Culture, Learning, and Development and the Natural World: The Influences of Situative Perspectives

Abstract

The study of human learning and development from situative or sociocultural perspectives has had significant impacts on a wide range of scholarship largely driven by the theoretical and methodological focus on understanding the role of activity systems in cognition and development. This article first explores how situative perspectives have advanced fundamental knowledge about how culture and race impact learning and development and works to demonstrate how these understandings have enabled new insights into folk-biological cognition. Traditional cognitive, cross-cultural, and situative perspectives with respect to folkbiology are compared and contrasted to demonstrate how situative perspectives enabled more complete understandings of the complexities of biological cognition. These complexities are conceptualized as the conceptual and epistemological ecologies of activity systems. Implications for education are considered.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to acknowledge and deeply thank colleagues with whom I have worked closely around these ideas: Douglas Medin, Ananda Marin, Carol Lee, Bruce Sherin, Beth Warren, Ann Rosebery, Barbara Rogoff, Sandra Waxman, Sara Unsworth, and Bethany Ojethelo.

FUNDING

The work discussed here is based upon research supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 1205758, 1208209, 0353341 and 0106194. The opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the funding agencies.

Notes

¹ Note that the use of natural kinds reflects a privileging of Western biology.