Culture, Learning, and Development and the Natural World: The Influences of Situative Perspectives

The study of human learning and development from situative or sociocultural perspectives has had significant impacts on a wide range of scholarship largely driven by the theoretical and methodological focus on understanding the role of activity systems in cognition and development. This article first explores how situative perspectives have advanced fundamental knowledge about how culture and race impact learning and development and works to demonstrate how these understandings have enabled new insights into folk-biological cognition. Traditional cognitive, cross-cultural, and situative perspectives with respect to folkbiology are compared and contrasted to demonstrate how situative perspectives enabled more complete understandings of the complexities of biological cognition. These complexities are conceptualized as the conceptual and epistemological ecologies of activity systems. Implications for education are considered.