The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Learning

THE INTERSECTION OF CULTURE AND LEARNING STYLE

Culture is not exclusively tied to race or ethnicity but also includes "shared values, beliefs, identities, and interpretations or meanings of ­motives, significant events that result from common experiences of members of collectives that are transmitted across generations" (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004, p. 15). Research has shown that the one-­size-­fits-­all traditional teaching approach excludes students whose cultural backgrounds differ from the majority and inhibits efficient and effective learning (Wynd & Bozman, 1996) ­because ­those students engage course content differently (Packard, 2011). Researchers studying the interaction of culture and learning style share five common assumptions about learners (Guild, 1994, pp. 18–19):

1. Learners in dif­fer­ent age groups differ in how they learn.
2. Both nature and nurture impact one's learning style.
3. Learning styles are neutral, meaning that adapting instruction to a par­tic­u­lar learning style can be successful for some students but can also be a barrier to learning for other students.
4. Learning styles cannot be generalized to apply to an entire group of ­people with a common culture ­because, as much as ­there are common traits within a group, ­there are also numerous differences.
5. There are often cultural conflicts between some students' socialized be­hav­ior at home and the cultural norms imposed on them at school, forcing them to adapt to the classroom norms in order to succeed academically.

Examining the first of ­these five assumptions from the perspective of an academic instruction librarian, instructors can expect that most students ­will be close in age, although ­there may be some outliers. For the second assumption, "nature" can be thought of as a student's innate learning preferences, motivation to learn, and cognitive abilities. "Nurture" closely correlates to the influence that cultural identity and life experiences have on one's learning style and also includes a student's degree of interest in the material. The third assumption speaks to Prof. Lee's concern that if she makes changes to portions of her course to accommodate a certain learning style, students of other learning styles ­will be disadvantaged.

The fourth assumption is arguably the most impor­tant to keep in mind while reading this chapter and thinking about the impact that cultural differences have on how students learn. The studies summarized in this chapter show that some variants in learning styles can be tied to students' cultural backgrounds, but this association is not a generalization for the entire cultural group. For the purpose of considering differentiated instruction as a response to the impact of cultural diversity on learning, keep in mind that de­cades of research involving students at all grade levels, along with observations made by thousands of teachers, provide strong evidence that differences in students' varied cultures can be ­great enough to impact how they learn. The evidence from ­these studies and observations merit an instructor's attention when considering how to best reach all learners.

The final assumption provides the most convincing reason for why differentiated instruction should be considered as a way to address how cultural differences affect some students' learning styles. Students who experience a conflict between their culture and the norms they are expected to adhere to in the classroom are forced to expend effort on acting as two dif­fer­ent people with two dif­fer­ent sets of be­hav­iors in order to perform well academically. This can be mentally and emotionally exhausting for students and harm their chances at academic success. In some cases, meeting the expectation of conforming to the cultural norms of the classroom can cause students stress and anxiety that interfere with their learning if the pro­cess of adopting ­those norms does not come easily.

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The results of ­these studies suggest that learning styles are not in­de­pen­dent of culture. The correlations may not always be strong or definitive, but they are statistically significant and should not be overlooked when considering how to accommodate differences among how students learn. ­Whether it be adopting attitudes about learning imparted by members of their community or assuming expectations about classroom be­hav­ior commonly held by­ people in their nation of origin, ­these outside influences can cause students to modify their learning be­hav­iors from an early age to con- form to norms from one or more aspects of their background. For students who come from a close-­knit ­family where nearly ­every task involves two or more ­people, the idea of working on something entirely in­de­pen­dently feels foreign to them. If learning to cook at home involves practicing a dish over and over again without ever writing down the ­recipe ­because that is how cooking is traditionally learned in their culture, it may be difficult for some students to succeed academically if they are only given written information about what they must learn and never get to actively engage in making sense of it before they take a test.

References

Guild, P. (1994). The culture/learning style connection. Educational Leadership, 51(8), 16–21.

House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W., & Gupta, V. (2004). Culture, leadership, and organ­izations: The GLOBE study of 62 socie­ties. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Packard, J. (2011). The impact of racial diversity in the classroom: Activating the so­cio­log­i­cal imagination. Teaching Sociology, 41(2), 144–58. doi:10.1177/0092055X124517

Wynd, W. R., & Bozman, C. S. (1996). Student learning style: A segmentation strategy for higher education. Journal of Education for Business, 71(4), 232–235. doi:10.1080/08832323.1996.10 116790