Abstract
This interview highlights and extends Dr. Barbara Rogoff’s keynote address at the 2019 annual convention. Specifically, in the interview, Dr. Rogoff discusses her framework for learning, Learning by Observing and Pitching In, as well as other aspects of learning, including notions of childhood, age-based social ordering, and conflict as an aspect of learning and community engagement.
On December 5, 2019, at the annual Literacy Research Association Conference in Tampa, FL, I had the honor to interview Dr. Barbara Rogoff, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz, about the invited talk she gave at the conference, “Lessons from Indigenous Communities.” Rather than a paper to be published in this handbook as is the standard for invited talks, Dr. Rogoff and the editorial team decided a transcript of our conversation would be a different and exciting way for her to expound on the framework for learning she discussed in her talk, Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI).
Dr. Rogoff has developed LOPI over the course of her career through research in various cross-cultural contexts, including a Mayan Community in Guatemala, and her work has become foundational in scholarship that brings together notions of learning, culture, and participation. Dr. Rogoff’s work has been widely published, including several books. For many in the Literacy Research Association and broader literacy community, her heavily cited 2003 article, cowritten with Dr. Kris Gutiérrez, “Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice,” has proven generative in opening up ways of understanding the complex interplays of culture, learning, and identity.
On a personal note, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to visit with Dr. Rogoff as her work, since I was first introduced to it as a doctoral student, has been instrumental in my own thinking, teaching, and research. In particular, her book, The Cultural Nature of Human Development (2003), has helped me, in my research focused on youth cultural practices, pay more attention to the ways in which social arrangements facilitate and/or limit particular possibilities for learning and development for youth—in and out of schools. Specifically, among other issues, her book has helped me to notice and examine how notions of age as a mechanism of social ordering function within the youth cultures and classrooms (Petrone, Sarigianides, & Lewis, 2015); how instances of teasing and conflict operate as aspects of key learning, even if they are quite unsavory at times (Petrone, 2010); and how constructions of childhood and adolescence are always historically contingent and socially produced rather than inherent in biology and psychology (Petrone & Lewis, 2012). Each of these themes is featured in the interview below.
Selfishly, I relished the opportunity to speak with Dr. Rogoff to get clarification and deeper understandings of several of the key ideas pertinent to LOPI. As you will see, the conversation opens with Dr. Rogoff providing an overview of her talk and LOPI to help orient readers who may have missed her talk or are unfamiliar with her scholarship. From there, the discussion dives more deeply into issues related to LOPI, including, for instance, how conceptions of childhood help produce a set of practices that structure children’s learning.
Unfortunately, the interview was bound by a strict time frame, so there was limited time for follow-up questions and to delve even deeper into her ideas. Nonetheless, I hope hearing directly from Dr. Rogoff may prove useful for others similarly interested in the intersections of learning, participation, and culture.
The Interview
Can you give us the gestalt of your talk today and your framework for learning?
What I decided would be the best thing I could focus on for this audience was to talk about ideas about learning that I’ve learned from having the opportunity to be quite involved in a Mayan community in Guatemala and also in an innovative public elementary school that led me to think of learning not as just the transmission of skills and knowledge but instead as a process of growth—a process of people transforming their participation in the activities, the endeavors that they have been involved in, and that they anticipate being involved in.
So, it’s a matter of, instead of just acquiring pieces of information or bits of skill, it’s a matter of growth, like…we all have legs that are different now than when we were young. What happened? Did we get pieces of leg or did our legs grow? So, similarly, with our understanding of the world, did we get pieces of information or did our understanding grow? So, that’s why I’m using the term growth as a way of thinking about learning. It’s expanding our understanding of skills or ways of contributing to the communities, the families, the groups that we are a part of.
So, one of the questions I’ve been thinking about is the name of your book The Cultural Nature of Human Development. And today’s talk was about learning. And so, I’m wondering if you could parse out learning and development.
That’s an interesting question. In one of my slides, I had learning slash development, and I thought, I’ll take out development for this audience. Then I thought, no, I need to put it back in there. I don’t distinguish them particularly because I think development and learning cannot really be distinguished. I think Piaget tried to make a distinction with learning being the stuff that is sort of environmentally delivered and development being the stuff that kind of just grows, but I don’t see that distinction. So, I use them fairly interchangeably.
I noticed in your talk you didn’t use the word identity.
No.
So, I’m curious how, like what’s the role of identity in your framework of learning and development?
Okay. That’s an interesting question. The place I usually think about identity is in questions of culture. I think that many people equate culture with ethnic identity. And I’m talking about culture not as ethnic identity but as practices. So, what you do, not who you are. And I think identity is who you are. And it’s a different question than the one that I’m trying to address. When talking about culture, membership in a group is just part of what we do as cultural beings as we figure out we’re a member or we’re not a member of any particular group. It’s a cultural practice determining identity.
What’s more interesting to me for the problems that I’m working on is participation rather than membership. So, in the Mayan community where I’ve worked for 40 some years, I’m not a member. I’m not Mayan. But I’m a participant. People expect me to do certain things. They expect me not to do other things. They know they can rely on me to take on certain responsibilities. They know that I kind of know how to behave. [Laughs] But only kind of. So when they introduce me to somebody from out of town, they might say, “This is Barbara…She’s sort of media Pedrana. The identity label there is which town you’re from, not your ethnicity, usually. Sometimes it is. Certainly not nationality. It’s what town are you from, which is San Pedro which Pedrana. So, I’m media Pedrana. So, half from San Pedro.
So, it’s interesting in that regard, but identity itself is not central to the things that I’m trying to take on. I think it’s an important, interesting issue. However, participation is the heart of understanding how people learn from the perspectives that I’m working on. Identity…sure, but it’s not the heart of it from what I’m trying to understand.
So, I just want to take a quick departure because I’m curious as a researcher, methodologically, how did you get the status of…
¿Media Pedrana?
Yes. What was your process of relationship building?
I lived there. I was one of the first White people to live there. I learned the language to some extent. I’m one of the few, in those days. I was one of the few to do that. Now there’s more. I participated. When somebody died, I’d help with the casket, pay for the casket.
But I think the biggest change in my identity in San Pedro was when I went back. So, I lived there for a year when I was a grad student, third-year grad student, and I was an employee of a group of people who had a grant to do some work. And I did that work, which was giving cognitive tests to kids, and I negotiated that I would do that half time, and the other half time, I would do ethnography of child-rearing practices. So I was interviewing moms and kids.
So that year was up, and when I was getting ready to leave, I would tell people, “I’ll come back.” And they’d say, “Nah.” [Expressed in a way to convey they did not believe she would return.] But I did. Six months later I came back, and when I came back, there was a whole different relationship. The fact that I came back, I think was a big deal back then. Now there’s so much coming and going of people from other countries and other places, but it would not be the same, but back then—
But when you came back, your relationship really shifted?
It really shifted. I was somebody more trustworthy, I think.
You kept your word.
Not just that I kept my word, although…I don’t think it was that I kept my word because word is a little differently treated there. It was that I returned, that I returned, even if I hadn’t said I was going to. The fact that I returned meant I had some commitment to the town that they couldn’t assume I would have from just having stayed there. But the fact that I went out of my way, and it was harder those days to get into town. I had to take a plane, then a bus, and then a boat, and then carry all your suitcases up a volcano. Now it’s much easier. There’s all kind of tourism and all kinds of stuff, so it’s different.
So, if we come back to learning for a minute, some of my research is on skateboarding culture, and I study how learning happens within skateboarding parks and skateboarding culture. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that there’s a lot of conflict and teasing and class conflict—all sorts of things, tensions you might say, within that learning space. And so, I’m wondering how your framework attends to issues of conflict and tension.
I think conflict is part of the definition of a community. I wrote about this in fact, in writing about the innovative public elementary school that I studied in Utah. There was a lot of conflict because everybody cared about the, about what happens to the kids, about what happens to the organization, about the longevity of the endeavor. There was a lot of conflict.
Same in San Pedro. There’s a lot of conflict, and I think that if you had no conflict, it might be a good sign there’s not a community because who cares, you know, if somebody does this or that. It means nothing if you’re not trying to get something or keep something going.
That shared goal that you talked about. Right?
Yeah. Now, it can be handled differently and more helpfully or less helpfully. Break things apart or not break things apart, but I think conflict itself is built in.
I’m struck by your example of how children are involved in activities [from the keynote talk], and so you sort of referenced the funeral example and the young children carrying water as participating in the adult world—you know, every day cultural activities.
I like the shift that you made just there. That’s really important because the idea of an adult world and a child world is based on the idea of separating kids from adults. And if you think of kids as being just a part of the community, you don’t have an adult world and a child world. You caught yourself in that way.
Yeah, I did. [Laughs]
But people usually don’t in the U.S. because they assume that there was such a thing as a child world. And of course, here there is, but it’s not built into being a child or being in an adult for there to be an adult world or a child world.
So, what would you say to, to someone, let’s say in the United States who says, but I want to protect my child from thinking of death, let’s say, at a funeral, or from physical labor, or how do you attend to that?
Well, those are two different questions. I’ll do the labor part first. About late 1800s early 1900s, there were child labor laws put into place to protect children from being abused in factory situations, working 14 hr a day, 7 days a week when they were 8 years old and getting their fingers stuck and torn off in the mills. Well, that was an important move to protect kids from that situation, but I think we went overboard and made it so the children have no contribution to make. And as human beings, they need to be able to make a contribution.
Now, it needs to be a safe situation for them. It needs to sort of be adopted to what they’re capable of doing. And I should give a footnote to capability, but you can’t expect somebody to wash dishes if they’re 2-ft tall and the counter is 4-ft tall. So, you have to take into account not only how tall they are, but how tall the counter is. So, capability is based not just on how tall the child is, but what are the circumstances that the child is in. So we all have different experience. It needs to fit with what they have had experience in.
At the same time, they are, I think, a lot more capable than what this very protective society assumes. And something that’s interesting to me. I’m doing a follow-up study in San Pedro or the study I did 30 years ago right now. When I was first there, the average number of births per mother was eight with five surviving. I don’t know what it is now, but there’s hardly any children. A few years back, maybe 15 years back, I think it was an average of two per family with most of them surviving. Now I think it’s less. And so, a lot of the babies, a lot of the parents are being very protective of them. Keeping them from playing with other children, and we need them to study. We need to have two kids together with a mom.
Within a family.
Yeah. Well some of those kids are the only kid, and the parents are protective of them. So, part of what I think may be the story for this lack of capability or the assumption of lack of capability is protectiveness because instead of having sort of a little “corporation” of a family, you’ve got all this idea that everything’s invested in these one or two little kids and that they are delicate. Now they’re not more delicate than they used to be. In fact, they’re probably less delicate than they used to be, but there’s an assumption that they’re not capable.
Part of that came from the child labor laws when the adults wanted the children’s jobs. That was a big part of child labor, was to get the jobs for the adults because the children were the desirable employees: Smaller, they could get their fingers into the machines to fix the machine when they were breaking, and they can be paid less, but the adults wanted the job. So, child labor laws were part of the solution to them. So, making them into precious little beings who can’t do anything, it’s sort of a part of our mythology in the industrial West. But if they’re given the opportunity to be involved in doing things, they can clearly do a lot of things that people assume they’re not capable of.
The death thing, I think is part of exactly what I’ve just been talking about. They are capable, they’re capable, and they deal with very complicated things already. And in some cultures, death is not understood, not treated in the same manner as the mainstream U.S. society treats it. It’s sometimes just part of life. Sometimes there’s not an assumption that when somebody is dead that they’re gone. That they could still be a part of things. And I think that’s…Hmm. Well, so depending on how the whole society thinks about death, it would be a scarier thing or less scary thing for the children.
One of the questions I wanted to ask you is how do each of these models—the assembly line model and the observing and pitching in model—what are the conceptions of childhood that are undergirding those two?
Well, the Learning by Observing and Pitching In model assumes that this is a human being from the start, a small one. That this human being deserves respect from the start. That they’re a full human being from the start. They’re not just a human being in waiting or preparation for being whole. Most of our developmental theories treat little babies as though they’re incomplete adults.
With Learning by Observing and Pitching In, that would be not the way it seems. Now I’m basing this on Native communities that I’m familiar with, and LOPI is sometimes practiced in communities that are not Native. In fact, plenty of times LOPI is practiced in other communities. So, I’m not sure it’s built into LOPI. But children being capable and full human beings, I think that’s consistent with LOPI more broadly.
Now, assembly line instruction. I think that the conception of childhood for assembly line instruction is that children need to be controlled. Control is a big part of assembly line instruction. Now here, I’m going over into my not very well-formed ideas about Puritan ideas about childhood, where if you didn’t control your child, they will be going to hell. And if they died soon, then you’d be really endangering your child if you did not control the child, spare the rod and spare the child. The idea was to save the child by making sure that they didn’t do bad stuff now when you’re only 6 months old, and they might die when they’re 7 months old and then they would be going to hell. So, the conception of childhood is one of danger for the children and adults needing to control the bad impulses of the children. It’s a kind of protection, I guess.
My work is with adolescents and youth, and so there’s a lot of that similar thinking around that adolescence is not being fully human in some ways. So, I’m not exactly sure how to ask this next question, but I’m sort of curious about the effects of LOPI versus assembly line instruction. And so, I’ll just give an example of what I mean. In Cultural Nature of Human Development, you talk about how some communities that are more LOPI oriented, there’s more cooperation and less competition, and in assembly line, there’s more competition and less cooperation. And so, I’m just curious what are the sociocultural effects of these different orientations?
It’s kind of speculation to be talking about big effects because it’s a causal question and most everything we have is description. So, in terms of information and skills, I think anything can be learned well by LOPI. Sometimes people don’t understand that. So, learning to weave, learning to ski, learning to do statistics, learning calculus, all of those, I think can be learned at least as well with LOPI as assembly line instruction. And I think probably we have evidence from the research on assembly line instruction that would say most of the astronomy students come in with the same misunderstandings about the solar system that they started out in college. So, we know assembly line instruction has not been working very well.
I think it’s a pretty decent speculation to say that people, through LOPI, are more likely to be able to know how to work together effectively in a group. I’d put good money on that one. I don’t think we have any evidence one way or another.
Taking other people’s perspective also. Noticing what’s going on around them, also, would be, I mean, if you’re learning, if you’re included in places where you can learn by observing and pitching in, you’re expected to do it, you want to do it, you’ll learn how to be a good observer. And if you’re told, on the other hand, “Pay attention to your own work. Don’t help anybody else. It’s the teacher’s job to help. It’s cheating if you help them,” you won’t have the opportunities to learn how to help other people, when to help other people, how to observe whether they need any help. All of those sorts of things. So, in those areas, I’d feel pretty safe guessing that there might be some effects.
In skateboarding, you could be 7, 15, 22, and 30, and all be hanging out in the same space. And so, for me, coming in from education and schooling, this was a surprise to me that there would be a learning environment where you get all these age-groups, and I think of it as intergenerational learning in some ways. And so, I’m really fascinated by age and age as a social construct. And so, I’m wondering what’s lost and gained by a theory of learning that takes into consideration intergenerational aspects of learning and frameworks of learning that segregate by age.
Segregation by age is convenient for bureaucracies. That’s it. That’s it.
According to the Whitings (Whiting & Whiting, 1975), segregation by age makes people more competitive with each other. That’s probably good for bureaucracies, too. So, it helps people put people in categories to be able to march them through in bunches for all kinds of bureaucratic reasons. And the competition is probably something that’s in the current bureaucracies that we have. Competition is built in also, and having people age graded, according to the Whitings, creates more competition.
Cross-age interaction according to Whitings, all the younger children learn from the elder children all kinds of stuff. The older children learn how to, I think they put it in terms of dominance. I’m not sure I would put it in terms of dominance but leadership. In some ways, they’re similar depending on what kind of system they’re in.
One of my soapboxes is I think that we have segregated by age to an extent that is really damaging to all ages. Imagine you have just become a parent, and this little thing is in your hands and you have a responsibility for their life, their welfare, their pooping, their everything. How do you handle that? You haven’t been around anybody who’s had any babies since you were 4. What are you going to do? And it becomes a trauma and probably that contributes to being overprotective to babies also. You don’t know what you’re doing and you are afraid you might mess up.
So, segregating parents from nonparents or having only parents of the same ages together—I mean, not the parents’ ages but the kids’ ages. That happens with batching the children, you get batching with the parents. So, here you are. You have a baby who is 8 months old, and they start doing this thing that makes you worried. Oh my God! And you’re dealing with it all by yourself because you don’t know anybody who’s got a baby that’s 12 months old or 2 years old.
So, this segregation by age keeps us from learning from the people who are just ahead and helping the people who are just behind, which is gratifying for most people. So if there is one thing based on my work that I would change about our society, it would be the extent to which we segregate by age. I think inclusion is an important part of learning and part of feeling good. And inclusion with the chance to contribute.
Same for old people. I mean, if you think about the next phase of your career, can you imagine it? Sort of, but you could imagine it better if you had more contact with people who had just gone through it. And that same happens to us in every phase of our development. So now I’m interviewing people about retirement. What do you do? How does it feel? Because one of these days, I probably will retire, but I don’t how this works. So, I think we need more cross-category contact and inclusion with opportunities to be helpful to each other.
The number one finding in my skateboard research was the guys who I studied felt like they loved that space because they had someone to mentor them, but more importantly, they were able to mentor other people. They would say, I feel like I’ve got something to share. Number one finding without a doubt. And it’s because of those cross-age groupings.
That’s beautiful. And I bet sometimes the little ones have something to offer the big ones too.
Absolutely. So, let me ask you two more questions if I can have up to 3 min. So, we’ve been talking about learning. Talk to me about teaching. What suggestions, implications for teaching, schooling from your work, from learning by observation and pitching in?
There’s a lot of implications for schooling. A big idea is a sense of purpose. Why do people want to get involved in learning and helping and being a part of things? Part of it is a sense of purpose, being able to contribute, like with the skaters wanting to have something to contribute. So, a sense of purpose. And I think that’s largely missing from schooling for many children. Children of academics probably have a sense of purpose that comes from seeing that their parents are doing this sort of a thing, so it must make sense.
But I think that many times children have no clue why they’re filling out this ditto form or why they’re being asked to put these numbers on this way and submit that way or even the assignments. Why? And so, if we could reorganize schooling around children having some say in what they do so that they can take some initiative in helping to plan the way things are accomplished that allows them to bring in things they care about collectively and individually, that would help them feel like, “Oh, okay, now I know that this is good.” Or if you’re writing a letter, and an example I have from school is say first and second graders were writing letters to Congress trying to convince them not to cut PBS programming.
And so, they and the adults working with them, brainstorm what are the programs that their families watched. And they also gave them some instructions on how you write a formal letter. Now if you took a bunch of second graders and you just said, here’s what a formal letter is and here’s how you do the salutation in the departure thing. They would be lost within 10 seconds. But if they’re writing letters to Congress and they’re trying to convince the strongest people to save Big Bird, they need that information.
So, a sense of purpose allows some of the things that are more arbitrary in curriculum also to be a part of things. And you guys probably have learned statistics, right? It makes a big difference if you’re going to use the statistics versus you’re just in a class with someone who’s going to test you on it.
So, purpose is one, and another would be, well, this is connected, allowing for children’s initiative. Initiative, trust, and inclusion. So, to have more contact across ages and across units, I think those would be some.
I was just going to ask you, sort of away from the learning and the school. You’ve had a long, prolific, exciting career from my vantage point. I’m wondering what thoughts and suggestions you have for people in my position? Early career?
You’re going to get rejected. You just are going to get your papers rejected. It’ll feel terrible. You’ll be mad. You’ll hate those reviewers. You will be, well, some of us go like this [shocking facial expression] and hide for a while when we get those letters and some of us go stomping around. So, depending on who you are, you probably do one or both of those. So, put it away for a week, that rejection letter. Then get it out again and read it. Really read it, because the first time you read it, you didn’t really read it and then you’ll say, “Oh, I wonder why they thought that.” And you go back to your manuscript, you find they saw something that you didn’t know was there that was a problem. They offered a solution that is not the right solution. The reviewers often try to solve the problem for you because it’s the only thing they can offer. You don’t have to do what they say, but you have to try to figure out why they thought that. There was a problem that needed a solution.
They are your collaborators. Those nasty, horrible people that wrote that terrible review. [Laughs.] They are your collaborators. They are people to be grateful for even though you hate their guts. My career would not be what it is without the reviewers. The reviewers helped me hone my arguments, helped me see what I needed to do to address people who come from a very different set of assumptions about what’s an interesting question or how to do research. So, the advice is expect stuff to get rejected. The people who survived were the ones who keep trying. And look at the reviewers as, even though you hate their guts, as they’re offering you something and that’s really valuable.
Thank you so much. Yeah, I have like a hundred more questions, but we’re about out…
I have a sequel to that one. When somebody asks you to write a letter or a statement. When you’re up for review, they’re going to say, so what have you been doing and what are you about to do? Those things are really hard to write, really hard to write. Use them as a way of helping yourself. Think about really what are you trying to do? Because it’s very hard to really articulate even to yourself, what is your direction? What is important? And those exercises, even though they’re scary and make you feel like, “Oh, somebody’s looking at me and I don’t know how to put myself across in the way I want to,” they’re really a valuable exercise for yourself to be able to say, to reflect. Like, “Hmm, why am I interested in this and this at the same time? They have something that has to do with the children.” That was my experience from my third-year review and that became my paper on integrating context and cognitive development. That was my third-year review statement because I had to figure out how I was going to tell them that I had any program of research when I had this, this, and this. So, what’s programmatical about that! Oh, well I’ll make something up. [Laughs.] So, I made something up and happened to have something to do with Vygotsky and context. And so then eventually, it became that paper, which was one of the more important papers of my early career.
This is so reassuring. [Laughs.]
I was so at a loss. It was mother–child interaction, spatial cognition, and there was a third one. I don’t remember what the third one was at this point. Early, I figured out I could let go of the third one because I was not keeping up on the literature on that. It might have been memory development. My dissertation was on memory development. I think I let go of memory development, but I wanted to keep spatial cognition and mother–child interaction. What do they have to do with each other? Nothing, nothing obvious. Oh! They both make you pay attention to context of cognition. I mean, that’s what I wanted out of spatial cognition. It’s spatial context that helps you think about memory differently than when you’re trying to remember nonsense words or something, and mother–child interaction, and my reason for being interested in that was the context itself. So yeah, it’s a worthwhile exercise. We get reviewed throughout our career. So, we have to keep on writing things. I don’t know if you guys do! Periodically every year. We get external reviews along the way. And I think it’s useful. So, my advice along the way is that if they don’t make you write one of those things, do it anyway because it makes you stop. It’s probably hard to write when nobody is making you do it, but it’s such a good reflection tool to thinking, Oh, do I really still care about that? No, I’m not reading that stuff. Okay. I guess I’m done with that for now but you can come back to it later. That makes it easy to let go. And I have done that. I should stop there.
Thank you so much.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author wants to thank the LRTMP editorial team and the LRA leadership team for creating this opportunity. Also, Maha Kareem, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri who helped coordinating this experience, sat in on, and transcribed the interview. Finally, a big thanks to Dr. Rogoff for engaging in the dialogue.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
