Culture-Rooted Expertise Research Paper

(a) Many forms of expertise occur through participation in practice, in other words, under socio- cultural constraints.

(b) Some forms of expertise are culturally valued; thus, practice for them is culturally organized.

(c) Consequences of expertise are sociocultural as well as cognitive: experts share particular evaluative criteria for assessing performances in their domain of expertise; their acquired knowledge and skills have a sociocultural origin; and an increase in cognitive competence is often accompanied by a fuller participation in the community of practitioners.

These culture-rooted aspects of expertise will follow and be elaborated on, and their implications for schooling and instruction will be discussed.

1. The Acquisition Of Expertise Occurs Through Culturally Organized Practices Or Under Sociocultural Constraints

In many domains of expertise, knowledge and skills are acquired through participating in culturally organized practices that are interesting and/or significant to the participants (Goodnow et al. 1995). Such cultural practices can be characterized as a set of sociocultural constraints that help participants produce culturally valued products and performances. There are a number of built-in factors and conditions that serve to control and direct a participant’s attention or that serve to eliminate in advance a large number of logically possible procedures and interpretations. Al-though such constraints are to support participants’ performance, rather than to contribute to their acquisition of expertise, repeated participation enhances the skills and knowledge needed to perform well in these practices.

External sociocultural constraints include (a) other people with considerable prior experience and (b) physical, symbolic, and social tools. When interacting with other people, human cognition and learning are constrained in that what they observe is not randomly selected out of almost infinite pieces of information, but is directed by joint attention to specific items. What they try to do is not a randomly chosen chain of responses from their repertory, but is often triggered by imitation, and how they interpret a set of observations is influenced by guided comprehension activity. Thus, people tend to be more competent when they collaborate than when they work alone. There-fore, when the mastery of skills requires a lot of experience, the opportunity to gain such experience is often provided through apprenticeship. Novices or newcomers are able to participate in practices as apprentices, with little or no pretraining, because they are initially assigned to relatively simple and peripheral parts of the practice, and come to fulfill gradually increasingly difficult and central roles as they gain better skills and an understanding of the total practice. For example, Lave (1988) reported that apprentice tailors in Liberia are given such jobs as fixing buttons, which are simple and repairable tasks, but constitute authentic and essential parts of dress-making. To generalize, when the master can manage to maintain a balance between the goals of increasing productivity and (the apprentice’s) learning, and when the apprentices are committed to enhancing their skills, this learning arrangement can be effective and enjoyable.

Tools or shared artifacts also serve to direct the user’s attention and narrow the range of procedures and interpretations they consider. For example, a pedometer draws the user’s attention to how far they have walked. A vending machine helps the user find how to convey their request for an item and pay for it, because the machine does not respond to operations performed out of their proper sequence. A set of tools can function as enabling constraints to help participants to perform a task successfully, and also to acquire knowledge and skills. For example, it is often much easier to actually perform steps in cooking than to state the steps verbally or to comprehend them, because human actions are highly restricted by the shared artifacts that are available (e.g., utensils and appliances).

That novices become experts by incorporating culture may be a misleading phrase, because what really occurs is the individual (re)construction of knowledge and skills under sociocultural constraints, with the resultant cognitive products being analogous to the knowledge and skills found in the culture. The emphasis on culture is compatible with the notion of the human construction of knowledge and the internal (cognitive) constraints imposed on it.

2. Some Kinds Of Expertise Are Culturally Valued

Most domains for expertise are apparently optional in technologically advanced societies; that is, individuals are allowed to choose the domains in which they pursue expertise. However, this does not mean that all domains are equally respected and valued in each culture. On the contrary, each culture contains a wide variety of ‘cognitive values’ (Goodnow 1990), which differentiate domains of expertise in terms of their significance. Some areas of knowledge, for example, are described as ‘basic’ while others are described as ‘extra.’ For the former type, people growing up in the culture have almost no choice than to seek mastery in them. National sports constitute a good example of such, almost obligatory, domains of expertise. Many Fijian children are interested in playing rugby, primarily because their culture denotes, though implicitly, that being good at rugby is more significant than expertise in other sports.

Cultures organize practices, the products of which are valued in a particular culture, so that a large number of people can acquire the knowledge and skills needed. The process of cultural imposition need not take a compulsory form. More often than not, developing individuals tend to choose those domains of expertise that are valued by their culture, because the culture provides them with many opportunities to participate in relevant practices, and because people close to them tacitly encourage them to do so.

Similarly, each sub-culture of a given domain or each community of practitioners has its particular set of values. For example, abacus operators are socialized in terms of the values they hold regarding the importance of abacus skills and their status in general education, as well as a respect for the speed of calculation (Hatano 1997). In fact, the community of abacus educators and skilled operators constitutes a strong pressure group in the world of education in Japan. Skilled abacus operators calculate speedily, but they are motivated to perform their operations even faster.

What kinds of experience or participation encourage the development of particular values or forms of privilege? Experts’ values are undoubtedly forms of culture in the mind, acquired through internalization. They serve as the source of motivation for experts to excel at the target domain. Although knowing little about the way in which these values emerge, it can be assumed that they are gradually internalized in the course of gaining expertise, through conversing with other practitioners, acquiring sophisticated evaluative criteria, and spending time and effort in and for the domain.

3. Consequences Of Expertise Are Sociocultural As Well As Cognitive

Gaining expertise is far from purely cognitive. It is a social process (Lave and Wenger 1991); more specifically, a process in which beginners become fully qualified members of the community of practitioners. The case of gaining expertise in abacus operation exemplifies this sociocultural nature of expertise (Hatano 1997). Abacus school pupils are usually first enrolled by their parents while in elementary school. The parents may believe that the exercise there will foster children’s diligence and punctiliousness as well as enhance their ability to calculate and to make numerical estimations. Pupils are first motivated to learn abacus skills to receive parental praise, especially by passing the qualification exam. Like many other out-of-school domains of learning in Japan, abacus learning has an elaborate qualification system and frequent qualification exams. However, the pupils’ motivation changes when they join an abacus club at school or become a representative of the abacus school. At this point, they compete in matches and tournaments, like tennis or chess players. Also like these players, abacus club members not only engage in deliberate practice (Ericsson et al. 1993) at least a few hours every day, but also think about how to improve their skills. Their learning is strongly supported by the immediate social context of the club and the larger one of the community of abacus operators. Formal and informal relationships with an instructor, oldtimers, and peer newcomers organize their ways of life, and sanctions from other players regulate their daily activities. Moreover, they may participate in the community of abacus operators by taking an administrative role in players’ organizations or by serving as an examiner or judge at matches and tournaments. They begin to increase their participation, by increasing their significant responsibilities within the community.

Consequences of expertise are sociocultural in another sense. The knowledge and skills acquired in the course of gaining expertise have a sociocultural origin, in that they are shared by mature members of the community, before being incorporated by individuals who are gaining expertise. In other words, such knowledge and skills constitute built-in constraints in the relevant practices. Even novices have learned, to a considerable extent, the methods and concepts used in practice that are needed to perform accurately. They have also learned, though to a lesser degree than experts or intermediates, to use the methods and concepts readily and skillfully. Most, if not all, of the knowledge and skills of experts have a sociocultural origin, although the experts may have added something new to their domains. Experts’ performance is often more standardized than novices.’ For example, wine experts are different from non-experts in their ability to readily classify a set of different kinds of wine almost uniformly in terms of the type of grape and region of production (Solomon 1997). Moreover, they have acquired a complex set of evaluative criteria by which they can aptly judge the quality of innovative as well as conventional products or performances in the domain (Oura and Hatano 1989).

4. Educational Implications

What educational implications can be derived from the aforementioned culture-rooted aspects of expertise? To the extent that the acquisition of subject-matter knowledge in educational practices is considered analogous to the process of gaining expertise, the above discussion is relevant. Educators might organize classroom activities, so that students are supported by sociocultural constraints, at least in the initial phase of learning. They might try to establish a local community within the school in which the target subject-matter knowledge is highly valued. Also, educators might invite students to be involved in designing learning activities and evaluation of their products. In fact, these principles have been incorporated into the ‘community of learners’ approach to school reform (e.g., Brown 1994).

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