Enculturation: The Neglected Learning Metaphor In Mathematics Education

Metaphors for learning abound in education. Sfard (1998) suggested a distinction between the acquisition metaphor, in which skills or concepts are learned by students, and the participation metaphor, in which “learning a subject is now conceived of as a process of becoming a member of a certain community ” (p. 6). As she noted, there has been a shift in the pedagogical discourse in recent years from acquisition to participation metaphors. However, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE, 2002) identifies skills, knowledge, and dispositions all as important learning outcomes for educators to address, suggesting that the concerns of an era cannot be reduced to a single metaphor. Consistent with Sfard and with NCATE, in my own work I have identified three key metaphors–learning as habituation, learning as (conceptual) construction, and learning as enculturation–that I see as underlying current pedagogical recommendations and disputes: habituation and construction motivating traditional pedagogy; construction and enculturation motivating reform pedagogy (Kirshner, 2002). These metaphorical notions of learning are variously addressed in learning theories. Behaviorism and some parts of cognitive science (e.g., the ACT theory of John Anderson and his colleagues) explore the conditions and processes through which skills become habituated through repetitiv