When it comes to the consideration of learning theories, professionals should take into account socio-cultural perspectives and the importance of culture, interaction and cooperation for quality learning. According to Polly et al. (2017), modern theories of social learning are based on the work of a Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who determined the role of culture and social interactions in the advancement of higher-order thinking skills. Interpretations of work of Vygotsky as well as other socio-cultural scholars have resulted in a variety of perspectives and approaches to education. Nowadays, socio-cultural theory is broadly recognized and highly valued, especially in relation to the socio-cultural nature of learning and development, which is due to convincing evidence that both these concepts are heavily influenced by the environment.
In accordance with the socio-cultural theory, human learning and development derive from historical, social, and cultural interactions. When it comes to children, Vygotsky wrote that their environment changes when it enlarges enough to participate in societal production (King et al., 2018). Naturally, between the time of children growing into the lives of their families and ‘societal production’, they grow into school life. With the enlargement of their environment, the young develop common interests and activities of daily living with a particular socio-economic group. With the conception of social class, King et al. (2018) turn to the approach proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, who denied the existence of classes per se, but argued that differentiations in social space are constantly being validated. This focus on the validation of differentiations as opposed to their existence as static characteristics of the group is especially relevant to the dynamics of a classroom.
Bourdieu’s notion is the key to analyzing the school culture: the fabrics of differentiation create a language that everyone can read and understand, albeit without being aware of it. Such readings operate as a so-called logic of symbolic violence: in accordance with it, the dominant way of life is almost always perceived by people, including those who lead it, as the dominant aesthetic (King et al., 2018). Consequently, where these differentiation structures are in place, they provide the sorting mechanism. The dominant way of life thus embodies the logic of symbolic violence in schooling, which changes the developmental trajectories for children from different socio-economic classes. It is important to mention that the cultural functionings of the dominant aesthetic in school contexts are mostly invisible and appear ‘natural’, and should not be understood as malicious actions of educators. The very logic of symbolic violence is one of the features of the lack-of-awareness culture that needs to be made visible, to, among other things, explain how middle-class and working-class children become different kinds of people.
In general, in formal education, knowledge is treated as not linked to the contexts of its learning and use. The primary objective of schools is the transfer of theoretical knowledge, which contains concepts that are mainly abstract and formal. In modern day and age, however, many researchers discuss the separation of the things that are learned from how they are learned and used. This is due to real-life practitioners and experts treating and using knowledge and skills in a very different way than it is practiced in formal education. Rather than teaching learners to memorize, test, and then forget the knowledge, as is the case with the Western schooling tradition, they have to be taught how to actually use the knowledge outside schools. This is the main premise of situated learning, or situated cognition, the theory that was developed by those who argued that knowledge was related to activities, contexts, and cultures in which it was learned.
In the instructions created in accordance with the postulates of situated learning, there are a few key points. As per Özüdogru and Özüdogru (2017) first of all, learners should be provided with authentic contexts that reflect the real world to which knowledge is applied. In addition to that, students are to take active participation in authentic activities that have real-world relevance. Furthermore, learners should be presented collaborative activities that promote co-operational knowledge construction and higher-order thinking skills. It is to be noted that learning is to occur in so-called communities of practice as, according to the situated learning theory, the construction of knowledge is only valuable when one learns directly from others.
Consequently, the Western schooling tradition and its practices suffer from an assumption that the aggregation of more education inevitably results in social development and not in what actually occurs. According to Gaudelli (2020), what actually occurs is the perpetuation of an unjust educational system via the Western education’s sorting mechanism. Granted, the necessity of universal access is undeniable; however, access by itself will not ensure either quality or a redefinition of education. Supposing, universal access is achieved tomorrow, yet the existing vast differences in its quality remain; the argument would certainly shift to issues of people not making full use of their access. Instead, the redoubling of efforts to make what is accessible also high-quality, or the testing of the limits of what even is valued as education is to take place.
In conclusion, in concert with Vygotsky’s ideas, there is strong evidence that both learning, and development are socio-cultural processes. The perpetuation of the so-called logic of symbolic violence by the school culture contributes to the difference of development trajectories of children from different socio-economic classes, with poorer kids becoming its victims. In addition to that, the Western schooling tradition is obsolete in the way that it is focused on providing more knowledge rather than on its quality and does not treat people as isolated individualized minds. It calls for a reconsideration of education, or, at the very least, application of the theory of situated learning to the learning process.
References
Gaudelli, W. (2020). The trouble of Western education. On_Education.
King, R. B., McInerney, D. M., & Pitliya, R. J. (2018). Envisioning a culturally imaginative educational psychology. Educational Psychology Review, 30(3), 1031-1065.
Özüdogru, M., & Özüdogru, F. (2017). The effect of situated learning on students’ vocational English learning. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 5(11), 2037-2044. Web.
Polly, D., Allman, B., Casto, A., & Norwood, J. (2017). Sociocultural perspectives of learning. In Richard E. West (Ed.), Foundations of learning and instructional design technology (pp. 187-215). EdTech Books.