A Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP) for Hmong Students

Abstract

adjusting to the American educational system as compared with other language minority groups. Underlying this difficulty is a fundamental conflict between learning in traditional Hmong cultural settings and learning in American classroom settings. Despite this conflict, many Hmong students have successfully negotiated our school systems. Most of them did this, however, by compensation strategies, such as memorizing, repeating, spending extended periods of time attempting to master large amounts of material, and receiving extensive help from friends and siblings, rather than by mastering the requirements of successful learning in a formal educational setting. Shuter (1985) refers to this phenomenon as residual orality. This paper will demonstrate that success in our educational system constitutes a paradigm shift for the Hmong learner, a shift from the Hmong learner's paradigm to the formal educational learning paradigm. The position taken here is that active participation in formal education is itself an important part of the acculturation process, requiring the building of a cluster of formal schemata having to do with learning in a specific setting. The paper first examines the conditions, processes, and activities

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.