The Third Dimension of ADDIE: A Cultural Embrace

INTRODUCTION If education is inherently a process that involves human interaction with the deliberate purpose of promoting the social values, norms, and mores, of a given society, then we can state that the knowledge a society chooses to convey says something about the culture of that society. In this way, we can conceive of education as being a process that is fundamentally sociocultural in nature. We argue that historically many professionals in the field of Instructional Technology have taken a culturally neutral position in the creation of instructional products. By not directly addressing culture in the design of instruction, many products have been designed that inadequately address the needs of the population for whom the instruction was designed. Unintended consequences of this shortcoming include the production of ineffective instructional products, the under use of potentially effective products, culturally insensitive products, and products that are deemed overtly culturally offensive by some members of certain populations. Theorists have recently begun to consider that culture may play an even greater role than being at the heart of any educative conveyance of knowledge. A number of researchers and theorists have begun to consider that our very perception of reality (and therefore reality itself) is a product of socio-cultural process (e.g. Lave & Wenger, 1991; Cole, 1985; 1986, Goodenow, 1992; Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1998). All knowledge, then, is socially mediated and all socialization is grounded in culture. Instead of earlier cognitivist ideas of activating representative schema existing in the human mind (Piaget, 1963), all representations are constructed in situ (Duffy & Jonassen, 1992). Education becomes not a process of conveying knowledge but of co-constructing knowledge in socio-cultural contexts. Interactivity and culture become education and instruction and the co-construction of reality. Although this is still controversial, we can state that whether or not reality itself is constructed, the role of culture is clearly relevant to the design of instruction. The obvious implication of this notion is that the effective design of instruction would have to be grounded in a rich understanding of culture and its essential role in the socially mediated construction of reality.