Author

Cornelius N. Grove, Ed.D., is America’s leading practical ethnologist of education. To quickly gain awareness of the nature of his work, explore either (a) the links in the narrow column to the right or (b) his 18 publications available at no charge at Academia.edu.

A definition of the term ethnologist appears at the bottom of this column.

Cornelius completed an M.A.T. degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1964, then served for four years as a high school teacher in White Plains, NY. From there he moved into educational publishing at two houses in New York City. During 1971-73, he and his English wife devoted two years to sojourning in rural Portugal and traveling in Europe and across Africa. He returned to graduate school at Columbia University.

While completing his Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree, Cornelius became fascinated with the non-linguistic cross-cultural factors that undermine children’s ability to learn in classrooms. For his dissertation project, he examined the cultural challenges affecting immigrant Portuguese students in a Massachusetts middle school. After graduating, he became Director of Research for AFS, the international student exchange organization. He also held adjunct teaching posts at New School and Columbia Universities, where he taught a course of his own design, Cross-Cultural Problems in Classroom Communication. During the spring term of 1986, he taught at Beijing Foreign Studies University, after which he joined the University’s vice chancellor in authoring Encountering the Chinese.

During 2006, Cornelius delivered a paper on instructional styles across cultures at a conference held in Singapore. Soon thereafter, he set a mission for himself:

To reveal the historical and cultural reasons for American students’ poor academic performance in comparison with their peers in other nations.

Three books published between 2013 and 2020 fulfilled this mission:

The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today (2013)

The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about RAISING Students Who Excel (2017)

A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about TEACHING Students Who Excel (2020)

Around the same time, Cornelius authored an entry on “Culturally Responsive Pedagogy” for the Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence (2015). And for the International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (2018), he authored a lengthy entry on “Pedagogy across Cultures”.

After completing A Mirror for Americans, Cornelius adopted a new mission:

To reveal what is known about children’s learning in traditional and indigenous societies, in which schools play little or no role anyone’s life.

His 2023 book fulfills this mission:

How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children’s Learning (2023)

After completing How Other Children Learn, Cornelius returned to the topic that had fascinated him at Columbia University: the non-linguistic cross-cultural factors that undermine children’s ability to learn in classrooms. So he chose an appropriate new mission:

To share with American teachers and trainers the practical applications of more than 50 years of anthropological research into the varying cultures of classroom learning.

Cornelius is now completing a book that fulfills this mission, to be published during 2026:

Misaligned Minds: How Cultural Differences Complicate Teaching: With 76 True Stories of Misaligned Minds from E.C.E. to Ph.D.

Beginning in January 1990, Cornelius’s day job was as managing partner of GROVEWELL LLC, which delivered executive coaching and cross-cultural services for corporations worldwide. After 31 years in business, GROVEWELL closed in December 2020.

Cornelius shares his publications not only on Academia.edu but also on ResearchGate.net, where anyone can access several dozen of his publications at no charge. Some concern the ethnology of education while others (written during his 30 years at GROVEWELL) address cross-cultural hurdles in global business relationships. Visit ResearchGate.net.

ETHNOLOGISTS use the research findings of anthropologists to compare parallel features of contrasting societies. As a practical ethnologist of education, Cornelius Grove compares the cultures of learning in contrasting societies, gaining insights into the varying characteristics of knowledge transmission worldwide. He uses those insights to develop actionable suggestions for American educators. Ethnology is based on the Greek words ethnos, nation, and logos, reason or discourse. Don’t confuse ethnology with ethnography, the principal research method of anthropologists, or with ethology, the study of the behavior of non-human animals.