Barbara Rogoff

This paper brings three bodies of work that share an intellectual and social history into conversation to engage several key ideas in cultural historical theories of learning and development. Anchoring the discussion around the contributions of Luis Moll, the paper highlights the intersections and shared theoretical and methodological commitments across the work of Kris Gutiérrez, Barbara Rogoff and Luis Moll. We discuss how each of us has contributed to understanding the importance of context and everyday practices in youth and children and youths’ learning, attending especially to building on the strengths of Latine children and families in learning activities. We show the relationship between Luis’ concept of households’ Funds of Knowledge and Gutiérrez and Rogoff’s concept of repertoires of practice, Rogoff’s perspective on mutually constituting processes, and Gutiérrez’s contribution focusing on how people develop repertoires of practice and Funds of Knowledge in their movement across the practices and ecologies of everyday life.

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 triads of mothers and 1- to 6-year-olds in 24 Mayan families exploring novel objects during home visits (Dayton et al., 2022). However, in the “same” situation 30 years later, 22 mother–child triads of their relatives spent half as much time in collaboration among all three people. This aligns with globalizing changes and with the pattern of Dayton et al.'s middle-class European American families. Nonetheless, the Mayan families maintained harmonious interactions, in line with preserving important cultural values.

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 Instruction , a way of learning that is common in Western schooling, to highlight the distinct contributions of community in these two ways of learning. We theoretically situate the two ways of learning, considering communities and individuals as mutually constituting aspects of the process of life, not as separate entities. Then we discuss the contributions of community to the reasons that people participate, how they interact, and the underlying theory of learning and purpose of learning in LOPI. We briefly address the role of community in how people communicate with each other and evaluate learning. To conclude, we consider the prevalence of LOPI both within Indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas and elsewhere, and our hopes for the contribution of describing this way of learning.

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 prioritized both in community organization at a scale of years and centuries, and in everyday family interactions and researcher‐organized tasks at a scale of days, hours, or minutes. We examined whether this sophisticated fluid collaboration could be seen even at a scale of fractions of seconds. At a microscale of 200‐millisecond segments, Guatemalan Mayan triads of mothers and children frequently engaged mutually, in fluid synchrony together, when exploring novel objects. They did so more commonly than did European American mother‐child triads, who usually engaged solo or in dyads, with one person left out, or resisted each other. This microanalysis of mutuality in family interactions reveals the role of culture in the foundations of thinking and working together in both Mayan and European American communities, and the fruitfulness of considering developmental processes holistically.

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 backgrounds engaged together collaboratively as an ensemble, making decisions in common and fluidly building on each other’s ideas, more often than 16 middle-class European American sibling pairs, who on average more often divided decision making into a solo activity (often ignoring the other or simply bossing the other). Siblings who spent more time collaborating fluidly as an ensemble in the shared planning task were also more likely to collaborate with initiative at home, according to their mothers, which suggests that family socialization practices may contribute to cultural differences in collaboration.

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 social equity: They are necessary for scientific characterization of human cognitive and social processes as well as for effective educational and societal practices. An example of a cultural strength is the sophisticated collaboration shown by many Indigenous-heritage children from North and Central America, which contrasts with the common practice in middle-class communities of dividing up activities into separate roles. These distinct approaches to working together fit with broader cultural paradigms that offer insights into human development as well as inspiration for alternative approaches. As an anonymous reviewer noted, the strengths of each group can be leveraged to mesh with the strengths of others.