learn.ed: Summer 2006

This class will explore a fundamental problem in educational psychology and the study of learning, which is that many of the basic traditional tenets of the field become complicated from a global perspective and require alternative or reconfigured conceptions. We’ll deal with a number of issues, for example:(1) the question of defining and assessing learning based on a normalizing model versus one that acknowledges and deals with diversity, (2) classic assumptions about “formal” and “informal” knowledge and the roots of those distinctions in privileged and dominant discourses, and (3) difficulties of trying to study learning from the perspective of cultural comparison without essentializing culture and nationality and reducing those things to research variables.We’ll also look at learning and teaching from the perspective of the classroom as a site of cultural and international contact, and the difficulty of even defining and teaching to a bounded notion like “culture” in a modern world of multifaceted identities and communities.