As a specialist in developmental psychology, Dr. Vianna has spent much of his career examining the way young people from disadvantaged backgrounds acquire knowledge and use it, the way the identities they have forged in the face of myriad deprivations can influence and impede the process of learning. At LaGuardia, where some of the city’s least-prepared students land, and where he has taught for 10 years, he is, in some sense, involved in a near-constant project of professional development. His classroom is his laboratory.

One enormous challenge for community college instructors is that many students arrive with the notion that a college education is essential, but remain unconvinced that what they will learn during the course of their studies is equally so. To create a world of young people skilled at analysis you first need to create a world of young people receptive to complexity, and many of Dr. Vianna’s students, he said, “cringe at complexity.”

Image Students taking a final exam in one of his classes this month. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

“There’s a mistrust and antagonism between teachers and students because authority hasn’t traditionally been good to them,” he said. “Their experiences in the education system have been coercive. It’s not really clear to them what the value of academic knowledge actually is. If they come here with the goal of doing something very specific — to become a stewardess, or a makeup artist — they may think, ‘What’s the point?’ ”

Dr. Vianna got an illuminating look into how deeply some students question the intrinsic value of learning when he gave students an assignment on the work of the psychologist Edward C. Tolman, a pioneer in the concept of latent learning. Dr. Vianna gave students a graph with two curves that corresponded to the conditions in Mr. Tolman’s famous experiments with rats, which showed that they learned to navigate mazes even when they were not rewarded. Despite the evidence that learning could occur in the absence of external incentives, many students looked at the data in front of them and determined precisely the opposite.

“They could not contrast the curves and generalize what they meant in context,” Dr. Vianna said. “What it suggests, is that data contradicts their assumptions and confuses them. Often learning requires changing one’s position toward some issue and they resist this.”

Dr. Vianna came to the United States in the late 1990s to study developmental psychology, after he had already obtained a medical degree in Brazil and practiced child psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro. There, he had seen patients who were autistic, defiant or struggling in school, but he resisted the notion of viewing them through the lens of psychopathology. Instead, he sought to explore more about learning theories and to develop new ones. He enrolled at the Graduate Center and received his doctorate in 2006.