Learning in Cultural Context – Family, Peers and School

This book is the product of a series of workshops, focused on sociocultural theory and its applications to learning. The workshops focused primarily on three related questions of shared interest: What are the best conditions for learning? How can we use sociocultural theory to understand children’s learning in context? How can we transfer what we know about learning in informal contexts to formal education? Related questions pertained to the learning opportunities afforded by cultural models and tools, families, peers, and schools. An additional interest was the ways that learning opportunities, particularly those in school settings, could be increased or enhanced by a better understanding of culture more generally, including cultural practices. This book attempts to answer these questions from a variety of perspectives, including psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and education.We use a multi-method approach to consider what happens in the child’s environment to make cultural learning possible.

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