Misaligned Minds is about the complications that can occur when a teacher with effective ways of instructing and relating to students is faced with new students accustomed to different ways of learning and relating to teachers. With respect to the learning process, the minds of the teacher and the new students are misaligned, making it challenging for the teacher to be as effective as usual.
Misaligned Minds is a publication in the field of ethnology* of education. As an ethnologist of education, Cornelius Grove compares the cultures of learning in differing societies, gaining insights into the varying characteristics of knowledge transmission around the world. Those insights can then be applied to develop practical suggestions for teachers and corporate trainers of all types and levels who are encountering learners who hail not only from unfamiliar far away nations but also from unfamiliar nearby neighborhoods. Sharing such insights and suggestions is the purpose of this book.
Grounded in ethnological research findings, this book will assist American teachers and corporate trainers (whether in the U.S. or abroad) of students from unfamiliar backgrounds to better understand how to more effectively carry out their principal responsibility: to transmit knowledge to all learners.
Misaligned Minds makes use of two formats – the book and this website – to bring readers two types of chapters that will help them understand and internalize three principal topics.
The two types of chapters
One type of chapter in Misaligned Minds comprises those in which the approach is relatively analytic, rational, and academic. The other type includes chapters that include information that’s more holistic, evocative, and impressionistic.
The analytic, rational chapters will seem quite familiar to readers because they’re written in expository prose and proceed similarly to other texts and manuals. They’re probably what you expect from this book. Out of the eleven chapters, seven are analytic.
The four holistic, evocative chapters are what make Misaligned Minds unique. It’s unique for three reasons. (1) The four holistic chapters contain stories – narratives portraying real people in schools and training facilities encountering others animated by unfamiliar norms and expectations about how to interact in a classroom and/or how to teach and learn. These stories enhance readers’ comprehension of the rational material in the seven analytic chapters. (2) Every story is an account of actual events; each comes from a published source. (3) Finally, there are seventy-six of these true stories, more than are found in any other book about cross-cultural encounters in educational settings.
Each of the seventy-six stories is presented in a sequence of six-steps: (a) the setting for the story, (b) the story itself, (c) the main character’s question, (d) a critique of the story that answers the question, (e) for thought, and (f) related stories, which identifies one or more of the other seventy-five stories that resemble or amplify this story in one way or another.
Seventy-six stories are a lot! So they’re divided into four groups of nineteen each. Within each group are stories deliberately selected and sequenced, shortest to longest, simplest to most complex. Each group has its own chapter; each chapter has a theme:
- Chapter 1: The immense variety of culturally misaligned minds in educational settings
- Chapter 4: The effects of individualistic and communitarian values on teaching and learning
- Chapter 7: The results of placing knowledge-focused students with learner-focused teachers
- Chapter 10: The obstacles to analytic learning raised by students’ holistic patterns of thought
These chapters all appear on this website, not in the book, which creates a big advantage for readers. Each of these four chapters begins with a “Quick Links Selection Aid,” a concise overview of each story: the region where it occurred, the educational level involved, the demographics of the characters, and a brief summary of the story. These details can aid readers in making decisions about which stories to read. A single click whisks the reader to the story of his or her choice.
The three principal topics
The seven analytic chapters and four story-filled holistic chapters combine to increase readers’ awareness and understanding regarding three principal topics, dealt with in this order:
- Individualistic and communitarian behavioral patterns for interacting with others
- Knowledge-focused and learner-focused pedagogies for instructing learners in classrooms
- Holistic and analytic patterns of perception and thought for making sense of our world
Here is how the eleven chapters are marshaled to tighten readers’ grasp of the three topics:
Chapter 1 relates nineteen stories drawn from a wide range of cross-cultural encounters in schools and other places of learning in the United States and around the world. These stories acquaint readers with the immense variety of misaligned minds in educational settings.
Chapter 2 begins a sequence of four chapters that, together, will significantly sharpen readers’ understanding of individualistic and communitarian behavioral patterns for interacting with others. Chapter 2 begins that process by introducing six ideologies – Confucian, Dharmic, Islamic, indigenous North American, indigenous African, and indigenous Māori – that non-Western societies have applied across millennia to guide children’s socialization and learning as well as adults’ daily interacting. Despite the numerous contrasts among the six, they all share a defining characteristic: their guidelines and social expectations are thoroughly communitarian.
Chapter 3 explains the two behavioral patterns, individualism and communitarianism, paying special attention to the predicaments that can arise when communitarian students from abroad or certain U.S. neighborhoods are placed in classrooms with individualistic American teachers.
Chapter 4 presents nineteen stories illustrating the effects of individualistic and communitarian values and behaviors on teaching and learning. The stories are set in both the U.S. and abroad.
Chapter 5 reviews, in historical perspective, the evolution of the mainstream American approach to children’s socialization and learning, beginning with our colonial period and continuing into the early 2000s. The purpose of Chapter 5 is to demonstrate that the citizens of this nation have slowly evolved from mainly communitarian values and patterns of behavior to the individualistic values and patterns that, today, characterizes the daily lives of many Americans. That evolution in social expectations has been reflected by shifts in the ways we school our children.
Chapter 6 turns our attention to this book’s second principal topic, the two pedagogies for transmitting knowledge: knowledge-focused and learner-focused. The former builds classroom process around the knowledge to be learned, while the latter builds it around the intended learners of the knowledge. Members of communitarian societies seem more comfortable with knowledge-focused teaching; members of individualistic societies tend to prefer a learner-focused approach. The historic shift in mainstream American behavior noted in Chapter 5 has been reflected in our classrooms where, across three centuries, knowledge-focused instruction increasingly became overshadowed by a preference for learner-focused methods.
Chapter 7 tells nineteen stories illustrating the results of placing knowledge-focused students with learner-focused teachers. Although this combination can happen in schools anywhere in the world, it’s especially liable to occur when students from abroad or from certain U.S. communities are placed in typical U.S. classrooms, and when teachers from the U.S. relocate abroad to teach.
Chapter 8 explores four cross-cultural classroom complications that are not well represented by the seventy-six stories nor sufficiently dealt with by the analytic chapters. The four complications involve subtle differences in
- how people think about creativity and originality
- students’ question-asking
- responsibility for student learning
- memorization and understanding.
Chapter 9 introduces the third principal topic discussed in this book: holistic and analytic ways of perceiving and thinking about our world. Chapter 9 tackles this formidable topic by relating it to nonliterate societies, culture-free intelligence tests, and contemporary business training. People in communitarian societies mainly think holistically; people in individualistic societies are able to think holistically but have also learned, and often prefer, to think analytically. Mindset misalignments are prone to occur when holistically minded students are placed in classrooms where analytic reasoning prevails most of the time, such as typical U.S. classrooms.
Chapter 10 presents nineteen stories illustrating the mindset misalignments that can occur when students with mainly holistic mindsets are learning under teachers whose approach to knowledge transmission is largely analytic. Most of these stories take place in U.S. educational settings.
Chapter 11 reviews Misaligned Minds, initially by summarizing the three principal topics. It then condenses the knowledge in this book into an array of practical suggestions for U.S. educators and corporate trainers anywhere and at all levels, E.C.E. to Ph.D., who are contending with culturally different learners. At the end of this chapter, a personal style or bearing is explored that teachers can adopt with students, and that research has found – with a few exceptions – to appeal to virtually anyone from anywhere.
* Ethnology is based on two Greek words: ethnos, nation, and logos, reason or discourse. Ethnologists use the research findings of anthropologists to compare parallel features of contrasting societies, paying particular attention to societal norms, values, habits of thought, and patterns of behavior. Don’t confuse ethnology with ethnography (participant observation), the principal research method of anthropologists. An even greater source of confusion is ethology, the study of the behavior of non-human animals.