Classroom represents a unique learning community becoming a vehicle for learning appropriate communication behaviors and roles that facilitate the interaction by all participants and are goal directed. Cognition and culture are a part of classroom environment and the process of learning. Theories of cognition and culture help to explain a path of development and a structural model of thinking evolving within the classroom environment.
Using Vygotsky’s (1978) theory of Social Cognition, it is possible to say that classroom context directs my attempts at exploration, which produces a sampling from the available information, which modifies my social knowledge. In this case, as a receiver of a communication, I become an active interpreter of events, one who will provide an understanding of the events at hand. I develop in the context of a classroom culture. Unique classroom environment helps me to acquire thinking and knowledge, practical skills and perceive universal values. Sensitivity is functional and adaptive in that it marks prior experience and orients or motivates me to respond adaptively to forthcoming situations. I develop an affective orientation toward some objects and situations. Following Vygotsky, this unique classroom environment teaches me to think and how to do it; it develops my orientations toward specific objects, ideas, or events. By this definition, physiological arousal need not accompany an affective orientation. This term can encompass preferences that involve little or no emotional component as well as those with some considerable degree of associated arousal. The process of learning has two dimensions: experiences with a teacher and peers. From my peers, I have acquired new habits and life preferences. Influenced by multicultural contest, I like Spanish food, listen to Japanese music and read Japanese nochs. From teachers, I leant that we have witnessed calls for returning to some form of American volunteerism in order to maintain humane values and to restore our communities so that they promote greater individual and general well-being. These factors form my personality and influence my intellectual development. The main sources of influence are curriculum, instructions and assessment.
The theory of “Nested hierarchy’ helps to explain consciousness and sensitivity. Following DiMaggio (1997) “culture comprises a hierarchy of nested schemata, arrayed from abstract to concrete, with the latter entailed by the former”. Cultural context of the classroom influences my self and self-identity. Meaning construction involves the perpetual encounter of a meaning-seeking subject and a historically and culturally orchestrated world of artifacts. Cultural cognition is a special kind of meaning-seeking activity closely related to more general processes of meaning construction. Meaning construction is a kind of learning, but it is not by itself a complete account of how we learn. Specifically, meaning construction is a Piagetian “assimilation” process whereby people employ old cognitive models as resources for making sense out of novel experiences (Olson, Torrance 1996). For me, cultural meaning construction becomes a specific kind of assimilation, requiring two distinct cognitive processes. First, a conventional form of a cognitive model is derived from instituted models present in the social environment. Second, a novel experience is organized for an individual in relation to this conventional cognitive model, providing a significant degree of sharing in the way individuals within a community experience the world. My consciousness and sensitivity have evolved because I am influenced by Eastern culture and their meaning of space and time, attitude towards learning and communication. Culture not only organizes my experience and sensitivity but also alternative versions of an experience from different points of view.
Following D’Andrade cognition process is explained as “implicit, unverbalized, rapid, and automatic” (D’Andrade 1995 cited Olson, Torrance 1996, 34). As a social actor, I constantly monitor my actions and recognize the available patterns through which I might act at any given moment, yet I am capable of modifying those patterns to accommodate reading of the rhetorical moment. Full participation in disciplinary cultures demands a similarly informed knowledge. To be fully effective in this role, people must be flexible and dynamic, capable of modification according to the situation. Much of immediacy is a function of nonverbal behavior, and it is very well established that nonverbal behaviors have different norms and impacts in different cultures. My interpersonal communication involves social interaction occurring within a socially defined context (classroom), involving interdependent social roles (teachers and students) and conventional rules, strategies, and tactics for making decisions and obtaining various goals (Olson, Torrance 1996).
According to the theory of distributed cognition “a distributed” world means that learning is experienced as a natural byproduct of the everyday conduct of real tasks and real normative behavior” (Courtney 2002, 71). For me, the rites comprise a culturally motivated process of knowledge transformation. In this way the translation of models into personal experience involves the embodiment and transformation of the novice’s primary understandings of experience. “People who use tools actively rather than just acquire them, by contrast, build an increasingly rich implicit understanding of the world in which they use the tools and of the tools themselves” (Brown et al 1989). In this case, my development takes place under the tight constraints of age-grading rites. “A “walkabout” schema” is internalized, not by direct transfer of a narrative model to novices but by the translation of the narrative into a sequence of experiences and performances (Sorrentino, Higgins 1986 45). These symbolic acts do not so much recount the model of knowledge creation as actually enact the model in the very forms of knowledge transfer. This concern helps to explain complex life of cultural signs and the various kinds of “motivation” they bear. Cultural signs have many different kinds of relationship to both the external world and the inner world of personal experience. Understanding how culture underwrites meaning construction requires us to recognize the implication of these many different kinds of symbolic motivation (Sorrentino, Higgins 1986). To anticipate, unmotivated symbols have been emphasized in modern information models of meaning. In classroom, we reconsider the issue of motivation by recognizing how signs can land at many different places. In this case, students are influenced by the systemic nature of social inequality, including its sources, history, and contemporary manifestations. Teachers need to incorporate into their teaching a conceptual framework that analyzes the relationship between dominant and subordinate groups. Together, students can consider proposals for redressing current forms of injustices (Brown et al 1989).
In addressing these concerns, our concepts of “community” and “culture” is incorporated into a critical understanding of social relations that assumes equality among diverse social groups. Learning, with its emphasis on community can deny or ignore social difference, including class stratification. Appeals to community typically imply a model of the good society as one composed of decentralized, face-to-face, small towns. For students, these small communities are, ideally, composed of people with the same values and same lifestyle.
In his study, DiMaggio (1997) explains that “learning that people retain almost every image or idea with which they have come into contact, renders intelligible otherwise anomalous research findings about inconsistency in expressions of attitudes across time, cultural volatility in periods of rapid change”. Influenced by multicultural environment and learning opportunities, I have evolved and become a culturally competent person who value ideas and beliefs of others and their life preferences. Following ideas and concepts developed by Frege, I can say that my understanding is constrained by a real object world. Forms of thought are internal representations of the properties of external reality. The reference of any mental representation is its analogue in the world. Multicultural classroom has changed my perception and understanding of meaning and other people, social and political processes. Following Frege, “the idea is subjective: one man’s idea is not that of another. There results, as a matter of course, a variety of differences in the ideas associated with the same sense” (cited Olson, Torrance 1996, 46). In contrast to the previous period of life, today I share a stock of “senses” of that world and sensory representations of that world’s forms. Thus individual differences in understanding arise because people have distinct “ideas” associated with these senses. The classroom context allows me to get an implicit sense of reason and logic, effective writing and communication (Olson, Torrance, 1996).
In sum, theories of cognition and culture help to examine and understand classroom as a unique environment which supports personal development and self-formations processes. My communication has been conducted within the cultural context. The behaviors of teachers might have different impact in one culture than they have in another. My consciousness and sensitivity have evolved because classroom and educational environment teach me about practices of other communities, about the practices of science and mathematics, values and beliefs, cultural behavior patterns and communication differences. My sensitivity and consciousness have change greatly towards charity and altruism while reasoning and critical analysis influenced by cognition and personal culture. Depending on the social context in which students are placed, the subjects interpreted the state either as a negative emotion, anger, or as a positive one, elation. This ideal is questioned therefore from the standpoint of inclusion, diversity, and social justice. Equal status contact is achieved when the perceived status of in-group and out-group members is more or less equal in the context of the particular face-to-face activity.
References
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., Duguidm, P. (1989). Situated Learning and the Culture of Learning. Retrieved 30 March 2007 http://www.sociallifeofinformation.com/Situated_Learning.htm
Courtney, S. (2002). The Dig”: Distributed Cognition and the Postmodern Classroom. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, pp. 71-72.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology 23:263. Retrieved 30 March 2007 http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/DiMaggio_97.html
Olson, D.R., Torrance, N. (1996). Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cognition. Cambridge University Press,.
Sorrentino, R. M., Higgins, E. T. (1986). Handbook of motivation and cognition. w York: Guilford.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
