How Do Different Cultures Learn?
My 20% Project By: Andrew Porter
Introduction
This semester, Edit 2000 has taught me that there are multiple ways to learn. I have personally taken it upon myself to dive deeper into learning by examining the relationship culture has on learning. For my 20% project, my essential question is: how do different cultures learn? The quest for answers during this project hasn't come easy. There isn't exactly a direct correlation between culture and ways that people learn; however, there are definitely some trends. Let's take a look!
Eastern Cultures
- Struggle-> For Eastern cultures, struggle is embraced and is viewed as an opportunity to exhibit emotional strength
- Struggle and persistence lead to success. If you fail at something, the effort and hard work put in to conquer that obstacle lead to success
- Children struggle with creativity and individuality
Western Cultures ( Emphasis on America)
- struggle-> Struggle indicates lack of knowledge. For Western cultures, struggling often indicates a sign that a student is not grasping the material, thus struggling is looked down upon
- Intelligence as a cause-> In Western cultures, we often believe that the reason we are educationally successful is due to our intellect
- Worry about how children's intellect will match up to that of Asian children
More Studies
Culture and learning have been said to have a correlation (examples:
- Arabic students were said to learn more actively than Turkish and Cypriot students
- Japanese manager surveyed showed that as a group of Japanese managers spent more time in the USA they became more concrete and more active in learning styles
- Japanese managers were usually more concrete and reflective while Americans were abstract and active
- American teaching and Chinese teaching style study proved to yield no significant difference
Project Challenges
Direct quote from the following: Omidvar, P., & Tan, B. H. (2012). Cultural variations in learning and learning styles. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 13(4).
Cultures of learning - vital feature of international education
Conclusion
There are certain trends between different cultures and learning;however, there is no data that suggests a one size fits all mld for learning amongst ethnic groups. Certain styles of teaching styles are more beneficial to learning for some ethnic groups in comparison to others. These differences can only be explored through extensive data and must be collected with the understanding that responsiveness to teaching style is culturally subjective to the individual and not something that can be applied to collective ethnic groups