THE CULTURAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Barbara Rogoff is one of the founding professors of psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz. In 1977, she received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Dr. Rogoff conducts research on human development and the relationship between learning and an individual’s cultural community. In 2003, she published The Cultural Nature of Human Development in which she argues that cognitive development is dependent not only on skill and development, but also on a child’s collaboration with other people in their everyday life.

Through research, Dr. Rogoff attempts to explain the theory of the cultural nature of human development. She argues that the participation of the child and an adult within a particular community guides the child’s development and learning process. This theory focuses primarily on two patterns with the first being an analysis of age segregation and grading of children from their communities. This is characterized by learning through lessons out of context of target activities. The pattern is common in middle-class American and European communities (Rogoff 2003).

 Secondly, she looks at the inclusion of children in various community events. Learning occurs through observing and taking part in ongoing cultural community activities. This is common in Indigenous American communities (Rogoff 2003). In order to achieve a complete understanding of this aspect, Rogoff compares the type of learning offered by Indigenous-heritage communities with that of European-heritage children of North and Central America. Numerous disparities come to light in the way in which they pay attention to and learn from events that surround them and collaborate in ongoing community endeavors. Their learning and attention has a direct relation to their families’ extent of familiarity with learning traditions (Morelli, Rogoff, & Angelillo 2003).

Children from the Indigenous communities keenly observe and participate in ongoing activities that are not meant for them while those from middle-class Western communities are usually excluded from learning by observing different mature activities (Gaskins 2000).  These Indigenous communities include the Mayan community in Guatemala and children whose families have immigrated to the US from indigenous regions of Mexico. Their type of learning is organized in ways that provide children with a broad access to community and family activities in which they are expected to eventually participate in the future. This is called intent community participation (Rogoff et al. 2003). It differs in various important ways from how learning is organized in Western schooling. Children from these communities become very alert to important information regardless of whether they are engaged in other activities or not.

Children who participate in their communities are expected to observe ongoing events and learn from these observations more than those from communities that do not provide such experience (Rogoff 2003). One of the way in which these issues can be addressed in western-type of learning is for early childhood teachers to offer extensive schooling to children. This may provide familiarity with an organistion of learning that can compete  with the tradition of intent community participation. Through this,early childhood teachers can underline the cultural nature of school approaches to teaching and learning while connecting participation in schooling with many other features of  the middle-class life. Additionally, early childhood educators should nurture a behavior of responsibility in children by allowing them to choose the activities in which they wish to participate in. Such activities can then be creatively used by educators to teach literacy, math, and other subjects in the curriculum. Lastly, teachers should look for ways of involving the community in the development of their children. Collaborative work between teachers, parents and their children is essential in order to incorporate cultural processes in children’s learning (Rogoff 2003). Therefore, more emphasis should be laid on this by early childhood educators through encouraging of parents to volunteer for various collaborative school programs.

References

Gaskins, S 2000. “Children’s daily activities in a Mayan Village: a cultural grounded description.” Cross-Cultural Research 34(4), 375-389.

Morelli, GA, Rogoff, B & Angelillo, C 2003. “Cultural variations in young children’s access to work or involvement in specialized child-focused activities.” International Journal of Behavioral Development, 27, 264-274.

Rogoff, B 2003. The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rogoff, B, Paradise, R, Mejia Arauz, R. Correa-Chavez, M, & Angelillo, C 2003. “Firsthand learning through intent participation.” Annual review of Psychology, 54, 175-203.