Examining Links Between Culture, Identity, and Learning

Learning as a cultural process is deeply rooted in our biology and in our evolutionary history. Prior generational intrusions and major events have implications for patterned interactions, processes, and outcomes for subsequent cohorts. Elder’s “Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience” (1974) provides an illustration determined by a major socioeconomic fluctuation. Specifically, his description of the long-term impacts of the early 20th century economic depression on youth as observed across time are parallel to current 21st century observations of developmental expressions of cultural processes having under-acknowledged foundations (Davis, Burleigh, & Gardner, 1941; Davis & Havighurst, 1946; Franklin V.P., 1979; Havighurst & Davis, 1943; Siddle-Walker, 2013).The impact of the latter temporal interval on social science conceptual leanings, particularly with reference to youth of color, was made worse for current analyses due to the penchant to ignore or “problematize” developmental expressions of humanity in context. Varied cultural expressions of learning have been devalued or “othered” as compared against a particular privileged standard (e.g., see Spencer, 2019; Spencer et al., 2019; Spencer & Dowd, upcoming).Alternatively, we put forward a viewpoint which recognizes not simply that culture impacts development. Moreover, we posit that the expression of intergenerationally determined patterns of development and social experience may be cultural in nature given significant fluctuations or social disruptions associated with prior generations. Particularly significant to contemporary life, there are few 18th through 20th century contexts serving as conduits for interpreting and reacting to learning patterns as cultural expressions, other than schools (i.e., both as the context of student learning and the institutions serving as the producers of knowledge utilized for teaching and socialization). The early observations by Havighurst and Davis in “Child Socialization and the School” illustrate the perspective emphasized in this section:Educators and other students of human development increasingly are viewing human learning as a function of the total biological and social history of the learner. It seems clear also that all new learning involves the changing of previously learned behavior. Since social behavior is learned, these principles indicate that what the child learns in his school culture is influenced by what he learns in his social life outside of school and what he has learned before he entered school.…His socialization in these groups largely determines what aspects of the school culture are experienced by him as either punishing or rewarding.(Havighurst & Davis, 1943, p.29)