Though adults have long faced the experience of learning to function in new cultural contexts, very little is understood about the processes of this sort of learning. This paper approaches learning culture from the position that cultural knowledge is best understood in terms of situated cognition. Contexts do not simply provide useful information in support of thinking and learning, but are inseparable from cognitive processes. Viewing culture in this way carries specific implications for understanding how a new culture is learned and how it might be taught. In particular, processes of learning culture can be seen to parallel processes of gaining practitioner knowledge, while processes of teaching culture can be modeled on the notion of cognitive apprenticeship.
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