Human Development: Vol.55/5-6 Conceptualizing Cultural and Racialized Process in Learning

Each article in this theme issue offers a unique perspective on the relation between race, culture, and learning. Discussed are theories of framing to argue that current treatments of culture, race, and learning lack attention to the broader social features through which power structures and hierarchies are enacted. The task of conceptualizing the culture and racialized nature of participation in learning settings is reviewed, as are the ways that students are supported or constrained in these cultural learning pathways. Also discussed are the ways that racial storylines inform our collective notions of who can be a student and how racial storylines about academies are enacted and contested in classrooms. The intersections of specific core disciplinary phenomena as they are typically taken up in schooling environments are reviewed, as well as the three types of identities (disciplinary identity, racial identity, and academic identity ), which are viewed as imperative to understanding the interdependence of marginalized students' disciplinary content learning and identity construction. This theme issue is concluded by two commentaries by leading scholars of culture and learning, Mike Cole and Carol Lee.