Culture plays a crucial role in communication, and even seemingly universal symbols like emoji can have different meanings across cultures. Designing for culture requires understanding shared beliefs, values, and assumptions. Cultural contexts shape behavior and influence education, from book narratives to assessment systems. Recognizing culture's impact is vital for effective design and fostering meaningful changes in education.
In the Five Spaces of Design in Education, we define culture as a pattern of shared basic beliefs, values, and assumptions. It’s a shared system of meanings that shapes our behavior, determines how we perceive the world, and provides cohesion and a sense of identity. This includes the customs, codes of manners, social institutions, norms, and practices of a particular group of people. These groups can be formal, legally defined structures such as nations and organizations or informal groups like chess clubs and families.
Cultures are not innate, but learned and developed through our social environment and interactions, both consciously and unconsciously. They are inherently social and shared. Cultures also vary greatly, and their implicit nature can lead to lapses in communication. Most importantly, cultures are often difficult to see, since they are mostly symbolic in nature. Critical aspects, such as values and beliefs, are implicit and thus hidden.
Designing culture may be the most difficult aspect of thinking about the role of design in society. But it may also be the most important, since it has implications for how the other spaces are understood and instantiated. Artifacts and processes that make sense in one cultural context can have very different meanings in others. It can be argued that culture actually “creates” reality. For instance, consider the idea of “terrible two’s”—a developmental stage marked by inappropriate behavior, out-of-control feelings, and tantrums. As it turns out, cross-cultural research shows that the “terrible two’s” may not exist as a construct in non-Western cultures. It has been suggested that the idea is a product of our cultural expectation that toddlers can and need to follow adults' rules at an early stage of life. Toddlers in other cultures are seen as too young to misbehave intentionally or willfully harm a person or object. That leads to a more “indulgent” parenting style that in the long run encourages more cooperative behavior. So in some sense the very disciplinary strategies that we use to enforce compliance in toddlers lead to the angry defiance, the opposite result.
Unsurprisingly, culture also plays a significant role in education—from defining the role that education plays to how it is conducted. For instance cross-cultural research between individualistic cultures (such as in the USA) versus collectivist cultures (such as Japan) shows that the stories that children are given during early childhood differ greatly. Books given to American children highlight the importance of individualism, self-direction, and achievement. Equivalent books in Japan emphasize collectivism, conformity, and group harmony.
Building on the examples of assessment and evaluation - it is clear that the learning assessments students are given are part of a broader culture of how we think education should be evaluated and how we think learning should be measured. Tests, as part of a culture of meritocracy, play the role of “objective” measures of achievement or performance. Even if some researchers have challenged the objectivity of these measures, culturally, tests are often accepted as “objective.” Thus tests and the resulting scores influence broader cultural conversations about the value of schools and how they can be measured and improved. Nationwide policies, such as No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top enforce (through incentives and policy) certain measures, as do comparative international tests such as the PISA.
Culture also plays an important role in more local educational contexts - such as schools and classrooms. Though culture is often bottom up (meaning it is emergent from individual and systemic interactions) it can be strongly influenced by leadership. Thus the teacher's norms for student engagement and participation can determine the culture of their classroom or learning environment. School leaders can similarly influence the culture of their organization through the thoughtful and intentional design of policies, systems and processes for interaction and engagement of various stakeholders (teachers, parents, community groups and more).