This work was designed to assess whether developmental milestones on problem-solving tasks were universal or varied across cultures and to try to uncover processes that could account for any observed differences in the rate of development or in the highest level of development obtained Cole, ; Rogoff and Chavajay, These and other studies strongly suggest that culture plays a role in basic cognitive processes that help learners understand and organize the world, such as memory and perception.

This work challenged the assumption that people everywhere, regardless of their backgrounds, see the world in the same way because they share the same perceptual system. Work on these kinds of cross-cultural differences demonstrates that the environment in which a person lives matters and that people construct their perceptions by drawing on their prior learning experiences, including cultural ones. More recent work has explored cultural differences in attention and other cognitive processes e.

Culture also affects the cognitive processes that shape learning Markus and Kitayama, ; Nisbett et al. This work illustrates the important point that by taking cultural processes into account, researchers can develop a more complete understanding of processes that underlie developmental change and of the course and end points of development Henrich et al.

Another body of work in psychology that explores the role of culture in shaping psychological processes has focused on learning as a dynamic system of social activity. The underlying principle in this body of work is that cognitive growth happens because of social interactions in which children and their more advanced peers or adults work jointly to solve problems. These types of tools have skills and ideas built into them, and learning how to use them is a critical aspect of cognitive development.

Each child does not reinvent these tools; they are passed on across generations and adapted Wertsch, The use of this theory to understand the cultural nature of learning emerged among cross-cultural psychologists who began their work testing Piagetian cognitive tasks in different societies.

Researchers who adopt the sociocultural-historical perspective in examining learning do so within the cultural context of everyday life. This body of research illustrates through rich and detailed examples how everyday cultural practices structure and shape the way children think, remember, and solve problems see Gauvain and Monroe, ; Greenfield, ; Rogoff, ; Saxe, a , b. These in-depth studies demonstrate that approaches to learning are embedded in the practices of communities and that as these communities change over time, cultural adaptation happens Greenfield, This adaptation, in turn, transforms how people within these communities learn and solve problems.

Gauvain and Munroe, ; Greenfield, Many of these ethnographic research studies address learning in countries and cultural settings that may seem very distant from a U. However, the same principles can be applied in examining cultural practices and tools everywhere, including urban metropolitan areas. Consider, for example, how the emergence of cultural tools, such as calculators, the Internet, and Twitter, has transformed not only expectations about what people learn but also how they learn these issues are discussed further in Chapter 6.

Not surprisingly, embrace of sociocultural theory led to one of the most important recent theoretical shifts in education research: the proposition that all learning is a social process shaped by and infused with a system of cultural meaning Nasir and Hand, ; National Research Council, ; Tomasello, This work bridges the worlds of home and school.

It examines how culturally defined expectations and the ways caregivers in a community engage with their children interact with school learning : the context and the content of what one learns in the structured setting of a school. Some of this work was described in HPL I ; it addresses issues of congruence or match between expectations and practices children learn at home or in their cultural communities and the expectations embedded in the culture of school.

These studies documenting the cultural nature of learning have largely been ethnographic : systematic descriptions of the culture of a particular set of people at a particular point in time. And they often were conducted with small study samples. However, as with the early cross-cultural work on cognitive development, these studies yielded significant insights about learning that are relevant for understanding all people, from infancy to old age: Namely, that everyone brings to their opportunities to learn the experiences they have acquired through participation in cultural practices in their communities.

Learning is a dynamic process that requires coordination of multiple systems within the individual and occurs within a dynamic system encompassing. Recognizing this principle is essential to understanding the forces that help shape learning over the life span. Through these dynamic interactions, culture influences even the biological aspects of learning.

In the s, Urie Bronfenbrenner offered a formal model to illustrate the complex and diverse influences of context on the development of individuals Bronfenbrenner, , ; Bubolz and Sontag, His model is a set of concentric rings representing the different systems in which the individual develops, moving from family, school, peer groups, and workplaces outward to broader social and institutional settings, ideologies, value systems, laws, and customs.

Similarly, learning at the individual level involves lasting adaptations of multiple systems to the changing external and internal environment, including changes in the biology of the brain. The biology of the brain provides the physiological platform for learning and is shaped by the social and cultural influences outside of the individual.

Culture coordinates the biological systems involved in learning and is the broader social context in which people engage in the experiences that enable them to adapt to the world and learn. Study of the role of cultural adaptation in learning, pioneered by Giyoo Hatano, has shown how cultural influences may both promote and hamper learning. It might convey expectations about exploration and experimentation that foster or hinder adaptation and experimentation and influence the ways learners apply what has been learned in novel situations see, e.

The first aspect is the social and emotional interactions an individual experiences. Brain development and functioning, like the learning it supports, is socially contextualized. It happens in the context of experiences, social relationships, and cognitive opportunities as subjectively perceived and emotionally experienced by the learner.

Cultural norms and goals shape how and what people think. This is true even when a person is working alone or independently. Humans have evolved to be highly socially interdependent: From birth through old age, no one can manage life without relying on many other people Rogoff, ; Tomasello, Studies of institutionally raised Romanian children provide a tragic demonstration of the effects of social deprivation on brain and cognitive function e.

Though children reared in Romanian government institutions during the period studied had enough food, clothing, bedding, and other material supplies, they had a rotating staff of caregivers and little opportunity to develop a meaningful, stable relationship with a loving, committed adult.

The result was that these children did not simply fail to adequately develop socially, emotionally, and cognitively; they also failed to develop biologically.

These children were stunted in physical growth and in brain development: Both their brains and bodies were abnormally small. Emotion plays a role in developing the neural substrate for learning by helping people attend to, evaluate, and react to stimuli, situations, and happenings. In the past, it was generally assumed that emotion interferes with critical thinking and that knowledge and emotion are separate Gardner, However, extensive research now makes clear that the brain networks supporting emotion, learning, and memory are intricately and fundamentally intertwined Panksepp and Biven, , even for experts in technical domains such as mathematics Zeki et al.

Emotions are an essential and ubiquitous dimension of thought, and emotional processing steers behavior, thought, and learning Damasio, ; Immordino-Yang and Damasio, Quite literally, it is neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about or remember information about which one has had no emotion because the healthy brain does not waste energy processing information that does not matter to the individual Immordino-Yang, Emotions help learners set goals during learning.

They tell the individual experiencing them when to keep working and when to stop, when she is on the right path to solve a problem. People are willing to work harder to learn the content and skills they are emotional about, and they are emotionally interested when the content and skills they are learning seem useful and connected to their motivations and future goals.

Conversely, emotions like anxiety can undermine learning by causing worry, which depletes cognitive resources and activates brain regions associated with fear and escape rather than with academic thinking Beilock, ; Schmader and Johns, The developing brain is sensitive to physical influences that also affect other aspects of health and development, including nutrition, exposure to environmental toxins, sleep, and exercise.

These physical influences can vary dramatically across context and are often shaped by cultural practices. Sufficient, high-quality nutrition is necessary for health, development, and learning for infants who are affected by prenatal nutrition , children, and adults.

In particular, adequate protein, calories, and other nutrients are needed for brain development and function. Because of the protracted course of brain development, nutrition is especially important through the years of adolescence.

Deficiencies in protein, calories, and other essential nutrients have been linked to negative effects on cognitive functioning e. Iron deficiency, for example, is relatively common in the United States; 9 percent of U. Figure 2 shows that external context can be generic or specific. While the generic tends to be more neutral, the specific context is situated in space and time.

This figure also shows, as defined earlier in this article, that the context includes the following elements: one or more agents that have the role of being participants, one or more environments, one or more events, and one focus entity.

In all cases, context can be the substrate of culture. Both context and culture are dynamic and evolving. An agent, which is an element of context, can be singleton or complex. A singleton agent can be artificial e. As explained earlier, every human being is influenced by different cultures.

A group can be considered a complex agent. An environment can be virtual e. The environment is generally created by humans influenced by their cultures. An event has a participant and an action. The concept of action is central here. Indeed, it is in and on action that culture has an influence. In our model, partly shown in Fig. Figure 3 illustrates that an action can be simple or complex. Among the simple actions is the single actor action involving a doer agent. Cognitive action is a kind of single-actor action.

Complex actions involve two or more simple actions as subactions. Problem solving is a kind of complex action as well as a human social interaction that occurs in context as represented in Fig. Finally, as was explained earlier about the focus entity, a context is determined by collecting entities relevant to a focus entity, since a context must be an entity FOR something.

The singing action is performed in the context of the concert, which consists of many actions performed by the audience and staff members who support the concert.

If we do not focus on the singing action, the concert event is just an event and it is not a context. When students learn in a lesson event in a class, the learning action is accomplished in the context of the lesson, whereas if we do not focus on the learning action, the lesson is just an event.

A context cannot be just anything on its own. A context emerges only when we focus on an entity. Gilbert et al. As humans, we are not influenced by only one culture.

These different sets of schemes are subcultures. As shown in Fig. It is essential to model the cultural configuration because groups also have their own cultural configuration.

In fact, the cultural configuration of a group is not necessarily the sum of the cultural configurations of the individual humans who make up the group. For example, in an international working group of instructional designers, the professional culture will probably have more weight than the national cultures of the participants, who will adapt to each other and also to the context as represented in Fig. So, culture can influence context and the reverse is also true: context can influence culture.

Figure 5 shows in more detail the distinction between main culture and subcultures. Main culture has some influence on subcultures and experiential worlds, and each subculture influences the experiential world to which it is attached.

The reverse is also true: the experiential world can influence the subculture. All of this is dynamic, as represented below, and these are systems that interfere with each other. We believe that for individual human beings, main culture is often the national culture, the one in which they grew up, the one used by their parents to educate them.

Of course, as illustrated in Fig. The idea here is to allow the model to take into consideration the weight of the different cultures and subcultures that can influence more or less strongly behaviors, the interpretation of behaviors, and the processes of interpretation and representation.

This cultural configuration will be adjusted according to the context. The group or the individuals will adjust according to the context. For example, when I am interacting with my family, the subculture of the World of family has a higher weight. I can assume that the individuals with whom I interact and with whom I have many cultural references in common will understand my references to events or expressions without me having to explain them.

But when I interact with a new Japanese friend, I cannot use the same references without explaining them, I cannot take for granted that my friend adopts the same rules of politeness, and I must provide or ask for explanations. Depending on the context and the agent or action, which are part of the context , our cultural configuration is adjusted. Understanding and distinguishing between the two concepts is essential to their full synergistic potential use.

This distinction can help to avoid wasting time trying to solve a problem by adjusting contextual external elements when it is the cultural configuration that requires adjustments. By recognizing context as the substrate of culture, we recognize the functions and potential roles of each context and culture in teaching and learning, and we broaden the horizon of possibilities for effective transfers and deeper learning.

We make sure not to use both concepts as if they were synonyms and to create a harmful ambiguity. We enable ourselves to use both, context and culture, in their full synergistic potential of use. Distance learning, especially online learning, combined with the use of varied technologies, offers beautiful opportunities to use a variety of contexts to improve learning.

In educational programs aiming at competencies development, competency is seen as a complex know-how, tied to action, that brings learners to mobilize their internal resources knowledge, skills, attitudes and external resources colleagues, reference tools, books, etc. To be considered competent, learners must demonstrate their complex know-how in different contexts. They need to make the transfer from one context to another. We believe that it offers great opportunities for contextualization—decontextualization—recontextualization, which are great opportunities to improve learning.

In fact, it offers learners the opportunity to go back and forth between different external contexts and their internal context mental representations. In fact, culture mostly works as the internal context for humans learners, teachers, or instructional designers. But it can be confusing in some cases. For instance, when an ITS developed in Canada is deployed in Japan, people might say it would not work well because of the difference between cultures.

They may think that culture is an external context in which the ITS is deployed. But this is not the case.

The reason why such a Canadian ITS might not work in Japan is not because culture functions as an external context, but because it works as an internal context in learners. Making both cultural and contextual variables explicit may eliminate some ambiguities that may affect the quality of teaching and learning. We believe that models of context and culture have to be integrated into the traditional ITS architecture and, eventually, into knowledge-based systems connected with or integrated into digital learning environments.

There are two main ways to use these models: the more traditional way, through meticulous use of knowledge already represented according to pre-established parameters, or by using them as a foundation for emergence.

Williams et al. In such an approach, it seems vital to involve learners more, as they can provide information about the different models learners, domain, pedagogy, contexts, culture , both in their learning and in planning their lifelong learning paths.

Portfolios and collaborative instructional design environments could be some of the constructive solutions that could use and evolve these new models, but we need more research to offer a variety of complementary tools, and to be able to make more efficient and explicit use of culture and context models.

As highlighted by Basque , p. Here we are interested in the study of systems in interaction, that is, cognitive agents interacting with each other, and with physical and symbolic systems. It offers many worthwhile avenues for research. By clearly distinguishing and explicitly defining the context and culture, it will be possible to develop knowledge bases on different contexts and cultures that can be used, separately or simultaneously, to benefit learning.

Training in the health sciences is a good example, particularly in the context of chronic pain where the need for flexibility and adaptability in training is glaring and clearly transversal, both for patients and the various professionals involved.

Specialists, teachers, and clinicians are called upon to train learners and treat patients from diverse backgrounds social, cultural, etc. Learners, teachers, and clinicians must develop new competencies and equip themselves to take into account a diversity of contexts and cultures, and use this diversity to foster transfers that enhance learning, and interprofessional and intercontextual practice.

In the field of health sciences, by emphasizing the importance of interprofessional practice, we encourage future practitioners to consider a variety of professional cultures and practice contexts, and diverse personal life contexts of patients. Thus, there is a definite interest in accommodating this diversity in curricula and in integrating these concerns for knowledge transfer and adaptation into teaching and learning practices. We need to find ways and to develop tools that will help us to actually achieve this.

We need to manage this complexity and take advantage of diversity to benefit learning. We consider the explicit models ontologies proposed in this article to be a good starting point, consistent with the first step in devising an effective knowledge representation system and vocabulary, as proposed by Chandrasekaran et al.

Such models provide a solid foundation for the consideration of contexts and cultures in their full synergistic potential of use in pedagogical scenarios for teaching and learning , and for the accumulation of knowledge about different contexts and cultures, in order to use it to improve learning and teaching and to facilitate transfers.

These models must now be used and tested in different contexts in order for them to be improved iteratively and made generally usable. Our first identified use context is within a training platform to address clearly identified training needs for chronic pain treatment.

According to Gruber, , an ontology is an explicit specification interpretable by the computer of a conceptualization. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified view of the world we wish to represent, a description of the concepts and relationships that may exist between them for an agent or a community of agents.

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