or level required to be considered literate, affects a person’s ability to do related tasks. For example:
- If you do not write essays as a part of literacy, then you will not be good at that type of activity
- People who learn math on an abacus are later able to do calculations involving up to 15 digits because they “see” the abacus in their head, even though their memory of other items falls within the standard range of 7 +/- 2.
Other conceptual tools
- Classification systems
- Star maps, navigational systems
- Narrative and schematic maps
- Folk psychology (provides assumptions for beliefs about other people’s desires, etc.)
Cultural tools for distributed cognition
Some cultural tools help collaboration at a distance, such as:
- Computers
- Literacy
- Workbooks
- Diagrams
See also
Pea, R. D. (1993). Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions (pp. 47–87). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Stevenson, H. W., Lee, S-Y., & Stigler, J. W. (1986). Mathematics achievement of Chinese, Japanese, and American children. Science, 231, 693–699.
Swetz, F. (1987). Capitalism and arithmetic: The new math of the 15th century. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New York: Oxford University Press.