How students learn in East Asian cultures and how that learning may evolve in the future

This workshop focuses on how East Asian cultures furnish unique contexts for education and learning in the region. We share and discuss ongoing research, observations, and theory buildings with regard to the interdisciplinary research on the learning sciences, with the unique context of the interplay of sociocultural, language, and political and historical factors in East Asia. The guiding question is: How learning experiences are shaped by the cultural contexts? In elaborating the uniqueness of the Eastern Asian cultural context, existing studies show that the cultural beliefs, the native languages and bilingual contexts, virtual adolescent social lives, have impacts on the teaching and learning. These studies and the observations of those impacts initiate the introduction to the general theoretical synthesis of Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) theory. This half day workshop aims at reaching a consensus on the benefits of exploring wisdom from East Asian cultures in transforming learning towards the cultivation of interest-driven creativity. Our knowledge synthesis effort will entail a) a consolidation of relevant research findings to date; b) a negotiation of understanding on the East Asian cultural factors by invoking the broader perspectives of researchers from other cultural contexts; and c) new research questions, methodologies and theoretical inputs to inform forthcoming studies and practices on the topic. In particular, we aim at developing a conceptual paper beyond the workshop to be submitted to a suitable journal, with the aim of triggering more cross-cultural dialogues among international scholars on the captioned topic. Copyright © 2016 ISLS.