|
Area of Expertise - Cultural Psychologist.
- Culture and Cognition
- Study how culture-specific etiologies and theories and representations affect people’s thinking, reasoning, decision making, and emotion
What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to higher education? Culture matters. There are cultural-specific etiologies and theories that affect people’s behavior, including the behaviors of learning something (as in an education setting). These issues have not been fully studied in the field of psychology. Sometimes they have been overlooked, not just internationally, but also in the US. We all know that many of the subjects in our studies, for many years, have traditionally been white male sophomores. We have not studied other ethnic groups to same extent, and we have not explored fully the impact of socioeconomic, racial, and other ethnic experiences and the ways in which these experiences may affect learning and education. A lot of what we study in cultural psychology primarily focuses on definitions of culture and the formulation of cultural-specific theories., We have some of understanding of these issues, but we have not applied our understanding of cultural effects to higher education. We should be able to design better ways of teaching based on our knowledge of cultural influences on how people learn. What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for research? Two kinds of problems: 1) The problem of the independent variable. What is culture? Is it a purely cognitive, affective, or behavior? We do not know much about culture from a psychological perspective, even though we talk about it all the time. So the issue of what is culture is still not well understood. 2) There are issues of the dependent variable as well. How broad are the cultural effects? How psychologically deep (in terms of mechanisms or processes) are these effects? We also talk a lot about multiculturalism, but mostly from a political perspective instead of a psychological one. We need to focus more on what are the cognitive benefits of multiculturalism. What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied? We know that there are differences in school performance by students from different ethnic groups. One example we all know is that Asian students perform better on math tests than any other ethnic group. There are a lot of theories about why they do so well in math. One possibility that has not been talked about much is that math is taught differently in Asian countries, which may be key to their success. Professor Howard Stevens at the University of Michigan provided one example of how teaching styles may affect performance. Dr. Stevens looked at an inner city school in Chicago with a predominantly Black student population. He found that the school did very well in a standard math test. He was very surprised to learn that the principal and the school in general emphasized what they called an “Asian way of teaching math.” So what is the Asian way of teaching math? One important component is that whenever you teach something, you do it in groups. New information is never taught solely with student-teacher interactions. An important part of the “Asian model” is an emphasis on students learning from each other. So they have a lot of group activities, and the activities are not simply presenting the answer as a group, but rather have the groups solve specific problems together. Also, when they solve the problems they do them in public. That is, they ask kids to solve the problem in front of the whole class, which can be very intimidating and humiliating, because if you do not know how to do it everyone will know. No American school or public school teacher would do this in the US because they believe that it would hurt the child’s self esteem. However, in Asian societies, teaching is always done this way. The public group method is based on the theory or folk belief that if you get learners excited or aroused, even by some humiliation, then they will be motivated to try and do their best. And even if learners don’t solve the problem, they remember the solution to the unsolved problem for quite sometime because they were aroused. When they applied the Asian way of teaching in that inner city Black school, the kids did very well. What I’m saying is that there are different practices from the ones we use in the US that might be helpful. We can look to other countries and other ethnic groups to understand alternative practices that we could be using. What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them? Different beliefs about education may be a problem. People in the US have their own folk beliefs about education and about the intellectual development, which I sometimes call the Socrates view. The nature of the Socrates view about intellectual development can be categorized in this way: 1) We emphasize questioning. That is, you have to question what people tell you. 2) We also emphasize evaluation. That is, that you have to evaluate judgments about other peoples stories, theories, and results. 3) We also emphasize self-generated knowledge. 4) We believe that there is a single truth These are ideas that are promoted and emphasized in the US. These ideas are not bad, but they are cultural-specific because people in other cultures do not share them. Asians views about education are more influenced by Confucius, which emphasize: 1) Effort—effort for learning--you have to spend some time to learn something 2) Respect—everybody has some knowledge that you don’t know. 3) Dialectical—thinking from two different perspectives, contemplating the contradictions. For Westerners, the contradictions are error or mistake. For Asians, much of the intellectual and human life is about contradicting statements and they do not seem to feel the need to resolve contradictions So I think those are the cultural specific views about intellectual development and cultural specific views about education. I think that the barriers to redesigning higher education are, in fact, cultural biases and cultural different beliefs. What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we want)? Reach out to the general public by way of the media. Inform them of our goals, and then present them with the major findings of the retreat. Publish articles that summarize the findings as well
|
