Being invited to reflect on my career provides an opportunity to highlight some areas in which I hope I am contributing to the understanding of human development as a cultural process. And an opportunity to reflect on the contributions of others, and circumstances, to my path.

My work focuses on culture and ways of conceptualizing learning, thinking, relating, and developing, as well as a specific way of learning (LOPI) that is common in many Indigenous communities of the Americas. The contributions on which I will focus in this chapter are the following, after some reflections on how these interests emerged. Here is a preview:

1. ◾ Across my career, I have argued for the fruitfulness of considering human learning and development as a process that involves both individuals and their contexts, especially their cultural contexts. This view contrasts with a mainstream approach that looks at learning and development as individual accretion and possession of knowledge and skills.

2. ◾ Central to this argument is the idea that individuals and communities contribute in a mutually constituting process to the events of life; their contributions are aspects of one ongoing process. This contrasts with treating individuals and culture as separate entities that influence each other mechanically.

3. ◾ It follows from this that learning and development are inherent in people’s participation in the endeavors of their communities. I see this as a process of transformation of participation in cultural practices – growth, rather than acquisition of information and skills.

   Relatedly, I focus on culture as ways that generations of people live in communities.

4. ◾ In developing these ideas, I have offered related concepts: everyday cognition, guided participation, interdependence with autonomy, collaborative initiative, and especially LOPI (Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors).

5. ◾ Related to all this are two ideas that I have been spouting informally for a number of years. One is that a mutually constituting process can be understood and studied as a fractal – a dynamic pattern in which even the smallest moments reflect the same process as centuries and beyond.

6. ◾ The other idea is known informally as “Barbara’s do-do theory.” This moniker comes from my declarations that, although psychology continues to search for people’s inner (context-free) competences, we can never know what people can do – independent of their circumstances. We can only know what people do do, in the circumstances of their lives.

But taking a step back – I think that this volume’s Editor is asking how I learned/developed through participation, and participation in what?

For many years, I interpreted being asked how I got involved in this work as simply a curious question about either my life or about academic careers. But I have become aware that the question has another purpose – how did I, a European American person, get so involved in studying culture, and especially, so involved in a Mayan community.

Life Circumstances and Interests, Unplanned Events, and Preparation

The answer has to do with life circumstances and interests, unplanned events, and preparation. These comments on how a career develops respond to the request to include mentoring for junior scholars.

In my early years, some of the circumstances, interests, unplanned events, and preparation are thanks to my parents – an artist and a scientist – who guided my interest in art and science, and took me around the world. During my dad’s sabbatical, I started school in Australia, which led to several surprises that made me aware of culture. For example, in Australian school I was taught to add horizontally, but when I returned to the USA and encountered vertical addition, it took some getting used to, even though it seemed to be a better system. This created a six-year-old’s awareness of cultural conventions; I have saved my little addition notebook all this time. Also, returning from Australia, I was impressed that my dad could communicate with people in France and Germany who seemed to be speaking gibberish; this probably contributed to my interest in language and culture.

Fast forward some years, and I need to thank gender norms of my generation and location (in Oregon), which dictated that girls take home economics in eighth grade. I was not keen on cooking and sewing, and I thought the gender-based rules were unfair. But I could get out of home ec if I took both Spanish and orchestra. Those circumstances led to five years of Spanish.

The Spanish learning contributed to college friendships with some Chicanx classmates at Pomona College in California. I joined with them and some Black students in the civil rights efforts of the day (thank you Luis, Roberto, Margarita, José, Mike, and Deloris). These experiences contributed to my later interest in Guatemala.

In college, I might have stayed an art major if the art department taught the kind of art I was interested in (cartooning). But it didn’t. And the psychology department had interesting courses, especially developmental psych. My developmental psych professor, Don Faust, gave me advice that I still use and share: “It is difficult to predict what you will want to be doing in ten years, or even five. But if you focus on what you want to do in the next year or two, that will lead you to where you’ll want to be later.”

Studying Developmental Psychology

In college, I think I was the only student who read the flyers in our mailboxes, and I applied for a Rotary Fellowship to go to the University of Oslo for the year between college and graduate school. I got the fellowship, but Oslo fell through; they did not accept nondegree students.

Professor Faust’s advice was again crucial. He said, “Why not choose Geneva, and you can study at Piaget’s place?” (Luckily, I had also studied French in high school.)

I spent 1971–1972 in Geneva, where I was puzzled by what Piagetians referred to (disparagingly) as “the American Question.” I was embarrassed to ask what they were talking about, but I learned that it was, “How fast can we get kids to go through the stages?” This question was not of interest to the Piagetians; they cared about the sequence but not the speed of stages. (The American Question laid the groundwork for the focus on “racetrack mentality” in mainstream US culture, in my 2003 book The Cultural Nature of Human Development.)

I did meet Piaget and attended some sessions he led. (Figure 25.1 shows some sketches from my notebook.) I was lucky to get his close colleague Bärbel Inhelder as my advisor, and she gave me excellent advice on choosing a graduate school when I got into several. (She spoke highly of Clark and said, “You can’t lose with Harvard either.”)

Mimi Sinclair and her grad students, especially Eddye Rappe, welcomed me into their research group. This academic experience, along with the friendships, traveling, and babysitting two young Genevan kids twice a week also contributed to my interest in culture and human development.

Figure 25.1 Piaget (on the left) during a session where he was discussing reflective abstraction (center). On the right, Inhelder and me, walking in a park, shortly before I introduced her to chocolate fondue.

In graduate school at Harvard, the intellectual influence of Sheldon White, Beatrice Whiting, and Jerome Kagan was deep. The fact that my advisors disagreed about many things added challenges and contributed immensely to my learning and career.

Shep White oriented me to theoretical ideas; he and Jerry Anglin introduced me to Vygotsky’s work. Shep also got me involved in a cultural study of his “5–7 Shift” idea, using ethnographies worldwide (Human Development, 1975, with Shep, Martha Julia Sellers, Nathan Fox, and Sergio Pirrotta).

Bea Whiting’s scholarship on culture and human development is deeply embedded in my work. Plus Bea took me to task for a shabby dissertation proposal. (I had to do another proposal.) I appreciated what I learned from her, and later I was also grateful for her care for my development in the scolding.

Jerry Kagan taught me several important lessons. He gave me a B– on my first term paper at Harvard (on children’s categorization), which told me that reviewing every study ever written was not the goal.

I also learned from watching Jerry – a consummate communicator – write and give talks. I studied how he transformed my second-year project writeup for Child Development (with Nora Newcombe). My first publication. I recently looked at that 1974 paper, expecting to feel embarrassed. To my surprise, the paper ended with the importance of context and cognition – an idea that frames my career.

But maybe the most important thing I learned from Jerry was his frequent question, “But Barbara, what is the question??” I dreaded that inquiry. However, it oriented my thinking, and now my grad students dread the same question, and learn from it. My grad school cohort and I scoffed when our professors told us, “At Harvard, we teach you to think.” But now, I think they did teach us to think, with questions like, “But what is the question??”

A Year “Off” (To Guatemala) and a Life’s Work

These experiences prepared me for an opportunity to do fieldwork in a Mayan community. Apparently, Jerry asked Bea for the name of a recent PhD who could run a study in a different Mayan town in Guatemala than where he had worked. Bea supposedly responded, “Barbara can do it, she speaks Spanish and she’s taken my childhood and culture courses. And she’d be cheaper than someone with a PhD.”

Bea advised me to choose San Pedro, because Ben and Lois Paul had already studied family life in San Pedro for decades. Bea set me up to meet them at Stanford. Beforehand, I read their 3000 pages of field notes from San Pedro in 1941, figuring this would help them welcome me to San Pedro. I needn’t have worried; they became close colleagues and family friends. However, reading those 3000 pages gave me excellent background for understanding life in San Pedro, who’s-who in town, and their relations.

So after my second year at Harvard, I took a year off (1974–1975) to set up a field site to run memory and Piagetian tests with Mayan children (ha ha, asking something like the American Question!). I negotiated to run the tests half the time and to study child-rearing practices ethnographically for the other half, thanks to advice from Roy Malpass.

After that year in San Pedro, I returned to Cambridge and proposed to do my dissertation in San Pedro, on children’s memory. What the study taught me, along with the writings and mentoring of Mike Cole, Sylvia Scribner, and Ann Brown, was that memory tests do not measure general “memory” capacity. Even with my efforts to create ecologically valid situations, the tests mainly revealed the importance of the testing context, such as familiarity with the social relations inherent in testing. The goal for participants in most studies of learning and memory is simply responding to a test, and this often requires effortful strategies to remember bits of information that make no sense. Later, Mary Gauvain, Kathy Waddell, Jayanthi Mistry, and I showed that the social context of memory tests is culturally familiar in some communities but strange in others, and demonstrated that a meaningful goal resulted in greater recall.

My involvement in San Pedro over fifty years has deeply affected my understanding of culture, learning, and human relations. The children and parents in my studies reoriented me, and so did my research assistants Pablo, Elena, and especially Marta Navichoc Cotuc. One of my most important teachers was Doña Chona Pérez, along with her grandchildren Josué and Chonita, with whom I wrote Developing Destinies (2011) to delve into the relation of individuals and culture across generations.

My understanding of learning and development was also based in everyday involvement with San Pedro neighbors, friends, relations, colleagues, and community endeavors (such as work to create the town library and learning center, http://www.taapit.org). I learned so much, especially from Delfina, Agudelina, Rafael, Sara, Xino, Juana Iyoom, Andrea, Miguel Angel, Don Juan, Rosa, Clara, Chimina, Santos, Magdalena, Agapito, Flora, Juanito, Martín, Agustín, and many others.

When I was finishing the dissertation, Mike Cole and Sylvia Scribner became crucial mentors for me. I met Mike when I invited him to give a Harvard colloquium. He responded that he was tired of traveling and countered, “How about you come here to Rockefeller [in New York] and give us a colloquium?” That colloquium was life-changing, in conversation with luminaries in culture and cognition.

Mike and Sylvia mentored me extensively surrounding my dissertation. They challenged my “Harvard” way of thinking and supported me in questioning the centrality of schooling in cognitive development. Mike and Sylvia were then co-editing Vygotsky’s Mind in Society (along with John-Steiner and Souberman), which expanded my interest in Vygotsky and Leont’ev. Mike remains an important mentor, as did Sylvia until her passing. A bonus was getting to know Sheila Cole, who later invited me to illustrate a children’s book (The Hen That Crowed, 1993).

A Paradigm Shift Regarding Thinking and Learning in Context

In my first years as an assistant professor at the University of Utah (beginning in 1977), I became aware of ways of thinking about development that I had soaked up from mainstream psychology. I became convinced that there must be another way, one that would incorporate context in learning and development. I felt like I was entering a dark tunnel, and I didn’t know where it would lead me. But I was confident that it was where I wanted to go. I spent several years in that tunnel, along with my first grad students, especially Shari Ellis, Mary Gauvain, and Bill Gardner. The writings of Dewey, Gibson, Pepper, Kvale, Shotter, Erickson, and McDermott were especially helpful.

As part of the pre-tenure review process, I wrote “Integrating Context and Cognitive Development” (1982), to try to explain my disparate interests to the Psychology Department. I worked to establish credibility as a developmental psychologist, emphasizing context, and kept cultural processes in the background. The study of culture was even more marginalized then, although interest in the role of context had become mainstream.

My efforts to highlight the role of context in cognitive development blossomed in a collaboration with Jean Lave (whom I met with Mike Cole’s group). Jean and I organized a groundbreaking conference in 1980. The conference brought together scholars examining context and cognition, distributed cognition, embodied cognition, mathematical cognition, and communication, resulting in our book, Everyday Cognition (Rogoff & Lave, 1984).Footnote ²

Jean’s research on apprenticeship and learning has been an important influence on my work, contributing to my view of learning as transformation of participation. During this early period I also learned a lot from Jim Wertsch, and we edited a volume on the zone of proximal development (1984).

It wasn’t until I reached full professor and had a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (CASBS, 1988–1989) that I became more outspoken in my commitment to understanding culture and human development. This shift resulted from a grant proposal (on the development of planning) being rejected by both the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the Spencer Foundation. The reviews had opposite complaints. From NICHD: Rogoff needs to control for x, y, and z to isolate the effects of culture. From Spencer: Why is Rogoff using these outdated psychological methods?! The opposing reviews made me frustrated enough to state my perspective directly. I told NICHD that controlling for “variables” destroys the holistic concept of culture. I told Spencer that I wanted to work within the field’s zone of proximal development to move psychologists to an understanding of the importance of culture.

I got both grants and became more direct about the importance of culture. In addition, my thinking was both challenged and supported by interdisciplinary conversations at CASBS with Bradd Shore, Linda Burton, and Claes von Hofsten.

Contributing to Cultural/Historical Concepts and Research: Guided Participation

At CASBS I was writing (and illustrating) Apprenticeship in Thinking (1990). I was trying to convince the field that children’s thinking developed through active roles both of children and of other people tacitly and explicitly guiding them. This was the idea of guided participation. The concept attempted to move the field beyond the pendulum swing between child-run and adult-run views of learning, to embrace a collaborative perspective. My team and I then explored this collaborative perspective on learning in several publications that focused on innovative school settings (see Learning Together; Rogoff, Goodman Turkanis, & Bartlett, Reference Rogoff, Goodman Turkanis and Bartlett2001).

Guided participation is a perspective on the mutuality of children and other people and their arrangements in learning, not a particular technique. It aimed to expand Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development beyond school settings and topics. However, people have often mistakenly assumed it to be a specific way of organizing learning.

Distinct forms of guided participation have been a major focus of my research, from early work comparing adult-child and child-child interactions (with Ellis, Gardner, Gauvain, Radziszewska, Skeen, Baker-Sennett, Matusov, Toma, and Lacasa), to recent work. Both Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors (LOPI; Rogoff & Mejía-Arauz, Reference Rogoff and Mejía-Arauz2022) and Assembly-Line Instruction are forms of guided participation (among many others).

Three Foci of Analysis, Mutually Constituted

In the process of writing Apprenticeship in Thinking, I struggled to find a mutually constituting way of understanding learning. I wanted to avoid the idea of “internalization,” which treats learning as acquisition of mental objects to be moved inside from the outside world. I sought a way of thinking about learning as a process integrating people’s understanding and actions in context.

I experimented with the idea of appropriation – making ideas one’s own – for several years. For example, appropriation was how I referred to learning in my 1995 article, which distinguished three planes of analysis of holistic, mutually constituting process – individual, interpersonal, and community/institutional planes of analysis. Although readers have often thought of the planes as separate levels, that was exactly what I was arguing against in proposing planes of analysis as simply different views of mutually constituting process. I now refer to three foci of analysis to clarify my stance that individual, interpersonal, and community/institutional analyses are different viewpoints on one process, not separate phenomena.

I remained bothered, however, with the term “appropriation,” which implies making something one’s own, maintaining a separation between individuals and the “outer” world. Eventually, I realized that simplification solves the problem; I moved from the label of “participatory appropriation” to simply “participation.”

I put forward the idea that learning is a process of transformation of participation. This idea requires considering the process that is mutually constituted by those who are transforming and the cultural events they participate in (Rogoff, 1998).

Moving from the idea of learning as the product of transmission or acquisition from the “outside world” to learning as transformation of participation involves a paradigm shift. It moves away from considering learning and thinking as acquiring new information or skill (static entities changed by mechanical influences) to seeing learning and thinking as aspects of continual change and continuity in a holistic, contextual process in which individuals and communities contribute, across generations.

The idea of viewing individual contributions, interpersonal interactions, and cultural practices and institutions as mutually constituting aspects of the holistic process of life has been explicit in my writing since at least 1982. In my 2003 book The Cultural Nature of Human Development (CNHD), I illustrated the idea that as analysts, we can focus on one aspect of the process – individual contributions, interpersonal interactions, and cultural practices, and institutions – while keeping the other aspects in the background of the analysis.

More recently, I have brought in the idea that a mutually constituting process can be thought of as a fractal. Fractal analyses examine the mutual entailment of all scales with each other, even while a specific study may focus on a particular scale (Rogoff, 2023). Illustrating this idea, Andy Dayton and I used a fractal analysis to show a pattern of fluid collaboration in analyses both of milliseconds and of millennia in a Cherokee community, with resonances across the different scales.

My mutually constituting, fractal perspective echoes the writings of Scribner and of Vygotsky, who focused on microgenetic, ontogenetic, cultural/historical, and phylogenetic development. It also resonates with concepts put forward by Leont’ev, Werner, Ochs, Erickson, and Indigenous American scholars – such as Bang, Cajete, Elliott, Kawagley, Marin, Rosado May, Urrieta, and Wilson – writing about relationality, holism, and innovation.

A Paradigm Shift That Reshapes Classic Ideas

I believe that this paradigm shift – from individual and culture as separate entities to mutually constituting aspects of one process – parsimoniously resolves several classic questions, such as the old nature/nurture controversy. The foci of analysis could also include others, such as a focus on neuronal, hormonal, or genetic contributions to the holistic process. Rather than separate or competing “entities,” these foci are simply aspects of a unitary process that may serve as our focus for a particular research question.

This mutually constituting approach led to several other concepts that go beyond some common dichotomies. In CNHD I argued for moving beyond the dichotomy of collectivism/individualism, an oversimplification that does not fit cultural patterns for many reasons. For example, in many Indigenous American communities, autonomy is an important aspect of interdependence – “interdependence with autonomy” (Rogoff, 2003).

Relatedly, I have argued that the intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy needs revision, given that in many Indigenous American communities individual agency is inherent in group collaboration. My research group refers to this as “collaborative initiative.” This is a key aspect of LOPI (Rogoff et al., 2014).

As I argued in CNHD, the ideas of mutually constituting process and of participation also shift notions of culture away from a static characterization of individual membership (e.g., ethnic category). Instead, the relation of individuals and culture becomes a matter of participation in the practices of cultural communities. As Kris Gutiérrez and I argued in 2003, the focus should be on understanding individuals’ transforming repertoires of cultural practice as they navigate across contexts, rather than equating culture with static traits like ethnicity or race.

The focus on the mutually constituted nature of human development also shows up in “Barbara’s do-do theory,” which asserts that efforts to observe individuals’ skill and knowledge must involve the context of their performance. We cannot identify context-free “capacities”– what a person “can” do – we only can observe what they do do.

Throughout my career, my efforts have focused on moving beyond static, internal individual characteristics – capacities or skills or traits – to understand the role of context in processes of human development. This endeavor has extended from my grad school second-year project through recent papers, such as one on the importance of understanding children’s lived experience, with Callanan and Dahl.

Using These Theoretical Notions to Advance Empirical Research on Human Development

I became concerned that cultural/historical theoretical notions need to be accompanied by empirical studies, to reveal the utility of the theoretical ideas. This concern led to a line of research focusing on cultural aspects of how children learn and how their families, peers, and communities organize for children’s learning.

A key research project that sparked this line of research was the 1993 SRCD Monograph: Guided Participation in Cultural Activity by Toddlers and Caregivers (Rogoff, Mistry, Göncü, & Mosier). That study challenged mainstream views in several ways. One way was that it challenged psychology’s view of attention (although psychology barely noticed). We observed that Mayan mothers and even toddlers often skillfully simultaneously attended to ongoing competing events, unlike middle-class European American participants, who often attended to one event at a time. This led to a line of studies showing that many Mexican and Indigenous-heritage children and parents attended especially keenly to surrounding events (with Pablo Chavajay, Rebeca Mejía-Arauz, Maricela Correa-Chávez, Angélica López, Katie Silva, and Monica Tsethlikai).Footnote ³

The 1993 Monograph study also opened a line of research on the sophisticated fluid collaboration that has been common among Mayan and other Indigenous-heritage children and families.Footnote ⁴ We also found interdependence with autonomy, collaborative initiative, intergenerational inclusion, and spontaneous helpfulness to be especially common in Mexican and Indigenous-heritage children and families.Footnote ⁵ (These studies also emerged from insights from Shari Ellis, Eugene Matusov, Chikako Toma, Leslie Moore, Ruth Paradise, Gilda Morelli, Pablo Chavajay, Cathy Angelillo, Rebeca Mejía-Arauz, Maricela Correa-Chávez, Behnosh Najafi, Angélica López-Fraire, Lucía Alcalá, Andrew Coppens, Omar Ruvalcaba, Itzel Aceves-Azuara, and Andy Dayton.)

The 1993 Monograph also pointed to the importance of nonverbal conversation among Mayan families. This led to further studies showing the skill and effectiveness of nonverbal conversation as a key feature of collaboration among Indigenous-heritage and Mexican children and families (with Rebeca Mejía-Arauz, Amy Dexter, and Omar Ruvalcaba).

These lines of research are all aspects of Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors (LOPI; formerly Intent Community Participation; Rogoff et al., 2003; Rogoff & Mejía-Arauz, Reference Rogoff and Mejía-Arauz2022).Footnote ⁶ LOPI is a way of learning that appears to be especially common in Indigenous communities of the Americas. The seven interrelated facets of the LOPI prism reflect many of the ideas that I have mentioned in this chapter: intergenerational inclusion, collaborative initiative, fluid collaboration, learning as a process of growth in transformation of participation, learning through keen attention and contributing, and communication and evaluation based in shared endeavors.

The LOPI research is ongoing in several ways. For about twenty years, I have been convening an international, interdisciplinary research consortium focused on LOPI, now consisting of about sixty scholars. And with my most recent students, Itzel Aceves-Azuara and Andy Dayton, we are looking at changes and continuities in LOPI across generations in Mayan and Cherokee communities.

I hope that our work and this chapter continue to contribute to the unending conversation that Kenneth Burke once described in his analogy of generations contributing to a long-standing conversation. We each arrive late to the conversation, try to figure out what has been discussed before, and try to add our two cents to move the conversation along productively. I hope this chapter clarifies my two cents, as well as highlighting the mutually constituting nature of the inquiry and ideas across generations and cultural communities.