Barbara Rogoff

University of California, Santa Cruz | UCSC · Department of Psychology

This article examines how people learn by actively observing and "listening-in" on ongoing activities as they participate in shared endeavors. Keen observation and listening-in are especially valued and used in some cultural communities in which children are part of mature community activities. This intent participation also occurs in some settings...

This article examines how 31 triads of 6- to 10-year-old children from 3 cultural backgrounds organized their interactions while folding Origami figures. Triads of children whose families had immigrated to the United States from indigenous heritage regions of México (and whose mothers averaged only 7 grades of schooling) coordinated more often as a...

This study examined cultural differences in children's simultaneous attention to 2 events versus quick alternation in which attending to 1 event momentarily interrupted attending to another. Thirty-one 6- to 10-year-old U.S. children of Mexican and European American heritage folded paper figures with 2 other first- to third-grade children and an ad...

This study examined the idea that toddlers in some communities are accorded a privileged status in which they are allowed what they want, assumed not yet to "understand" how to cooperate. U.S. middle-class and Guatemalan Mayan mothers and 3- to 5-year-old siblings were observed while the siblings and toddlers (14-20 months) both sought access to at...

This chapter examines the role of the ubiquitous cultural institution of formal schooling in children's forms of collaboration and assistance with each other. This institution, in which U.S. children spend years of their childhood, fosters particular approaches to working together and guidance, in accord with the everyday structures of interaction...

Changes in family life related to globalization may include reduction in the collaborativeness observed in many Indigenous American communities. The present study examined longitudinal changes and continuities in collaboration in a Guatemalan Maya community experiencing rapid globalization. Fluid collaboration was widespread 3 decades ago among tri...

This chapter suggests that individual and cultural/contextual contributions to learning and development can be understood as mutually constituting aspects of a holistic fractal process flowing across generations. To examine specific aspects of the dynamic mutually constituting process, the chapter suggests foregrounding or focusing on one aspect of...

Defining the process of learning as an apprenticeship--a social activity that is mediated by parents and peers who support and challenge the child's understanding and skills--Rogoff here explores the mental development of children. She draws from and expands on the work of Vygotsky in her examination of the dynamic relationship between thinking pro...

This article presents conceptual and empirical advances relating to Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavours (LOPI). The opening article offers a new version of the LOPI model and a focused analysis of the key role of community. The other nine articles provide evidence of the social organization of LOPI, based on an...

This article focuses on communities’ contributions to a way of learning that seems to be common in many Indigenous communities of the Americas and among people with heritage in such communities: Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavours (LOPI). We briefly contrast this with community contributions in Assembly-Line Ins...

This study brings to light cultural differences that fit with two distinct models of collaboration and learning: shared thinking versus individual negotiation. The study identifies a previously unstudied sophisticated form of collaboration frequently used by 25 pairs of Mexican-heritage 8- to 11-year-old children and rarely used by 25 pairs of Euro...

Using a holistic, process approach, this article brings attention to cultural differences in the prevalence of fluid synchrony in collaboration, at a microanalytic scale of analysis that is embodied in the processes of everyday life. We build on findings that in a number of Indigenous American communities, fluid and harmonious collaboration is prio...

Separate lines of research on prosocial development suggest that although toddlers worldwide are eagerly helpful, older children help voluntarily in some communities but in other communities, children become resistant to helping with household work. This study investigated these discrepancies by interviewing 64 Mexican-heritage and middle-class Eur...

Valued cultural practices of marginalized communities are often critiqued by dominant cultural communities. In this study, US Mexican-heritage mothers who had experience in Indigenous ways (and limited schooling and parenting classes) espoused instructional ribbing – a cultural practice involving indirectly guiding children’s behavior through mock...

Drawing on examples pertaining to Native North America, but with relevance to Indigenous communities worldwide, we promote family- and community-based Indigenous language reclamation. From the vantage point of a decolonization and Indigenization framework and eagerness to actively resist settler-colonialism, we offer a critical corrective to an (ov...

This chapter addresses the idea that a focus on participation in cultural practices is more productive for understanding cultural aspects of young children’s learning than comparing membership in racial or national identities. We illustrate this idea with observations of contrasting attentional strategies used by children from 5 communities varying...

En el año 2018, los autores Rebeca Me-jía-Arauz, Bárbara Rogoff, Andrew Dayton y Richard Henne-Ochoa publicaron un artículo con el fin de contrastar dos maneras en las cuales se puede conceptualizar el pensamiento compartido o la realidad compartida: la colaboración y la negociación. El vasto recorrido de estos autores da cuenta de que éste es un a...

In light of calls for improving people’s skill in collaboration, this paper examines strengths in processes of collaboration of Mexican immigrant children. Sibling pairs (6–10 years old) in California were asked to collaborate in planning the shortest route through a model grocery store. On average, 14 sibling pairs with Mexican Indigenous-heritage...

We argue that the field of developmental research needs a course-correction, to focus more on describing the cultural paradigms of children's lived experience — children's participation in the settings of their lives. This is essential information for understanding child development. We describe a sociocultural theoretical perspective that focuses...

Cultural research can help to identify strengths of cultural communities that are often viewed through a deficit model. Strengths-based approaches open researchers, practitioners, and the public to seeing the logic and value of cultural practices that vary from mainstream approaches. Strengths-based approaches include and extend beyond concerns for...

This chapter discusses two cultural paradigms of children’s involvement in family and community endeavors that channel many aspects of children’s everyday lives and their families’ approaches to child rearing. One paradigm – in which children are segregated from many family and community endeavors – is commonly assumed in scholarship on children’s...

The present article makes the case that the study of culture would do well to shift the notion of culture to ‘ways of life,’ rather than treating culture as static characteristics of groups (e.g. ethnicity). This would entail a paradigm shift, to focus on people's participation in cultural communities, across generations. The shift fits a transacti...

Informal learning is often treated as simply an alternative to formal, didactic instruction. This chapter discusses how the organization of informal learning differs across distinct settings but with important commonalities distinguishing informal learning from formal learning: Informal learning is nondidactic, is embedded in meaningful activity, b...

Los niños aprenden y se desarro llan al ampliar lo que ya saben, fortaleciendo sus conocimientos previos (Bransford, Brown y Cocking 1999). Una de las fuentes más importantes del conocimiento previo de los niños es su experiencia cultural (Ro goff 2003; Vygotsky 1978). Los bebés y los niños pequeños aprenden a través de las actividades del día a d...

This chapter examines children' attention to surrounding events in which they are not directly involved, a way of learning that fits with the cultural approach of Learning by Observing and Pitching In. Research in instructional settings has found that attention to surrounding events is more common among Indigenous Guatemalan Mayan and some US Mexic...

We discuss Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI) as a cultural paradigm that provides an interesting alternative to Assembly-Line Instruction for supporting children's learning. Although LOPI may occur in all communities, it appears to be especially prevalent in many Indigenous and Indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas. We explain...

To be able to collaborate skillfully, people need to coordinate well with others, taking into account how their actions fit with those of their partners. This is a key aspect of an approach to learning called Learning by Observing and Pitching In, hypothesized to be common in many Indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas. This chapter consid...

Cultural accounts of how people facilitate learning extend beyond the five types of teaching outlined by Kline's target article. Rather than focusing so exclusively on individual teaching, cultural accounts examine the mutually constituting efforts of individuals who are teaching, together with those who are learning. Further, cultural research emp...

Children's views on their household work as mutual contribution within the family may encourage their initiative in pitching in. We asked 9- and 10-year-old children from a Mexican city how they viewed child participation in family household work. Almost all of the 16 children reported that children want to contribute to family household work, whic...

This article addresses cultural differences in children's initiative in helping in their home. Many 6- to 8-year-old children from an Indigenous-heritage community in Guadalajara, Mexico, were reported to engage, on their own initiative, in complex work for the benefit of the whole family (such as tending younger siblings, cooking, or running erran...

To conclude this special issue of Human Development on Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors (LOPI), we argue that everyone can benefit from learning to do things in more than one way, expanding our repertoires of practice. We examine potential developmental benefits for children's collaborative initiative, alertne...

This article examines and contrasts two distinct patterns of assisting children’s learn- ing that relate to adults’ participation in different cultural practices: strategies to control children’s attention and motivation versus supportive guidance including children’s ini- tiative. We report case studies of the instructional approaches taken by 4 r...

This article argues that a generational approach focusing on changing constellations of cultural practices helps to understand culture. We contrast this approach with the “box approach,” which categorizes individuals by racial or ethnic ancestry. The article focuses on the survival, disappearance, and transformation of constellations of cultural pr...

This article formulates a way of organizing learning opportunities in which children are broadly integrated in the activities of their families and communities and learn by attentively contributing to the endeavors around them, in a multifaceted process termed "Learning by Observing and Pitching In."This form of informal learning appears to be espe...

Another example is that mestizo (mixed heritage) populations in Central America may not identify as Indigenous and may use many non-Indigenous ways (such as being monolingual in Spanish), but nonetheless carry forward many Indigenous practices across generations [Rogoff, 2011]. For example, the form of Spanish used throughout Nicaragua has many fea...

This study examined incidental recall of a folktale told to 91 Tohono O'odham American Indian children (average age 9 years) who either were directly addressed or had the opportunity to overhear the telling of the folktale. Learning from surrounding incidental events contrasts with learning through direct instruction common in Western schooling, wh...

Resumo This article examines how people learn by actively observing and “listening-in” on ongoing activities as they participate in shared endeavors. Keen observationand listening-in are especially valued and used in some cultural communities in which children are part of mature community activities. This intent participation also occurs in some s...

This study examines cultural variation in the use of a balance of nonverbal conversation and talk for social coordination among children learning how to fold origami figures. Participants were 102 same-gender similar-age triads of first through third grade children from communities in México and California that varied in relation to Indigenous hist...

Forty-four pairs of Mexican-heritage and European-heritage US children were asked to characterize differences between two contrasting cultural patterns of working together in video clips that showed a) Mexican Indigenous-heritage children working together by collaborating, helping, observing others, and using nonverbal as well as verbal communicati...

A puzzle presented itself when I began to study cognitive development in a Guatemalan Mayan town, decades ago: How do people learn without being taught? In many Indigenous communities of the Americas, children are included in the wide range of activities of the community and they learn by observing what goes on around them and by pitching in. A new...

This chapter examines children's collaboration and helping from the perspective that understanding prosocial development requires attention to the cultural practices and values in which children and adults participate. Children's ways of engaging with each other and with adults are based on practices of their families and the current and historical...

This book provides a unique window on the cultural nature of human development. The ideas are illustrated with the life and work of a Mayan woman who was born to be a sacred midwife. The ideas are revealed also in the changes and continuities of children's and families' ways of life in her Guatemalan Mayan town. In following the threads of culture...

This article reviews cultural differences in the extent of segregation of children from community life and their integration with people of differing ages, focusing especially on children's engagement with older children or similar-age children. We highlight cultural differences in children's everyday companionship with older children and with peer...

Children commonly observe and pitch in to ongoing activities in Indigenous communities of Mexico, according to ethnographic research. The present study examines the generality of this approach to learning by comparing its use among Mexican immigrants of two cultural backgrounds in the United States. Results showed more sustained attention to (and l...

The study builds on ethnographic research noting an emphasis in many Indigenous communities of the Americas on learning through keen observation of and participation in ongoing community activities. Forty-four U.S. Mexican-heritage 5- to 11-year-old children whose families likely have experience with Indigenous ways more frequently attended to and...

This study investigated differences in attention and learning among Guatemalan Mayan and European American children, ages 5-11 years, who were present but not addressed while their sibling was shown how to construct a novel toy. Each child waited with a distracter toy for her or his turn to make a different toy. Nonaddressed children from Mayan tra...

Abstract This article examines cultural practices that support informal learning as children observe and pitch in with everyday activities that are integrated into family and community life. We discuss the social and cultural grounding of this learning tradition, drawing on research carried out in different parts of the world during more than 60 ye...

Obra que desde una perspectiva interdisciplinaria estudia el desarrollo cognoscitivo del niño, a la luz del contexto sociocultural; pone de manifiesto los procesos socioculturales mediante los que el niño adquiere y amplia sus habilidades y como desarrollo su inteligencia, a partir del contacto con el pensamiento compartido con otras personas.

This study examined the planning that occurred when children participated in classroom playcrafting with either adult or child leadership. In a first‐/second‐grade classroom in an innovative public school, we videotaped 11 sessions in which children volunteered to develop a play with small groups of classmates and seven sessions in which adult volu...

The aim of this chapter is to distinguish theories of development that cast learning as a community process of transformation of participation in sociocultural activities from theories that cast learning as a one-sided process in which only teachers or learners are responsible for learning, either through transmission of knowledge from experts or a...

Ethnographic research indicates that in a number of cultural communities, children's learning is organised around observation of ongoing activities, contrasting with heavy use of explanation in formal schooling. The present research examined the extent to which first- to third-grade children observed an adult's demonstration of how to fold origami...

In this paper we examine changing arrangements of human development that have accompanied societal shifts to mass, compulsory "Western" schooling. We draw attention to the often taken-for-granted role of schooling in childrenߣs lives once extensive schooling has become the childhood norm in their communities. To do so, we examine two cases, involvi...

This article addresses a challenge faced by those who study cultural variation in approaches to learning: how to characterize regularities of individuals’ approaches according to their cultural background. We argue against the common approach of assuming that regularities are static, and that general traits of individuals are attributable categoric...

Ethnographic literature indicates that in many cultural communities around the world, children have extensive opportunities to learn through observing and participating in their community’s work and other mature activities. We argue that in communities in which children are often segregated from adult work (as in middle-class European American comm...

Estudio sobre el desarrollo de los seres humanos, visto como procesos culturales que ocurren a través de la participación del sujeto, junto a otros miembros de su comunidad, en la construcción y reconstrucción de prácticas culturales que han sido heredadas de generaciones anteriores. Temas clásicos del desarrollo humano como la crianza, la interdep...

Contrasting educational philosophies-in-action were used by 45 parent volunteers working with children in a school organized as a community of learners. Newcomers were more likely to employ a one-sided philosophy-in-action (with either adult-directed or child-directed organization), whereas parents with several years of experience were more likely...

We argue for the importance of keeping a focus on the dynamically coordinated functioning of multifaceted cultural practices for investigating cultural aspects of human development. Although some research projects benefit from focusing on specific aspects of cultural functioning, it should be with the recognition that segmentation into 'variables’...

This paper argues that planning entails distributed, mutual contributions of individuals, their social partners, and their community institutions. We suggest that these mutually involved contributions can be viewed through shifts in focus of analysis, contrasting with analyses of cognitive development that treat individuals as though they exist apa...

Traditional indigenous social organization in the Americas has been characterized as involving horizontal multiparty engagements, in contrast with schooling, which often relies on hierarchy and division of labor. This study examined whether the social organization of problem solving of Guatemalan Mayan indigenous mothers and children varied with th...

Traditional indigenous social organization in the Americas has been characterized as involving horizontal multiparty engagements, in contrast with schooling, which often relies on hierarchy and division of labor. This study examined whether the social organization of problem solving of Guatemalan Mayan indigenous mothers and children varied with th...

Throughout the past century, U.S. parents, scholars, and educators have debated how to help children learn in schools. This book contributes to the discussion by presenting ideas about how children can learn in a community organized to foster their learning. Our ideas stem from participation in an innovative public school that prioritizes instructi...

This book advances the theoretical account that Barbara Rogoff presented in her highly acclaimed book, Apprenticeship in Thinking. Here, Rogoff collaborates with two master teachers from an innovative school in Salt Lake City, Utah, to examine how students, parents, and teachers learn by being engaged together in a community of learners. Building o...

Over the years that I spent as a co-oper for my three children in this parent co-operative school, I gradually came to understand the philosophy and become part of the structure of this learning community. It took a long time for me to grasp the underlying principles—the “common thread” that weaves through the practices of this community. An unders...