Barbara Rogoff’s Human Development and the Sociocultural Theory
Barbara Rogoff’s Human Development and
theSociocultural Theory
Raquel Rico
EDCI 6304-Learning and Cognition
Barbara Rogoff is a Founding Professor of Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz. She received her Ph. D. in 1977 from Harvard University. Dr. Rogoff conducts research on human development and how learning interacts with a person’s cultural community. In the 1960’s through the 1970’s, she researched cross-cultural psychology overseas and cultural disadvantages in the U.S. Between 1978 and the 1990’s, she concentrated in cultural psychology and sociocultural research building upon the Russian Psychologist Lev Vygotsky’sSociocultural Theory. Today Dr. Rogoff continues research on child development through social and cultural practices. She is internationally recognized as a scholar in the field of developmental psychology.
Dr. Rogoff and her research group focus on cultural variation in learning processes. They have special interests in cultural aspects of collaboration, learning through observation, children’s interests and attention to ongoing events, roles of the adults as guides, and children’s opportunities to participate in cultural activities. She has given special emphasis on indigenous-heritage communities of Central America and North America where she argues that children learn through observation of community events and through collaboration and engagement. Her research also focuses on the structure of informal learning, communities where schooling has not been prevalent, and research on informal learning in innovative elementary schools. Her theoretical work focus on three planes of analysis: Individual, interpersonal, and community or cultural. The first plane states that a person engages in learning through community or institutional settings. This is also known as the Apprenticeship plane. The second plane involves a person engaging in learning through interpersonal situations with others, known as “guided participation.” And the third plane states that a person engages in learning in their own personal ways through participation and reflection in their own community or culture.
Dr. Rogoff is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, the American Anthropological Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Educational Research Association. She has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, a Kellogg Fellow, a Spencer Fellow, and an Osher Fellow of the Exploratorium. She has also served as an Editor of Human Development and of the Newsletter of the Society for Research in Child Development, a Study Section member for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and a committee member on the Science of Learning for the National Academy of Science. In 2004, she was selected to give the UC Santa Cruz Faculty Research Lecture.
Other achievements include her published books, “Apprenticeship in Thinking” (1990) which received the Scribner Award from the American Educational Research Association. This book provides evidence of developmental culture from various disciplines like cognitive, developmental, and cultural psychology; anthropology; infancy studies; and communication research. Her other book, “The Cultural Nature of Human Development” (2003) won the William James Book Award of the American Psychological Association. In this book, Dr. Rogoff has compiled the work for the past three or four decades on cultural processes that are important in human development. Dr. Rogoff argues that cognitive development does not only involve skills and knowledge but that it is a “growing sophistication” of collaboration with other people in everyday life. In the book she also talks about child development and describes learning as a process of “guided participation” shared by the child and an adult in their own community. The book “Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community” (2004) was finalist for the Maccoby Award of the American Psychologist Association.
Dr. Rogoff is also a faculty member at the Center for Informal Learning and Schools, CILS. The CILS was funded by the National Science Foundation in 2002 to conduct research on informal learning, science education infrastructure, and the connections between in and out of school science learning. Today, the research groups are focused on 1. theoretical work on the structure of informal learning distinguishing between “intent participation” involving collaborative participation between learners and experts and “assembly-line preparation” based on a hierarchical structure where there is no collaboration, 2. research on structures of learning settings in communities where school has not been prevalent and how these children learn outside of a school practice, and 3. research on informal learning in an innovative elementary school. This elementary school prioritizes learning through intent participation where both adults and children, including volunteer parents, collaborate in the learning process by organizing the curriculum according to the children’s interests instead of the traditional method. Dr. Rogoff says that one of the goals of the school is to teach children to have responsibility because this will make them want to learn. Allowing them to choose their activities will help them achieve that responsibility.
An experiment that proved to be very helpful in developing mathematical skills was one in which the teacher asked the children to choose a topic that they were interested in. The children decided that they wanted to talk and work with the word pizza. They drew pizzas and divided them in pieces allowing the children to learn about fractions and other math concepts. Therefore, her research in this elementary school in Salt Lake City has proven to be very useful when considering teaching approaches in math, literacy, and other areas of the curriculum.
This theory focuses on what adults and children can do when they engage in a good learning experience. Allowing children to become more involved would certainly make a difference for those children who are extremely intelligent and the class curriculum bores them. Those children would benefit from this type of instruction because it would let them express themselves freely and this would keep them from any mischief which they tend to get into when they are not challenged. The only problem would be to get more parents to volunteer their time to interact with the classroom because the majority of the community cannot or will not volunteer because of work, school, etc.
Dr. Rogoff’s main focus is to get the community to become involved with their children. She emphasizes on the importance of adults and children learning together and how cultural processes are involved in all of children’s learning. According to Dr. Rogoff, the key to school reform, which many people desire, is to emphasize collaborative work between children, teachers, and parents.
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