Studying Cultural Practices in Urban Learning Communities

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Abstract
Educational practices are constituted through the junction of cultural artifacts, beliefs, values, and normative routines known as activity systems. Classroom activity is a particularly important nexus for understanding cultural processes in that thinking and doing are linked in social practice. An activity-based, problem-oriented approach to understand development in school contexts focuses analysis on the cultural practices of learning environments. Studying classrooms and other learning contexts as cultural activity reveals how different microcultures for teaching and learning emerge, and it links forms of participation to the kinds of cognitive forms individuals construct to accomplish cognitive and social functions. Ongoing studies of the literacy practices of formal and nonformal learning environments serve as the context for examining culture in educational activity.