Selective permeability, multiculturalism and affordances in education

ABSTRACT

Selective permeability holds that people’s distinct capacities allow them to do different things in a space, making it unequally accessible. Though mainly applied to urban geography so far, we propose selective permeability as an affordance-based approach for understanding diversity in education. This has advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as necessarily coming from “within” students, instead locating challenges in the environment. This implies that settings (not just people) need remedial attention, also raising questions about normative judgments in disability nomenclature. Second, affordances can be negotiated in numerous ways to reach a goal, analogously to how people with missing arms have learned to drive with their feet, so restrictive problem-solving methods are often counterproductive. Third, our approach illuminates how cultural factors ranging from gait styles to language and hence group coordination modulate action possibilities, so that cultural groups may encounter objectively different affordances in the same classroom. But fourth, while fit with environment allows for skill refinement, non-fit can contribute to growth situations, which suggests a degree of selective closure can be desirable. Throughout, we argue social constructs – including educational ones – are literally built or enacted barriers or openings that have reality in environments in the same way that affordances do.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective atmospheres and scaffolding
• embodiment and ecological psychology
• disabilities
• inclusive education and learning
• diversity and multiculturalism
• selective permeability, political affordances and social grammars

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We are grateful to the issue editors Pablo López-Silva and Marta Jorba, along with the anonymous reviewers. Our article has also benefitted from conversations with or support from students, research assistants and colleagues. Though it is infeasible to list everybody, among those whom we would like to thank are Yong-Kyun Bae, Kuralay Bazarbay, Ayaulym Chinaliyeva, Bokyoung Choi, Paula and Robert Crippen, Niv Farago, Sevara Gabbasova, Chris Hennessey, Oliver Kauffmann, Gulnur Kenbayeva, Gadi Kiperwasser, Nikky Kuil, Aimée Lê, Seunghyun Lee, Miyoung Park, CedarBough T. Saeji, Virpi Schäfer, Junghyun Shin, Sarah Slagle, Yinuo Song, Dustie Spencer, Suphisara Sukkasem, Tommi Tapanainen, Mareike Joleen Timm, David Tooch, Paula Völler and Farida Youssef. Special thanks to Xiaoyue Wei for her outstanding assistance over several terms. Additional thanks to people at our home institutions and at the Dominican Institute of Oriental Studies in Cairo for supplying research spaces.

2. Supporting the above-cited, Ekawati and colleagues (2022) found weather affects slant perception and Liu et al. (2018) report that thinking about debts makes hills look steeper and more distant – effects that can be regarded as non-subjective insofar as they follow from depleted energy levels.

3. The version of realist-constructivism advanced here loosely parallels ideas that C. S. Peirce (1878) developed, though he did not especially highlight constructivists sides.

4. Conversations with Najmat El-Ola Gebril, who has been focusing on special programs for children in North Africa, helped us develop this example and deploy it in teaching.