ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cornelius N. Grove, Ed.D., is America’s leading practical ethnologist of education. To quickly gain awareness of the nature of his work, explore either (a) the links in the narrow column to the right or (b) his 18 publications available at no charge at Academia.edu.

A definition of the term ethnologist appears at the bottom of this column.

Cornelius completed an M.A.T. degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1964, then served for four years as a high school teacher in White Plains, NY. From there he moved into educational publishing at two houses in New York City. During 1971-73, he and his English wife devoted two years to sojourning in rural Portugal and traveling in Europe and across Africa. He returned to graduate school at Columbia University.

While completing his Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree, Cornelius became fascinated with the non-linguistic cross-cultural factors that undermine children’s ability to learn in classrooms. For his dissertation project, he examined the cultural challenges affecting immigrant Portuguese students in a Massachusetts middle school. After graduating, he became Director of Research for AFS, the international student exchange organization. He also held adjunct teaching posts at New School and Columbia Universities, where he taught a course of his own design, Cross-Cultural Problems in Classroom Communication. During the spring term of 1986, he taught at Beijing Foreign Studies University and joined the University’s vice chancellor in co-authoring Encountering the Chinese.

During 2006, Cornelius delivered a paper on instructional styles across cultures at a conference held in Singapore. Soon thereafter, he adopted as his professional mission this commitment:

To gather together the practically useful findings of global educational researchers (such as anthropologists) and make this knowledge available, in readily understandable language, to teachers, parents, and other citizens concerned by American students’ inadequate learning.

His first book explores the historical reasons for most Americans’ belief that students master academic learning well, or not so well, largely because of their inborn (fixed) intelligence.

The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today

Cornelius’s second and third books are closely related. Together, they reveal the explanation for why students in East Asia master academic subjects more thoroughly, and are able to apply their knowledge more successfully, than American students. His second book investigates East Asian youngsters’ upbringing by their parents at home. His third book discusses how pupils are engaged by their teachers in East Asian kindergartens and primary schools.

The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about RAISING Students Who Excel

A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about TEACHING Students Who Excel

Around the same time, Cornelius authored an entry on “Culturally Responsive Pedagogy” for the Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence (2015). And for the International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (2018), he authored a lengthy entry on “Pedagogy across Cultures”.

After completing A Mirror for Americans, Cornelius took a fresh perspective on children’s learning. He asked this question: How do young children learn in indigenous and traditional societies where schools play little or no role in anyone’s life? This led to his fourth book:

How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children’s Learning

After completing How Other Children Learn, Cornelius returned to the topic that had fascinated him at Columbia University: the non-linguistic cross-cultural factors that undermine children’s classroom learning. He decided he would share with American teachers and corporate trainers practical applications of anthropological research into the varying cultures of classroom learning around the world. He’s now finishing this book, which probably will be published in early 2026:

Misaligned Minds: How Cultural Differences Complicate Teaching. With 76 True Stories of Misaligned Minds from E.C.E. to Ph.D.

Beginning in January 1990 and continuing through December 2020, Cornelius’s day job was as managing partner of GROVEWELL LLC, which delivered executive coaching and cross-cultural services for corporations worldwide.

Cornelius shares his publications not only on Academia.edu but also on ResearchGate.net, where anyone can access several dozen of his publications at no charge. Some concern the ethnology of education while others (written during his 30 years at GROVEWELL) address cross-cultural hurdles in global business relationships. Visit ResearchGate.net.

ETHNOLOGISTS use the research findings of anthropologists to compare parallel features of contrasting societies. As a practical ethnologist of education, Cornelius Grove compares the cultures of learning in contrasting societies, gaining insights into the varying characteristics of knowledge transmission worldwide. He uses those insights to develop actionable suggestions for American educators. Ethnology is based on the Greek words ethnos, nation, and logos, reason or discourse. Don’t confuse ethnology with ethnography, the principal research method of anthropologists, nor with ethology, the study of the behavior of non-human animals.

The material below is being tested for the website of my next book.

Resources Found to Be Especially Insightful and Useful

Below you’ll find Cornelius N. Grove’s reviews of sixteen scholarly resources that he found to be especially insightful and revealing as he was carrying out research for Misaligned Minds and, in some cases, for his earlier books as well. Ten of these resources are books while six are articles in scholarly journals. In the cases of most of the journal articles, also included with Grove’s review is either that article’s abstract or one or two of its opening paragraphs.

In the case of each book, if you are intrigued by Grove’s review and would like to learn more, a link is provided to a webpage where you can learn more. Similarly, in the case of each journal article, if you are intrigued by Grove’s review and would like to learn more, a link is provided to a webpage where you can read the article.

Al-Issa, Ahmad (2005)

When the West teaches the East: Analyzing intercultural conflicts in the classroom

Intercultural Communication Studies, 14 (4), 149–168.

This article is valuable because it’s quite unusual in three ways. First, it’s focused solely on teacher–student relationships within classrooms. Second, Al-Issa’s examples all come from complications that arose in classrooms where American teachers were facing Middle Eastern students, which is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature. Finally, Al-Issa suggests a process whereby teacher and students can collaborate to better understand and attempt to overcome at least some of their mental misalignments.

The many examples in this article – four of which I adapted to become true stories 4.12, 4.15, 7.04, and 7.08 – occurred in real life at the American University of Sharjah, founded in 1997 in the United Arab Emirates. Ever since then, its student body and faculty have been extraordinarily diverse internationally, although American professors and Middle Eastern students predominate.

Early in this article, several pages are devoted to an overview of classroom cultural conflicts in which one party – almost always the teacher – is American, and the other party – almost always a student or student group – is Middle Eastern. Al-Issa states that his purpose is to “show that classroom conflict is caused by differences in cultural patterns” (p. 151), and he does this quite well.

Subsequently, Al-Issa constructs a framework for analysis of classroom cultural conflict, basing it on three assumptions: (1) Teaching and learning are culturally determined activities. (2) Teachers and students should work together as cultural investigators and informants to understand their cultural conflicts. (3) Resolving cultural conflicts begins with knowing one’s own culture, which is easier said than done. This third point is one with which all intercultural professionals have agreed since our field was founded well over a half century ago.

The framework is an action plan for operationalizing the second assumption, that teachers and students should work together to understand and resolve their conflicts. Al-Issa proposes a five-stage process named RELAX, an acronym for these sequential steps:
R – Raise cultural awareness.
E – Examine culturally conflicting incidents.
L – Look at the conflicts to decide what went wrong.
A – After the analysis, decide what to do.
X – X-citement: Develop competence.

As I note in Chapter 11, this process is more challenging than it might seem at first glance. But it can yield useful “ah-ha!” insights for both teacher and students.

If you are intrigued by this overview of the Al-Issa article and would like to learn more, click here.

Chávez, Alicia F., & Susan D. Longerman (2016)

Teaching Across Cultural Strengths: A Guide to Balancing Integrated and Individuated Cultural Frameworks in College Teaching

Stylus Publishing, 208 text pages.

Although it’s explicitly intended for college teachers, much about the ideas that Chávez and Longerbeam offer will be useful for teachers in secondary schools and below. Don’t pass up this book just because you’re not teaching at the college level.

I must state here at the beginning that the authors have a significant blind spot: They demonstrate no awareness of the set of expectations that Asian students bring to U.S. schools. This is curious because large numbers of Chinese and other Asian students have been frequenting major U.S. universities for decades, and because a burgeoning literature focused on East Asian approaches to learning has been amassing since the early 1970s. Unfortunately, some of Chávez and Longerbeam’s suggestions for dealing with culturally-different students will perplex and discourage Asian-origin learners.

But now that I have alerted you to the authors’ blind spot, I hasten to note that their major strength is in relation to students with Hispanic backgrounds – I’m using “Hispanic” inclusively here – who constitute the largest group of non-Northern European students in U.S. schools from K through college. Another notable strength of their book is in relation to Native American students.

Chávez & Longerman posit a broad cultural distinction that then drives their book: between individuated and integrated teaching and learning, similar to distinctions that I apply in Misaligned Minds. Their individuated tendency resonates with my individualistic and learner-focused categories and is derived mainly from Northern European ways of seeing the world. Its counterpart, the integrated tendency, resonates with my communitarian and knowledge-focused categories and is associated largely with worldviews outside of Northern Europe.

Very early in their book, the authors present Table 1.1, Cultural Frameworks in Teaching and Learning Model, which is broken down into eight categories such as Purpose of Learning, Time, and Sequencing. For each category, a brief summary is offered under the individuated and integrated sides of the table. These eight categories then become the major organizing themes of the entire book. Discussion of the two sides of the Purpose of Learning category begins on the very next page.

The emphasis throughout this book is less on helping readers “get” the two sides of the category, more on offering multiple suggestions for integrated lesson approaches that are likely to resonate with the preferences and expectations of students from non-European backgrounds – except Asians. And dozens of quotes throughout the book reveal real-life challenges faced by college students and teachers who are grappling with cross-cultural complications to instruction.

If you are intrigued by this overview of the Chávez & Longerman book and would like to learn more, click here.

Dehlye, Donna, & Margaret LeCompte (1994)

Cultural differences in child development: Navajo adolescents in middle schools

Theory into Practice, 33 (3), 156–66.

This is one of the most informative short articles anywhere exploring the mindset misalignments between U.S. school personnel and the members of a culturally different society, in this case the Navajos. Deyhle & LeCompte attain their insights by examining the contrasting assumptions made by Navajos and Anglos about children aged 9–15 and how they should be raised by their parents. Anglo school personnel apply Anglo assumptions to their interactions with Navajo pupils and expectations of Navajo parents, leading to culture-based complications.

One of the mental misalignments is this: Navajo adults assume that as soon as a young child appears to be comprehending daily events – around age 3 or 4 – their wishes begin to be respected by parents and other adults as much as possible. After just a few more years, that child’s autonomy is virtually unrestricted; he or she enters into an egalitarian relationship with parents and other Navajo adults. The gap between this Navajo assumption and that of Anglos provides the basis for true story 1.06.

Another misalignment is that Navajos assume that, around age 15, children attain sexual and social maturity simultaneously, after which they are accepted as fully fledged adults. In contrast, Anglos assume that the arrival of sexual maturity does not interrupt the long period of subordination and dependence during which adolescents are regarded as persons in need of supervision. This attitude leads Anglo school personnel to view Navajo parents as dangerously “permissive.”

One of the most readily observed Navajo–Anglo differences is how the two societies respond to each girl’s first menses. Among the Navajo, this event prompts a four-day public celebration, a religious and social event central to Navajo culture: Kinaaldá. The contrast with the response of most Anglos to one of their girl’s first menses is stark.

Deylhe & LeCompte quote an Anglo sixth-grade teacher at a middle school attended by both Anglo and Navajo children:

I think that the girls who have had the Kinaaldá and the boys who saw the ceremony are a lot more mature. They are the only ones who don’t giggle and get all silly when we talk about reproduction in biology. They seem to have a grown-up sense about it all (p. 163).

Particularly useful are two tables that contrast Navajo and Anglo differences: Table 1 portrays differences in the role expectations of adults and older children. Table 2 compares differences in the two groups’ goals for middle school children.

If you are intrigued by this overview of the Dehlye & LeCompte article and would like to learn more, click here.

Fox, Helen (1994)

Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing

National Council of Teachers of English, 136 text pages.

With a diverse international English-teaching career as background, Dr. Helen Fox has given us an impressively insightful yet slim book about the contrasting ways in which human beings can reason and write. Listening to the World includes many accounts of foreign students who spoke English as their second language who were facing a crisis in a U.S. university and turned to Fox for assistance. Their problem? The way they were accustomed to sharing their thoughts on paper were found unsuitable by their American professors. Fox’s accounts are the basis for my true stories 1.19, 10.01, 10.05, and 10.11.

Based on her long experience working with these students, Fox illuminates not only American culture’s approach to academic, technical, and expository writing, but that of other cultures as well. Her principal distinction is between a “directly stated, context-light” style aligned with the assumption that valuable knowledge is scientifically discovered, versus an “indirectly stated, context-heavy” style aligned with the assumption that valuable knowledge is received from authoritative ancient and/or divine sources. The first is our American style while the second is that of the “world majority,” a phrase Fox frequently uses to emphasize that we modern Americans are but a tiny slice of the world’s population.

For example, consider the two meanings of “original” among educated people worldwide. For the world majority, an original thought is one whose lineage can be traced back hundreds or thousands of years to an authoritative source. For us Americans, an original thought is a unique one that very recently occurred to an individual. (This distinction is the basis for true story 1.19.) However, we do use the world majority’s meaning in at least one context: when discussing the opinions of “originalist” jurors, whose old, authoritative source is our 1789 Constitution.

Along the way, Fox also discusses instructional styles, contrasting the same two that I discuss at length in Misaligned Minds. The style I call “knowledge-focused” is derived from the assumption that valuable knowledge is received from ancient sources, while the one I call “learner-focused” is derived from the assumption that valuable knowledge is newly discovered. I am delighted that Fox agrees with me (on page 51) that today’s youngsters can be – and are known to have been – taught the skills of modern scientific discovery using a knowledge-focused approach.

Listening to the World also discusses topics such as the much-used term “critical thinking,” the conversational and writing styles of Native Americans and African Americans, and the practice of borrowing the phraseology of others while crafting one’s own writing, a behavior roundly condemned in one cultural tradition and widely admired in the other.

If you are intrigued by this overview of Helen Fox’s book and would like to learn more, click here.

Guthrie, Gerard (2018)

Classroom Change in Developing Countries: From Progressive Cage to Formalistic Frame

Routledge, 244 text pages.

If you’re planning to go abroad to teach at any level in any location in the non-Western world, consider reading Classroom Change in Developing Countries to acquire big-picture deep background for the work you’ll soon be undertaking.

Guthrie has assembled a strong case for understanding the progressive education movement (a) as the soft power cutting edge of Western cultural imperialism in developing nations and (b) as routinely unsuccessful in attaining sustained classroom change in those same developing nations.

Guthrie argues that progressivism is a value-laden worldview regarding how to teach children rather than a hypothesis that its proponents are interested in field testing. Instead, proponents regard progressivism as a desirable and unquestioned professional goal. For example, when progressivism’s advocates test the effectiveness of progressivism, they typically seek to determine whether the reforms they have introduced into a foreign educational system bring about a change in teaching styles. What they should be testing is whether the reforms have improved student learning. When independent assessments of student learning following progressive reforms have been carried out, they almost always find that student learning has not improved. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 review evidence of progressive reform failures in China, Africa, and Papua New Guinea.

Several distinctions are drawn in this book between progressivism on the one hand, and its opposite, “formalism,” on the other. Formalism is another term for what I refer to as knowledge-focused teaching (which Guthrie labels teacher-centered). An especially useful distinction is that formalism is found in societies where valued knowledge is regarded as revealed by a distant source such as ancestors or divinities, and a key societal goal is to transmit that valued knowledge, intact, to the young. Progressivism is found in cultures, mostly Western, where valued knowledge is discovered via scientific methods and a key societal goal is to ensure that the young learn to value enquiry, problem-solving, and creativity.

Progressivism is found in the “Anglo Cultural Cluster” of modern nations in which English is the native language of the population. In 2015, these nations accounted for merely 6.2% of the world’s population. Yet they, and especially the U.S., are responsible for the sustained effort to export progressive methods to the rest of the humanity. Guthrie’s key contention is that progressive reform fails because its view of valued knowledge as scientific contradicts the view of the rest of the world’s population that valued knowledge is revealed by authoritative sources.

I found Guthrie’s book especially useful for exposing as fallacies some of the reasons proponents give for believing that progressive methods are superior. One fallacy holds that enquiry (“discovery”) teaching methods are necessary to develop enquiry skills in younger students. A second claims that formalistic (knowledge-focused) classrooms are inherently authoritarian. A third fallacy holds that, under formalism, individual students are ignored. Each of these fallacies is grounded in ignorance regarding what actually goes on in formalistic (knowledge-focused) classrooms.

What actually goes on in the knowledge-focused lower-grade classrooms of East Asia is the subject of my book, A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel. Find out more by having a look at my essay “Is ‘Whole Class Interactive Learning’ a Contradiction in Terms?” in the ESSAYS section of this website.

If you are intrigued by this overview of Guthrie’s book and would like to learn more, click here.

Hollins, Etta R. (2008)

Culture in School Learning: Revealing the Deep Meaning, 2nd Ed.

Taylor & Francis, 178 text pages.

In her preface, Dr. Etta Hollins announces that her objective is to help classroom teachers develop a “perspective on teaching that embraces the centrality of culture in school learning.” Primarily designed for preservice teachers at the elementary and secondary levels, Culture in School Learning will be equally useful for inservice teachers grappling with immigrant and indigenous students, and for graduate students of education. It sets forth a learning process with six steps:

Objectifying Culture (Chapter 2): “Objectifying culture” refers to the process of depersonalization – i.e., mentally separating oneself from one’s culture so that one can regard it objectively – that enables a dispassionate examination of the ideology supporting accepted behaviors. These ideological foundations aren’t apparent to most students or parents, or even to many educators.
Personalizing Culture (Chapter 3): The purpose of this step is to help each reader develop and internalize a positive racial/ethnic identity via deep introspection, replacing stereotypes with accurate information. Discussed is this process for both people of color and for whites.
Learning about Students’ Cultures (Chapter 4): This chapter is the most valuable one in Hollins’s book. It goes into detail about the processes of data collection, not only from sources in print and on the internet, but also from questionnaires, academic performance data, life histories and biographies, formal and informal interviews, and even participant observation and other procedures involving direct human-to-human contact. (In true stories 4.11 and 4.16, the relations of teachers – one elementary, one university – with their culturally different students changed markedly simply because they learned more about them.) This chapter alone is worth the price of the book!
Reframing the Curriculum (Chapter 5): This chapter explains how to use the information gathered during the previous step to reframe the curriculum for a specific population of students. Discussed are both the existing curriculum and the characteristics of a meaningful curriculum for certain student populations.
Redesigning Instruction (Chapter 6): Drawing on the activities of the previous chapters, this one concerns the identification of learning experiences for various student populations that are more productive than those usually found in schools. The needs of elementary and secondary students are separately addressed.
Formulating Theory (Chapter 7): Hollins explains that the last step is to begin formulating theory that will explain the relationship among culture, cognition, and school learning. The goal is to explain the conditions and practices that generate productive instruction in culturally diverse classroom settings.

NOTE: A third edition of Culture in School Learning was published in 2015.

If you are intrigued by this overview of Etta Hollins’s book and would like to learn more, click here.

Nisbett, Richard E. (2003)

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why.

Free Press, 229 text pages.

Written for a general audience by a leading cognitive psychologist, Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought patiently walks readers through the multiple ways in which our Western habits of thought differ from those of Asians. Equally important, he specifies the misunderstandings and complications this introduces into daily interactions between members of the two cultural groups.

Like others who have explored East–West contrasts in thinking patterns, Nisbett posits that their deep origin lies in the environments and cultures of the ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese. Scholars noticed and wrote about these group patterns as early as the 1880s, when a German sociologist coined the terms Gesellschaft (individualistic) and Gemeinschaft (communitarian). Such terms made it all seem too highfalutin to worry about, but as people from the two world regions began to encounter each other with increasing frequency, awareness of the practical impacts burgeoned. This book, which is illustrated, identifies and explains many of these impacts.

Here’s an example of a stable East–West difference that can be demonstrated via a simple research procedure. A child is given photos or drawings of three things – a chicken, a cow, and a plot of grass – and asked, “Which two of these go together?” Most children in the U.S. say that the chicken and the cow go together, while most children in China say that the cow and the grass go together. The question is why.

American children, and Western children in general, grow up around adults who routinely think of things as belonging to categories based on their properties or characteristics. The chicken and the cow are both animals (they share the property of animalness). Chinese children, and other Eastern children in general, grow up around adults who routinely think of things in terms of relationships. The cow and the grass are related because the cow eats the grass. This habit of thought has been found to apply to adults who are completely fluent in both English and Chinese. When tested in English, they strongly tend to think in terms of categories, linking the cow and the chicken. When tested in Chinese, they strongly tend to think in terms of relationships, linking the cow and the grass.

I have used this example because it’s easy to explain and to understand. As a result, you might be tempted to imagine that differences like this have little day-to-day significance. If so, have a look at Nisbett’s illustrated section on “Teachers and Testing,” beginning on page 210. Among other things, you’ll find laid to rest the assumption that children’s intelligence can be tested in a culture-neutral way.

If in your classroom you are contending with the subtle differences between American and Asian, especially East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), students, then I enthusiastically commend Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought to you.

If you are intrigued by this overview of the Nisbett book and would like to learn more, click here.

Ott, Craig (2021)

Teaching and Learning Across Cultures: A Guide to Theory and Practice

Baker Academic, 298 text pages.

During my writing of Misaligned Minds, I found Craig Ott’s Teaching and Learning Across Cultures to be one of my most useful sources. Several of my true stories came from Ott’s book because it includes numerous examples and case studies drawn from his personal experiences abroad – as a student (of German) and a teacher – and those of other teachers. A second useful feature for me was that this book is thoroughly global in scope.

If you look into purchasing this book, do not be dissuaded by the fact that Ott is an evangelical Christian missionary who wrote Teaching and Learning Across Cultures for the benefit of working missionaries. Most pages make no mention of the book’s evangelizing purpose; passages that are explicit about that connection are easily skipped – or are useful nonetheless. For example, Ott includes many vignettes of cultural complications in classrooms, most drawn from missionary work. But these classroom complications are cultural in nature, not religious.

Following three introductory chapters, the organization of this book is provided by five dimensions of how culture influences teaching and learning. These are:
• The Cognitive Dimension: how learners mentally process information.
• The Worldview Dimension: epistemology, causal attribution, time, etc.
• The Social Dimension: roles and relationships, status and authority, etc.
• The Media Dimension: instructional modes and media, including online.
• The Environmental Dimension: physical, institutional, and political contexts.

My one disappointment with this book concerns Ott’s treatment of “learning styles” in the third introductory chapter. He rightly presents them as a “contested concept,” but it seemed to me that he was trying to avoid saying definitively that the learning style concept has been debunked among objective researchers. (Was he loath to upset some members of his constituency?) The third chapter becomes useful when Ott switches to discussing teaching styles in cross-cultural context.

As the subtitle of this book – A Guide to Theory and Practice – attests, it not only comprises many discussions of theoretical matters such as cognitive styles, epistemology, and teacher–student relationships, it also offers field-derived approaches for teachers to try when encountering students with culturally different expectations about how to go about learning.

If your budget for purchasing books on the practicalities of teaching across cultures is limited, Ott’s 2021 volume definitely is one you should consider.

If you are intrigued by this overview of Ott’s book and would like to learn more, click here.

Pewewardy, Cornel (2002)

Learning styles of American Indian/Alaska Native students: A review of the literature and implications for practice

Journal of American Indian Education, 41 (3), 22–41.

“Indispensable for any discussion of Native Americans!” is what I wrote at the top of my copy of this article. It’s author, Cornel Pewewardy, identifies himself as “Comanche–Kiowa,” so his article brings us a valuable insider’s perspective.

Pewewardy approaches his topic using the rubric “learning styles,” but he’s not using that term to mean genetically inherited styles fixed at birth. Pewewardy’s meaning is that each individual American Indian/Alaska Native student brings to school his or her overall cultural context as a member of one of 500+ tribal groups, speaker of one of 200+ languages, and learner of a variety of spiritual beliefs, kinship patterns, and cultural values. Notwithstanding such differences among individuals, studies of North American tribal groups reveal that their members do share certain constellations of cultural values such as conformity to authority, respect for elders, strong social hierarchy, and an emphasis on learning anchored in the teachings of the elders of one’s tribe. Such values shape how each student perceives and responds to the kind of information dispensed in Western schools.

Considered as “learning styles,” the following topics are discussed one after the other in the body of this thought-provoking article:
• Field-dependence / field-independence [explained in Appendix C]
• Perceptual strengths: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic
• Reflectivity versus impulsivity
• Classroom management and behavior
• Role of the family, tribe, and elders
• Teacher–pupil relationships
• Cooperation versus competition

Pewewardy’s “visual perceptual strength” appears most similar to the type of learning style promoted by proponents of genetic inheritance. Pewewardy, at first, seems to agree: “Findings support the view that American Indian/Alaska Native students are visual learners,” after which he lists 24 citations! (p. 29) But then he points out that these students have grown up learning skills “by observing parents or elders. Children watch, then imitate, their skills. Therefore, many native students appear to perform best in classrooms with an emphasis on visualization, especially in mathematics.” Two comments: First, that’s culturally learned behavior (i.e., not genetically inherited). Second, visualization benefits Anglo students, too!

This article ends with a substantive discussion of “Implications for Educators.” Pewewardy goes into detail re, among other things, that these students learn best when holistic strategies are employed such as storytelling, and that teachers can rather easily harness their culturally learned disposition to be highly cooperative.

If you are intrigued by this overview of the Pewewardy article and would like to learn more, click here.

Reagan, Timothy (2018)

Non-Western Educational Traditions: Local Approaches to Thought and Practice, 4th Ed.

Routledge, 359 text pages.

In this 4th edition of his 1996 book, Timothy Reagan explores the ways in which education – child socialization – has long been thought about and practiced by pre-colonization (indigenous) peoples in nine broadly defined cultural clusters:

Western, roughly conceived as comprising “Plato-to-NATO” [Note]
African, focusing on Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa
Islamic, focusing on Turkey and Saudi Arabia
Confucian and Chinese
Dharmic, focusing on Hinduism and Buddhism
Native American (no one society is singled out)
Mesoamerican, focusing on the Aztecs
The Roma (Gypsies) of Central Europe
Oceania, focusing on Polynesia, Hawai’i, New Zealand, and Australia Hawai’i

Near the end of Non-Western Educational Traditions, Reagan concludes that he found seven common (but not always universal) themes among the eight non-Western educational traditions:

The non-Western traditions do not make the mistake of confusing education (which refers to child socialization) with instruction (formal schooling). In our Western tradition, this has been a relatively recent development.
In the non-Western traditions, education strongly tends to be community-based and grounded in respect for the wisdom of elders. Thus, there has been little focus on identifying educational specialists or professionals.
There is deep concern in every non-Western tradition with what we often refer to as “civic education,” i.e., with helping each child grow into the kind of adult who will function effectively and appropriately in the society.
The family is responsible for each child’s education in every non-Western tradition. Other institutions and non-family members might play roles, but each child’s own family is ultimately responsible for his or her upbringing.
There is strong emphasis on the proper use of language, including knowledge of the society’s spoken traditions and the ability to use language creatively to reason and argue in the manner set by the society’s cultural traditions.
Most of the traditions include considerable sensitivity to the environments in which the people live, including how to coexist in the natural world in a manner in which sustainability across many generations can be maintained.
All the traditions include grounding in values, morality, and spirituality, so that the principal goal of education is the development of a Good Person.

NOTE: “Plato-to-NATO” is cute and memorable, but it is a misleading substitute for “Western” because it ignores societies that most people agree are largely Western such as Australia and New Zealand. Among Reagan’s cultural clusters, those two are included under the “Oceana” rubric.

If you are intrigued by this overview of the Reagan book and would like to learn more, click here.

Reese, William (2001)

The origins of progressive education.

History of Education Quarterly, 41 (1), 1–24.

As the 20th century dawned, a new way of thinking about the nature of the child, the purposes of schooling, and the best methods of classroom teaching was beginning to dominate public discussions about education. The new thinking was called “progressive education.” Its most debated feature, “child-centered” instruction, was driven by growing dissatisfaction with “teacher-centered” classroom organization, also known as “formalism.” Progressive education is arguably the central pedagogical issue of the 20th century. Even today, it’s an issue that’s far from settled, in part because American educators have been indefatigable in exporting it into the far reaches of the world (about which see my review of Guthrie on this webpage). Scholars do their best to debate progressivism in dispassionate terms but among parents, teachers, and concerned citizens on both sides of the issue, passions often become aroused.

Anyone who steps back from the impassioned debates to gain an understanding about what progressive education actually is will be confronted by a veritable mountain of scholarly literature, beginning with the seminal 1964 study by Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957. John Dewey is the scholar most associated in the public mind with progressive education, notwithstanding the fact that he publicly criticized it on several occasions. (He once called letting pupils do as they please “really stupid!”). With literally hundreds of resources about the nature, the pros, and the cons of progressive education available, the question becomes where to begin?

My recommendation is to begin by exploring the history of how progressive education sprang into being and gradually rose into prominence. But here again the number of available sources, both journal articles and scholarly books, is huge. My solution? Begin with William Reese’s 2001 journal article, “The origins of progressive education.” By journal-article standards, it is long, but it’s far shorter than any book on the subject. It’s thoroughly researched and fortified by lengthy footnotes – yes, footnotes – in which all of the leading books and journal articles available in 2001 are cited. Throughout, Reese remains an enquiring historian; I’ve never been able to figure out which side of the debate he favors.

If you are intrigued by this overview of the Reese article and would like to learn more, click here.

Ripley, Amanda (2013)

The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got that Way.

Simon & Schuster, 199 text pages.

Smartest Kids builds on the experiences of three American exchange students who spent a year living with a local family in another nation, and attending the local high school, under the auspices of AFS (American Field Service). These students were chosen as subjects by Amanda Ripley because each of their host nations – Korea, Finland, and Poland – is a democracy with world-class scores on the international comparative test, PISA (Program for International Student Assessment).

This book received major media attention after publication. It’s well deserved. Accessibly written, Smartest Kids has a “Notes” section demonstrating that Ripley – a journalist, not a scholar – put thoughtful effort into her research, which she carried out by interviewing informants from teenagers to government ministers, observing in classrooms abroad, and poring over research literature.

In their respective host schools, the students encounter contrasts with their schools back in the U.S., notably that their classrooms abroad seem old-fashioned, having few, if any, digital enhancements; and that their peers put far more effort into studying than American students do. (Ripley concurs with other observers that the Koreans’ study ethic is excessive.) The students’ personal stories become interwoven with Ripley’s observations regarding the many non-linguistic contrasts that distinguish high schools in those three nations from high school in the United States.

Two features of Smartest Kids proved memorable for me. The first is that Ripley devotes Chapter 1 to her revealing interview with Andreas Schleicher, PISA’s principal manager. He claimed that PISA is unlike any other academic test that Ripley had ever taken. To see for herself if that was true, Ripley arranged to take a PISA test under realistic conditions. Read her conclusions in Misaligned Minds in the Chapter 8 section entitled “Memorization and Understanding.”

The other memorable feature is a pair of summary statements that Ripley makes about education abroad. The first appears in the text (p. 191): “High school in Finland, Korea, and Poland had a purpose, just like high-school football practice in America.” The other, very unfortunately, is hidden deep within her endnotes (p. 277, note 116): “Going [to school in Finland and Korea] was like watching a professional soccer game when you’d been playing junior varsity all your life. It was the same game, but everything seemed more fluid, less random. Pervasive rigor had raised these systems to another level.”

If you are intrigued by this overview of Ripley’s book and would like to learn more, click here.

Spencer, Herbert (1860)

Education: Intellectual, Moral, Physical

University Press of the Pacific (reprinted in 2002), 230 text pages.

Countless factors combined over three centuries to give Americans the child-centered approach to teaching children we have today. I believe that one factor was more influential than any other: the views of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), an English scientist and philosopher. These views are concisely stated in his short book, Education . It was a huge best-seller in the U.S., read by citizens as well as educators involved in crafting our nascent system of state-supported “common schools.” Spencer’s views were amplified during his many lecture tours across the U.S. (a popular form of entertainment in those days).

Applying a biological model to human mental development, Education holds that each child’s mind, like its physiological body, has an inborn disposition to reach a pre-determined form, and will do so in its own good time. No one – child, parents, teachers – can hasten the process. (This could be the origin of today’s beliefs about learning “readiness.”)

Spencer’s legions of followers learned that each person’s energy exists in finite, fixed quantity. A child is active physically and is growing physiologically, thus has very little energy left for mental exertion. The physical, emotional, and social consequences of mental overstrain are dreadful – especially for girls, who are likely to grow up flat-chested. So parents and teachers must be extremely gentle in what they expect children to accomplish academically.

Spencer lauds “the enormous value of that spontaneous education which goes on” as each youngster explores “the household, the streets, and the fields.” He contrasts this wonderful natural process with activities in schools, where “second-hand facts” in books are “thrust” on children. His prescription for educational transformation is for parents and teachers to constantly ensure that the correct new experiences, in the correct order, be placed before each child. The metaphor he used was that parents and teachers were children’s “domestic servants.” [Note]

Education details seven pedagogical principles governing what children should be doing in classrooms. The seventh principle urges teachers to ask themselves whether what they’re doing “creates a pleasurable excitement in the pupils.” Pupils’ immediate happiness is the “test by which we may judge whether the dictates” of his other six principles are being observed by a teacher. (This could be the origin of today’s preoccupations with “engagement.”)

Imagine yourself as an educated parent or a conscientious teacher between 1865 and 1900. If you came upon this information in a book by the celebrated scientist Herbert Spencer or during one of his many public lectures, what would you think and do? After all, this wasn’t merely thought-provoking philosophizing. This was a call to action on behalf of the children for whose successful development you were personally responsible.

NOTE: In Education, Spencer did not specify any of the correct experiences. He believed that the new science of psychology would soon begin specifying these details to dedicated parental and pedagogical “domestic servants.”

If you are intrigued by this overview of Spencer’s book and would like to learn more, click here.

Webb, Nathan G., & Laura Obrycki Barrett (2014)

Instructor–Student Rapport in Taiwan ESL classrooms.

Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 2 (2), 9–23.

Don’t pass this article by just because you see it’s about classrooms in Taiwan. If you’re interested in gaining more insight into teacher immediacy, this article is a good place to start. It’s practically useful, not very long, and not very researchy.

But it is a research report. The study was carried out at the Taipei ESL Center (TEC), a private, evening school that puts together Taiwanese students at all K–12 levels with teachers who are native speakers of English. For this study, small classes of secondary school students were observed with one of eleven TEC teachers, of whom eight were American, two were Canadian, and one was English. Interviews with each of the teachers also were carried out.

The research question that this study addressed was, “What teacher behaviors in the classroom do ESL instructors perceive to build rapport with their students?” As I suggested in Chapter 11, teacher immediacy refers to types of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that very often lead to the development of teacher–student rapport.

The especially useful feature of this article is that Webb & Barrett were able to identify eight instructor behaviors that helped build teacher–student rapport. Listed in order of their positive impact on rapport, higher to lower, these behaviors are:
• Information-sharing behaviors
• Uncommonly attentive behaviors
• Connecting behaviors
• Courteous behaviors
• Common grounding
• Balancing connection and authority
• Adapting rapport to student level
• Providing respite to norms

Each of the eight is explained and insightful quotes are provided from the interviews carried out with the eleven instructors. In my view, the most interesting of the eight behaviors is “balancing connection and authority.” During the interviews, several instructors spoke of the fine line they must walk with their students. For although they wanted to build a sense of personal connection, they realized that they simultaneously needed to establish themselves as an authority figure. Getting that balance right, say the authors, might be a key to effective rapport-building in an intercultural classroom.

If you are intrigued by this overview of the Webb & Barrett article and would like to learn more, click here.

Winner, Ellen (1989)

How can Chinese children draw so well?

Journal of Aesthetic Education, 23 (1), 65-84; includes photos of children’s art.

“Chinese children do not draw childish drawings,” is the opening line of this revealing journal article. Our meaning of “childish” is gauged by our experiences here in the U.S. The experience of Chinese people with children and their drawings is stunningly different. By the way, we’re talking about ordinary children, not merely those who are artistically gifted.

This article is important because, in the context of art instruction in the lower grades, it reveals the vast gap between the American and Chinese assumptions that underlie how adults guide children to adulthood.

The unspoken assumption in East Asia is that what exists outside oneself – i.e., social situations, relationships, events, others’ needs, etc. – is more worthy of attention than what exists inside oneself – i.e., own aptitudes, ideas, feelings, needs, preferences, style, etc. Among us Americans, the reverse is true: We assume that what’s inside us is more worthy of attention.

Winner doesn’t make her point exactly that way (it’s my analysis), but she does provide examples of the East Asian assumption being played out in art classrooms there. It comes down to this: In the U.S., children’s art lessons are facilitation ; in East Asia art lessons are training.

By “training” I mean that children are deliberately molded through demonstrations, the tracing of models, repeated practice, and focused guidance – including hands-on guidance – to become able to execute a wide range of previously developed “schemas” for producing drawings, paintings, etc.

The architype for East Asian art classes is calligraphy instruction. Explains Winner:

[First graders] learn how to sit, how to hold the brush for the different kinds of strokes, how to prepare the ink, and how to mix the ink with water to achieve precisely the right tone… In a fourth grade class, each child had a textbook containing rows of Chinese characters. Under each character was drawn the same character, but this time only with thin lines. Students filled out the lines in the lower characters so that the brush strokes were of the appropriate thickness and tone. (p. 47)

There are many similarities between how calligraphy is taught and how art is taught. She writes that “it is clear to everybody that there are right and wrong ways to draw… The notions of art as process, as visual problem-solving, or as innovation are conspicuously absent” (p. 49). Art is a traditional craft, and the goal for Chinese children is to master it. There’s no need for “visual thinking.” All visual problems have been solved by the old masters; children are trained to apply the old masters’ solutions.

Winner comes up with an analogy that strikes me as highly insightful (p. 59):

In China, the act of painting is like performing a piece of music written by someone else. Although artists may ultimately put their personal stamp on what they paint, this is analogous to putting one’s own interpretation into a piece of music that one performs, rather than composing one’s own piece.

Here’s a final quote from Winner’s valuable exploration of Chinese art education (p. 57):

Westerners commonly believe that artists paint to express themselves and to work out their feelings. It is not unusual in the West to see children making drawings of things that have high affective content – a visit to the doctor, the death of a pet, and the like. I did not find art put to such uses in China. I never saw pictures that had a personal voice. When I asked children if they ever felt the desire to draw something that had just happened to them, they looked at me blankly and said no. What they draw are schemas that they have learned in school.

If you are intrigued by this overview of the Winner article and would like to learn more, click here.

Wolcott, Harry (1967/2003)

A Kwakiutl Village and School, Updated Edition.

Rowman & Littlefield, 131 text pages.

Among the hundreds of accounts I’ve read during my career dealing with cross-cultural encounters in classrooms, this one ranks near the top in terms of the depth and the breadth of the mindset misalignments separating teacher and students. It has the added advantages of being entirely readable and of modest length.

Harry Wolcott was a young Anglo college graduate who would eventually become a leading anthropologist of education. He began his professional life by teaching indigenous children in a one-room school in “Blackfish Village,” which consisted of 13 occupied houses situated on a tiny island between the mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. He sums up the educational situation there as one “in which two educational systems – one essentially informal, indigenous, and present-oriented; the other essentially formal, external, and future-oriented – confront the children” (p. xi). Did his students, ages 6–16, yearn for Western education so that they could escape their marginal, remote existence and assimilate into mainstream society? They did not. They tolerated Western schooling because they were obliged to do so. Wolcott portrays their attitude as being similar to traveling on someone else’s boat: One gets on, sits patiently during the long ride, and eventually gets off. Their destination? Age 16. What accounts for this attitude? They knew what had become of older youth who had tried to escape their world.

True story 7.18 provides only one example of the challenges Wolcott faced in the classroom. And unlike you and me, when his day in the classroom was over, he could not retreat to his other, real life far away from school, for the teacher’s residence was right next door. No other Westerner, let alone a teaching colleague with whom he could have shared his problems, was within reach. “Since villagers rarely engage in any activity alone,” he writes, “they apparently assumed I was lonely, so I had as many as twenty adults and children visiting of an evening” (p. 6). The saving grace was that virtually everyone could speak some English.

This Updated Edition of Wolcott’s widely admired 1967 book has the added advantage of including the author’s reconceptualization of his former self’s arduous months in Blackfish Village: “In cases where indigenous minorities see themselves as overrun, dislocated, or threatened with involuntary assimilation, resistance to ‘the system,’ or to the teacher as its spokesperson, may become entrenched student strategy, a posture readily adopted as appropriate behavior within one’s group, especially among its youngest antagonists” (p. 144).

If you are intrigued by this overview of Wolcott’s book and would like to learn more, click here.

A second source of Grove’s literature reviews:
By far the greatest number of documented mindset misalignments and resulting cultural complications in a specific educational context come from interactions between Westerners and East Asians, which has been the focus of literally hundreds of research efforts since the early 1970s. If you’re interested in increasing your acquaintance with this collection of scholarly literature, you will find my reviews of 118 books and journal articles a good place to begin. These are freely available on the Annotated Bibliography page of the website for my 2020 book, A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel. Click here to be taken there directly.

Selected Essays by Cornelius N. Grove

Below you’ll find brief reviews of ten essays in the field of ethnology of education written by Cornelius N. Grove. If the review of any essay interests you, you need only to clink on the link provided to retrieve it in PDF format.

You may share and print any of these essays, and you may quote them because no copyright is claimed. Dr. Grove asks only that you cite the essay in the standard manner, identifying its source as misalignedminds.info/Essays/. Thank you.

Why Study the Culture of Schooling in Different Nations?

Since around 1970, research has compared the culture of schooling in the West (especially the U.S.) with that of East Asia. Described in this article are the nature of such research and four impactful societal differences that have emerged from the findings: (a) assumptions and beliefs about children’s capabilities; (b) beliefs about, and attitudes toward, academic learning; (c) basic objectives for children’s learning; and (d) sources of motivations for children to learn. Five pages in length, suggested readings, endnotes.

This essay combines excerpts from Grove’s entry, “Pedagogy across Cultures,” in The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (2017). For more information, visit Wiley’s webpage describing that encyclopedia.