Curricular Complexity:
Recognizing the sociocultural
contexts of learning
Lisa R. Lattuca
Center for the Study of Higher Education
Penn State University
July 8, 2004
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July
2004
The CHEPS theme of
innovation and governance:
Higher education institutions play a crucial role in
the knowledge society and economy.
 What changes are needed to strengthen this role?
Themes from Day 1
 “Productive destruction”
 What shall we keep? What shall we replace?
 Innovation is cultural and social, as well as technical
 Teaching as technical core – and cultural practice
 From innovators to conditions for innovation
 Need for conversation between macro and micro levels
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Themes from Day 2
 Sedimented structures and patterns in institutional
practices
 Challenge is to cognitively and institutionally recombine
Themes from Day 3
 Shifts in discourses on higher education (learning)
 Recent transformations represent change in social contract
between society and higher education
 Curriculum is a story about who we are – and is this
even more necessary in a shifting global context?
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Situating myself…
The Academic Plan, Stark & Lattuca, 1997
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
In the spirit of productive destruction…
What should
be salvaged
and what
should not?
The Academic Plan, Stark & Lattuca, 1997
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Advantages
1. Promotes clarity – identifies potential
influences, constraints, affordances
2. Applicable at course, program, institution-level
3. Provides a heuristic for curricular planning and
research – elements of a plan and variables for
investigation
4. Encourages attention to student learning
5. Suggests a dynamic curriculum development
process – evaluation and adjustment process
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Some tensions to resolve…
Real versus ideal conceptualizations:
“A plan for any endeavor incorporates a
total blueprint for action, including
purposes, activities, and ways of
measuring success. A plan implies both
intentions and rational choices among
alternatives to achieve the intentions.”
(Stark & Lattuca, 1997, p. 9)
Critique: a rationalist perspective
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
A possible revision…
 … any academic plan consists of choices made
about seven elements: purposes, content,
sequence, learners, instructional processes,
resources, and assessment/evaluation.
 In developing or revising a course or program,
we make choices about these seven elements
– sometimes intentionally, sometimes rationally,
and sometimes unintentionally and irrationally.
(for the revision of Lattuca & Stark, 2006?)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Advantage #4 revisited…
Encourages explicit attention to student learning.
 Inclusion of students as element in academic
plan promotes thinking about how new
curricular approaches and attention to student
goals build on recent psychological
understandings of how learners reconstruct
their knowledge by meshing new information
with old.
(Stark & Lattuca, 1997, p. 14)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
 Psychological perspectives on learning are
useful but incomplete
 Interdisciplinary perspectives (including those of
anthropology, cultural psychology,
neuroscience, etc.) needed to further refine
models of learning
WHY? Because social contexts shape
learners and learning.
What are the implications of this statement
for the academic plan concept and for
curricular practices in higher education?
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Advantage #5 revisited…
 “Encourages a dynamic view of curriculum
development. The assumption of a built-in
adjustment mechanism encourages iterative
change by making it an expected part of regular
practice…Unlike the static definition of a
curriculum as a set of courses, a plan implied
vigorous strategic adjustment as conditions
change because the process of creating a plan
can also be examined and influenced.”
(Stark & Lattuca, 1997, p. 14)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
…we have considered curriculum…only in its
noun form (a racecourse to be traversed), and
not in its infinitive verb form (currere—to run,
especially the course). In the latter, the
emphasis is on the activity of running or,
metaphorically, on the activity of our making
meaning from the course… This currere view
makes mind “a verb” (to use Dewey’s phrase:
an active, meaning-seeking and meaningmaking verb).
(Doll, 1993, p. 278)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
 How would a revised model of
curriculum portray
 Fully contextualized understanding of
learning
 The idea that adjustments can be made as
the course is being run – as well as after it
is completed
 The curricular goal of meaning-making
 Mind as verb
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
So what’s wrong with this picture?
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Sociocultural
contexts
Organizational Influences
•Program relationships
•Resources
•Leadership
•Governance
Sociocultural/historical context
Internal
Influences
•Faculty
•Discipline
•Students
•Peers
•Program mission
•Leadership
National context
 Government
 Marketplace
 Society
 Disciplinary
associations
University
College
Program/Department
Academic Plan
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Discipline
Further reconceptualization…
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Learner in context?
Educational Context
If students
uniquely
experience a
curriculum,
where do
“outcomes” go?
Purpose
Content
Resources
Instructional
Processes
Learners
Academic
Plan
Sequence
Materials
Evaluation
Outcomes
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
A new question arises…
Educational Context
Purpose
Content
Academic
Plan
Sequence
Resources
Instructional
Processes
Learners
Materials
Evaluation
Outcomes
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
If learner and
learning are
inseparable –
what are the
implications for
quality
assurance and
accountability?
Where we’re going now…
 An overview of learning theories
 Contribution of social learning theories
 Should learning theory inform curriculum
theory?
 What does it mean for policy and practice?
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
What’s “learning”?
 Until 1950s, psychologists commonly defined
learning as a change in behavior
 Mind is subjective, not observable…
 But behavior can be measured
Notion of change (or potential for change) still
underlies many definitions of learning
•Piaget – assimilation and accommodation
•Dewey – solving problems
•Vygotsky – zone of proximal development
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Behaviorist perspectives
 Learning is a process of forming connections
between stimuli and responses
 Environment shapes/controls behavior
 contingencies of reinforcement
 operant conditioning (rewards)
 Drives -- hunger, rewards, fear -- motivate learning
 Behavior that is not reinforced becomes less
frequent and may disappear
But what about “understanding”?
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Woods (1987) found that in a four-year
engineering program, students observed
professors working more than 1,000 problems.
The students themselves solved more than
3,000 homework problems and worked
problems on the board. “Yet despite all this
activity, they showed negligible improvements
in problem-solving skills…what they did acquire
was a set of memorized procedures for about
3,000 problem situations that they could, with
varying degrees of success, recall.”
(Bransford, 2000, p. 59)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Instruction
in the behaviorist model
 Increase frequency of correct answers and
minimize errors
 Drills and rewards prominent
 Self-paced instruction
 clear, specifiable outcomes (objectives)
 easy to achieve steps
 that in sequence complete a behavior
 Criterion referencing: a clear standard for
performance rather than norm referencing
 Immediate feedback as to the correctness of a
response
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Cognitive perspectives
Reaction to behaviorist perspectives on learning
 The human mind is not passive exchange
system where stimuli arrive and appropriate
responses leave (Grippin & Peters, 1984)
 Humans actively interpret sensations,
manipulate things and ideas, make intellectual
connections – and thereby give meaning to
phenomena
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Contributions: Piaget
Locus of control is individual learner
 Internal cognitive structures change as
individuals mature and interact with
environments
 Stages of development shape learning
and what can be learned
 Child actively explores the environment,
assembles, organizes material – that is,
constructs understanding, in solitary play
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Contributions:
Information processing theories
 Focus on mental associations – inferred from behavior
 Environment important, but learner also considered
 Prior knowledge, schemata
 Early theories focus on restructuring of memory
 Good instruction presents and organizes information
in way that maximizes memory
 Response from learner - is info correctly stored?
 Use of key points, meaningful associations to connect
new and old information
 Encouraged active learning – check individual
understanding, correct errors before they are stored
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Contributions: Metacognition
 Learning process becomes the
responsibility of the learner
 Instructors no longer direct learning
process
 Instructor supports metacognition (and
uses some direct teaching strategies)
 Learner-centered models of instruction
 Constructivist theories, self-regulation,
motivation important
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Critiques
 Cognitive theories portray the learner as
“the lone investigator”
 Theories don’t reflect on learners as
members of social groups
 Nor on how learners interact using the
medium of language
 Take prior knowledge and individual
differences into account, but learner may
still be passive
 Metacognitive theories are an
improvement, but focus largely on
individual processing
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
In contrast…in context
 Lev Vygotsky:
 Less interested in what children can do alone
than what they can do with aid from others
 Proper challenges or stimulation might enable
further learning–ability to profit from assistance
 Learning process is similar in child & adult
 John Dewey:
 Individuals grow up in social environments that
have accepted meanings and values; they learn
these values and these values, in turn affect
learning what and how they learn
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Prospective
assessment of development
Zone of
Proximal
Development
Actual
Development
Individual
problem-solving
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Potential
Development
(problem-solving
with guidance)
Constructivist perspectives
Individual
constructivists
Capacity to think and learn is an
adaptive feature
Enabling the individual to deal
fruitfully with the environment
Learners actively explore and
construct understandings of the
world through their activities
Learning is a practical activity that
occurs when people interact with
their environments
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Social
constructivists
Social learning perspectives
(situative perspectives)
 Focus on social settings in which learning occurs
 Learning occurs through observation of others in
immediate environment and
 Learning is a function of interaction of person-and
or person-in environment
 Not individual cognition (alone)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Varieties of constructivism
Individual Perspective
Social Perspective
 Learning is an
individual (internal)
activity
 Individuals make
meaning based on
previous and current
knowledge structures
 Emphasizes
individual’s acquisition
of knowledge and
cognitive skills
 Learning is social
(cultural) activity
 Meaning-making is a
dialogic process of
social interaction
 Learning is collective,
participatory process
 Emphasizes context,
interaction, and
situatedness
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Foregrounding aspects of learning
 Behaviorist perspective emphasizes activity
 Growth = skill development
 Cognitive perspective stresses information
 Symbols, meaning, problem solving and reasoning
 Growth = greater conceptual understanding
 Situative perspectives emphasize
 Participation in practices of inquiry, discourse, and
sense-making of a community
 Development of identities as thinkers and learners
 Growth = more effective participation in practices
(Greeno et al, 1997, 1998)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
A rapprochement?
 Each perspectives contributes something to
our understanding of educational practices
 The situative perspective can subsume
cognitive and behaviorist perspective by
including skill acquisition and conceptual
understanding as aspects of students’
participation and their identities as learners
and as knowers.
(Greeno et al., 1998)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Situative perspectives
 What looks like individual learning is rarely truly
individual
 Much of what we learn we learn from others
 through observation and imitation afforded
by participation in social settings
 through dialogue about shared problems or
tasks
 through use of cultural tools invented by
human societies
 Language, signs, numbers, logic, etc.
(Salomon and Perkins)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Social aspects of learning
 If learning cannot be understood solely in
terms of cognitive processes occurring in
individual heads, then…
 We must attend to
 interactions among individuals
 interactions among individuals & situations
 and their impact of learning
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Social mediation of learning
 Zone of proximal development (Vygotsky)
 Social processes, such as instruction, may raise
cognitive performance to levels that could not be
reached by the individual alone
 Scaffolding (Scardamalia, Brown, Palincsar)
 Active guidance, modeling, encouragement, mirroring,
and feedback aid learning
 Theories of intellectual development (Perry, Magolda, etc.)
 Instructional activities can move students from lower to
higher levels of intellectual/epistemological development
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Participatory
knowledge construction
 Knowledge is jointly constructed in
communities of practice
 Interaction is vehicle for thought; learning
products distributed over social (learning)
system
 Goal of instruction: social knowledge
construction and distribution of knowledge,
skills and understanding around a
particular activity (apprenticeship)
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Cultural artifacts
 Social mediation by cultural artifacts
 Books, languages, statistics, computers, etc.
are culturally and historically situated tools
 These shape learning in powerful ways
 Can’t separate the individual from the
context in which he learns – sociohistorical
time and place shape learners and learning
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Agency
 Learning is culturally and socially situated.
 What we learn is influenced by time (history)
and place (context)
 Instructional practices influence what and how
we learn (or don’t)
 but we can learn to learn better
 Cultural tools influence how and what we learn
 but we can adapt tools for our own purposes
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Some questions…
 Do current educational practices
acknowledge the social contexts of
learning?
 Individual cultural & social background
 Prior knowledge (misconceptions) – what
students bring to the table
 Social nature of learning
 Impact of context on what is learned by
whom
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Do our curricula look like this?
Educational Context
Purpose
Content
Sequence
Resources
Internal
influences
Academic Plan
External
influences
Materials
Instructional
Process
Evaluation
Learners
Outcomes
Organizational
influences
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
 What are the implications of a situated
(or sociocultural) understanding of
learning on curriculum?
 Revisit Barnett’s question – what is the
right analytical level for a model of
curriculum and curriculum change?
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
National or system level:
 What higher education policies encourage
achievement of desired educational outcomes?
 What social needs do we wish to serve – since
those will determine the outcomes that must drive
curricular choices?
 How will we know if we’ve achieved our goals?
What can we assess and how shall we assess it?
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Institution and program level
 How do we create learning environments that
produce the desired outcomes?
 Access policies
 Faculty rewards
 Instructional development
 Flexible programs (entry points and
standards)
 Formative assessment of students and
programs
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Course level:
 Can we ensure that all students learn?
 What would facilitate learning? R
 remediation, academic skills training, advising?
 What kinds of feedback should students receive
as they are learning? What do we do to
improve “learning in progress”?
 What pedagogical strategies do we use to
promote learning? Do our pedagogies promote
learning?
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Final thoughts…
Curricula are complex animals –
 more than a set of courses or a program
 a “living” – and somewhat unpredictable
thing – enlivened students and faculty
 embedded in social, cultural, political,
and economic contexts that can shape
what is learned
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004
Finally, the normative view…
Every curriculum reflects a set of values
 sometimes curricula don’t communicate what
we truly value
 rather they reflect choices and decisions
made out of habit, lack of attention,
convenience, or compromise
What we truly value – learning, ideas,
ways of inquiry – should drive, and should
be reflected in, our curricula.
Lattuca - CHEPS Summer School July 2004