Mental Representations and Schema

Mental representations and schema or schemas have great significance as we deal with culture. When our minds abstract we create what is recognized as a mental representation. There are three aspects of mental representation: Propositional representations, mental images and mental models. When dealing with culture we can safely say that there are mental images that stand out in one’s mind when recognize or hear the names of different ethnic groups. We also have propositional representations and mental models in our minds about certain groups. For example, you are speaking with a classmate and she was informing you about how her Chinese boyfriend is exceptional in mathematics. The moment you heard Chinese you thought of a short yellow person with squinty eyes. This is an example of a mental image used to represent your perception of what Chinese people look like. We make abstractions like this one all the time and is often how indentify ideas, objects and concepts. These mental representations go hand in hand with schema. Schemas are made up of mental representations such as mental models and mental images. Mental representations and schemas are given meaning or interpreted by one’s culture. How you raised and the ideas that were instilled in us teaches us the meanings of certain symbols, words ideas and concepts. Understanding how schema and mental representation connect to culture is beneficial for a pre service educator. Throughout our training as pre teachers we are constantly faced with the issues that cultural differences may present such ethnicity, religion, ideas and beliefs. Understanding how these schemas and mental representation construct reality for most will give us insight on how a culture operates and why specific cultural groups operate in the manner in which they do. We can also learn how other cultural groups solve problems this can increase our cultural competency. If you take a man who comes from a rural tribe where electronics are sparse he would have a very hard time using an ipod. The schemas that he has already acquired do not prepare him to operate electronics. He would more likely try to adapt the schema of operating a radio to this new situation. When we begin to observe his struggle with modifying this schema we can infer that his culture is not familiar with these technologies like the ipod.