FORM 2051 Learning Cultures

This course explores global cultures of learning and their relationships to the learning of culture. How pople learn and know in educational institutions is rooted in cultural values: in the way they imagine studying or praciticing, in their different expectations about what success means, in their sense of who should teach and who should learn. But it is equally true that learning extends well beyond the years and settings of formal education. From birth on, humans are learning through experience in the context of families, communities, and a wide range of practices and institutions. We will read and discuss texts to consider how human across the world differently experience and structure these two kinds of learning. We will, for instance, explore how schools from Michigan to Manila to Munich are infused not just with explicit pedagogy, but the values of the people that populate them. As we will also attend to the formative processes happening in our daily lives, beyond schools, from bedtime rituals to alms giving ceremonies to pickle ball courts.