ABSTRACT
Appropriately, this chapter begins where the excellent chapter by Pedro Portes from the first edition of this Handbook, entitled "Ethnicity and Culture in Educational Psychology," leaves off. In his penultimate paragraph, Portes argues:
In this chapter, we will consider teaching and learning to be part of a unitary cultural system. And we focus on how key differences in "learned styles, identities, and relations" are amalgamated into two fundamentally different cultural conceptions of learning and development. One cultural conception is termed individualistic, the other collectivistic or sociocentric. The
specific contrasts that will concern us in the rest of this chapter are presented in Table 29.1. These are portrayed as idealized pathways of learning and development and do not describe any specific person or even all members of a particular ethnic group. Within each group, members can be diverse with regard to socioeconomic status, levels of formal education, and rural or urban backgrounds, affecting their developmental pathway at different times. Nevertheless, childrearing values can persist over several generations even in new contexts (Lambert, Hammers, & Frasure-Smith, 1979).
