This class will explore a fundamental problem in educational psychology and the study of learning, which is that many of the basic traditional tenets of the field become problematic from an enlightened global perspective. But there have been efforts by sociocultural scholars in recent years to address this problem. We'll explore a number of these issues: (1) the question of defining and assessing learning based on a normalizing model versus one that acknowledges and deals with diversity, and (2) classic assumptions about "formal" and "informal" knowledge and the roots of those distinctions in privileged and dominant discourses, and (3) difficulties of trying to study learning from the perspective of cultural comparison without essentializing culture and nationality and thus reducing those things to research variables. We'll also look at learning and teaching from the perspective of the classroom as a cultural and international contact zone, and the difficulty of defining and teaching to a bounded notion like "culture" in a modern world of multifaceted identities and communities. Instructor: Cynthia Carter-Ching