Enculturation process : what does it mean?

Abstract

Culture has become a household name in research circles mainly due to different interpretations that people come up with. How one defines it is relative to the discipline from which one is reasoning from. My engagement with literature in trying to define culture was limited to what happens in the mathematics classroom. What comes out as the operating definition in this study is that culture evolves. Classroom is about learning. As with culture, there are different interpretations of what it means. In this study my discussions on this issue were limited to those that use constructivism as a referent to learning. However, there are still a lot of debates within constructivism in terms of what it means to learn. My discussions were then confined to what it means to learn from a sociocultural perspective. From this perspective learning is accounted for on social and cultural processes. In contrast from a constructivist perspective the individual’s cognitive processes and the classroom culture are reflexively related. The evolving classroom culture does not exist apart from the teacher’s and students’ attempt to coordinate their individual activities (Cobb and Yackel, 1998). Initially the study was aimed at collaborating with an intermediate mathematics teacher in creating a constructivist classroom learning environment. However, the nature of data I had was such that I developed interest in what constitute enculturation process. I had moved between my classroom experiences and experiences with literature to establish what constitute enculturation process. The following constructs emerged as attributes of what enculturation process for both classroom and mathematics culture entails: language, learning, and negotiation of meaning.