Submitted by: Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur
In the field of human learning and development, researchers have begun to attend to culture as more than just a variable in a complicated human equation and really started digging into how culture works, how it is mediated by practices, relationships, language, and meaning, and how it constitutes different lived experiences. Recognizing the central role of culture in human experience has implications for how we teach and learn, our understanding of and expectations for development from infancy through adulthood given different cultural contexts, as well as understanding cultural similarities and differences more generally. Attending to culture is needed now more than ever given rapid globalization and the historical tendency in the field to assume hyper-individualist perspectives on human learning and development.