Commentary from Barbara Rogoff

I’m not sure what the genre of the commentaries is, but here’s what I’ll do: I’ll first briefly comment on what I think that socioculturalhistorical theory needs to do now, and then I’ll describe what I’ve done with what I understand of socioculturalhistorical theory and why.

What I think socioculturalhistorical theory needs to do now

I think that the theory needs to be accompanied with more empirical research to demonstrate the utility of the ideas, in the world.

I think that the theory needs to find ways to make the ideas less jargony to make a difference in the broader academic and practice worlds.

It would be valuable to extend Wertsch/Bakhtin/Volosinov’s points about authorship to examine current approaches to scholarly crediting of prior ideas and their transformation, as well as the ‘appropriation’ of prior generations’ ideas without awareness (as in Elinor Ochs’ study of postdocs feeling like they came up with ideas that came from their advisors).

What I’ve done with what I understand of socioculturalhistorical theory – and why

I don’t think I’m a scholar of what Vygotsky, Leont’ev, Smirnov & Zinchenko, Bakhtin, Ilyenkov, Cole, Scribner, Lave, John-Steiner, Wertsch, Valsiner, and Minick have said. (Especially because my reading/listening of the Russian-writers has always been second-hand or more, and my uptake of the English-writers is also subject to my choosing the parts that are useful in my project of the moment.)

However, I have gained from what I understand of their ideas and research, and that has deeply influenced mine. (Along with the work of Dewey, JJ Gibson, Pepper, SH White, B Whiting, Gutiérrez, my former and current grad students, my deep immersion in Indigenous ways in a Mayan community, and the philosophy of a primary school community of learners).

I have contributed some ideas, stemming from these sources:

Along about 1984, I offered the perspective of guided participation, which was meant to draw attention to the inseparability of the contributions of adults and children to children’s learning processes (e.g., Rogoff, 1990, 2003). I wanted to provide a window on children’s learning that did not separate the learning into either adults teach kids (filling them with knowledge in a transmission model) or kids discover on their own (in an acquisition model).

Guided participation is not a specific form of interaction; rather it’s a window on the mutually constituting processes involved in guidance and participation. In Rogoff (1990), I emphasized the mutuality of individual and cultural aspects of human development, together with many scholars before me; by 1995, I was using the term mutually constituting, thanks to my reading of Elinor Ochs’ work.

The idea of guided participation built explicitly on Vygotsky’s concept of zone of proximal development (Rogoff, 1990). However, it expands on ZPD. I had the impression that ZPD focused mainly on in-person highly verbal dyadic interactions, and I wanted to explicitly include other forms. I especially included these forms as ways of guided participation: nonverbal communication, tacit forms of guidance in the arrangements that families and societies make

regarding children (such as segregating or including them, or who takes care of them), children’s active observation of surrounding events, engagements in which children learn ways that are not desired (such as learning household violence as a response to frustration), and implicit information and expectations that are available in engaging with another person or in groups.

Along the way, I wrestled with the idea of internalization, which to me implies a boundary between individual and world. I’ve been arguing against this boundary all this time – it is built in but not noticed in both the transmission and acquisition approaches, and gets in the way once we shift to a mutually constituting view. We can get further without it, as I argued in a fun debate in 1992 with Jaan Valsiner in Human Development. He argued for the necessity of links between individual and world and I argued that the need for links disappears once the boundary between the individual and the world disappears and they are seen as aspects of a shared process.

For some years, I used the term participatory appropriation to go beyond the idea of internalization (e.g., Rogoff, 1995). But even at the time I was unhappy with the external/internal implication of the term appropriation. I’ve settled now on the idea of mutually constituting processes and transformation of participation instead. I don’t think we need a concept of internalization or appropriation. (My emphasis on learning being a process of transfomation of participation in shared endeavors has been influenced by Lave as well as by my decades of research in a Mayan town and in an innovative school (Rogoff, 2011; Rogoff, Goodman Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001).

The focus on processes rather than on objects is an essential part of the view I’ve been putting forward. To analyze the contributions of an individual, or of social interaction, or of institutions/culture, I argued (1995, 2003) for focusing on these as temporary, analytical planes of analysis, useful as analytic tools used by researchers in different investigations but not real ‘components’ of the process (Wertch’s writings are relevant here).

Throughout, I have felt that socioculturalhistorical theory needs to be grounded in empirical work to show the value of the theoretical notions. I have focused especially on empirical research on transformation of participation and on the paradigm shift entailed in moving to this view from transmission/acquisition approaches. This has involved several decades of research in two contexts: Indigenous ways of learning in the Americas and in an innovative collaborative public school in Utah (especially Rogoff, communities of learners; Rogoff et al., 2001).

My research focuses on understanding people’s ways and their philosophy-in-action, not just what they say they are doing or have done (e.g. Matusov & Rogoff, 2002). The research tools that I use have been greatly influenced by ethnographers and anthropologists and interdisciplinary researchers (e.g., Scribner; McDermott, Gospodinoff, & Aron; Shotter; Ochs & Schieffelin; and related work).

The majority of my research of the past decades has focused on understanding collaboration (Mejía-Arauz et al., 2018; http://stemforall2017.videohall.com/presentations/1034 ) in the context of one form of guided participation. Together with a consortium (that I organized among about 40 interdisciplinary, international scholars), I am attempting to articulate a form of learning that appears to be especially prevalent in Indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas (and which contrasts with the Assembly-Line Instruction approach that pervades much of schooling, though not all). We first referred to the paradigm we wanted to describe, as intent participation, then as intent community participation, now as Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors (LOPI; Paradise & Rogoff, 2009; Rogoff et al., 2014).

This way of approaching children’s learning involves inclusion of children as bona fide contributors in family and community endeavors, and assists them in transformation of participation as responsible knowledgeable innovative contributors. Our research has helped us to describe 7 aspects of the LOPI paradigm (Rogoff, 2014), and to examine generational changes and stabilities in its use in a number of Indigenous and Indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas (Rogoff et al., 2013; Correa-Chávez, Mejía-Arauz, & Rogoff, 2015). We have built on Indigenous scholars’ published descriptions of the paradigm, the lived experience of consortium members, and the research findings. This has yielded a strong empirical base for socioculturalhistorical theoretical ideas, influenced by scholarly works mentioned above and research insights from our observations and conversations with Indigenous American children and adults.

Cites (chronological)Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York:

Oxford University Press. Morelli, G.A., Rogoff, B., Oppenheim, D., & Goldsmith, D. (1992). Cultural variation in infants' sleeping

arrangements: Questions of independence. Developmental Psychology, 28, 604-613.Rogoff, B. (1995). Observing sociocultural activity on three planes: Participatory appropriation, guided

participation, and apprenticeship. In J.V. Wertsch, P. del Rio, & A. Alvarez (Eds.), Sociocultural studies of mind (pp. 139-164). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Rogoff, B., Goodman Turkanis, C., & Bartlett, L. (2001). Learning together: Children and adults in a school community. New York: Oxford University Press.

Matusov, E., & Rogoff, B. (2002). Newcomers and oldtimers: Educational philosophies-in-action of parent volunteers in a community of learners school. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 33, 415-440.

Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University Press. Paradise, R., & Rogoff, B. (2009). Side by side: Learning through observing and pitching in. Ethos, 37, 102-138.Rogoff, B. (2011). Developing Destinies: A Mayan midwife and town. NY: Oxford University Press.Rogoff, B., Alcalá, L., Coppens, A.D., López, A., Ruvalcaba, O., & Silva, K.G. (2014) (Guest Eds.),

Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors. Special Issue, Human Development, 57.

Correa-Chávez, M., Mejía-Arauz, R., & Rogoff, B. (2015). (Editors.) Children learn by observing and contributing to family and community endeavors: A cultural paradigm. In Advances in Child Development and Behavior, Vol. 49.

Mejía-Arauz, R., Rogoff, B., Dayton, A., & Henne-Ochoa, R. (2018). Collaboration or negotiation: Two ways of interacting suggest how shared thinking develops. Current Opinion in Psychology, 23, 117-123.