ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex relationship between culture and learning. The child-rearing styles of caregivers from diverse cultures, according to the researchers, resulted in different learning styles, or diverse ways of receiving and processing information. The chapter describes a set of attributes that are key to understanding how culture is implicated in learning, and how these notions of culture complicate a facile approach to multicultural education. These characteristics are complementary and interconnected, so much so that it is difficult to disentangle them from one another. The characteristics include culture as dynamic; multifaceted; embedded in context; influenced by social, economic, and political factors; created and socially constructed; learned; and dialectical. The chapter considers how culture and language influence learning by looking at some of the cultural discontinuities between school and home expectations of students from various backgrounds. Shirley Brice Heath's research in a working-class African American community she called "Trackton" is a compelling example of cultural and communication discontinuities.
