Meeting the Needs of All Cultureless Learners: Culture Discourse and Quality Assumptions in Personalized Learning Research

This chapter reviews recent qualitative studies on personalized learning in middle/secondary school settings to analyze the role of culture in how this concept is enacted and researched. Personalized learning is posited as a pedagogical approach that aims to revolutionize schooling and challenge educational inequity by foregrounding learners’ agency in what and how they learn, tailoring pedagogy and its purpose to learners’ unique interests, needs, and abilities. Given the strong emphasis of the approach on the uniquenesses of the persons who are learning, our analysis interrogates the discourse on culture in studies on personalized learning and extrapolates how this discourse informs problem formulation, design and logic, sources of evidence, analysis and interpretation, and implications for practice. This review reveals a disconnect between the relevant literature on culture in learning and omissions of researchers and research participants’ cultural positionalities and identities. This appears to affect the quality of educational evidence, inhibiting a deep understanding of the implementation of the personalized learning approach for different communities of learners. We assert that research into practices that intend to meet the needs of diverse learners should center learner and researcher cultures and positionalities as part of a theory of change that permeates the entire research process.