Workshop on Understanding and Promoting Knowledge Accumulation in Education:

Tools and Strategies for Education Research

Day 1 – June 30, 2003

Remarks by Dr Barbara Rogoff

DR. BARBARA ROGOFF: Well, I think the assignment to do the Rorschach Test for us all, but I think my assignment is to speak to you about the study of culture in learning as a case study in how we can think about education research more generally, but just as a case study.

The importance of culture in learning for the educational scene in the United States is remarked on in the National Academy of Science book, How People Learn. I was on the committee that - on the science of learning - that produced the book, How People Learn, and one of the central ideas of the book is that in education it is essential to pay attention to where learners are coming from, “the importance of prior learning,” was how it was stated in the book. Prior learning, of course, has to do with all kinds of aspects of how children come to school and live their lives while they are in school.

In the overhead that you see here, I put two kids who have very different living environments. They are also very different from the way I think probably everybody in this room grew up, both of them.

The little guy on the left lives in France and he’s 20 months old, and he is using a computer program that he pushes, he’ll get some little animal sound - animal and its sound to imitate. Remarkable.

The little kid on your right is a child of 11 months. He lives in the Aturi(?) Forest in Zaire. He is an FA child, and he is holding a machete and cutting fruit with a machete, and he is doing it safely and skillfully. In the background, his grandmother is watching and I’m sure that provides a little measure of extra assistance if there is any trouble. Also remarkable. Both are remarkable.

If we look at the sort of range of living environments around the world, there is a lot of remarkable things that one doesn’t understand from any one of the others without giving some thought to the cultural aspects of how children are developing.

So I put the two kids up there mainly as just an anchor for our thoughts about culture and development. In the schools in the United States, I read recently that in the 100 largest school districts in the United States, 70 percent of the kids are African American, Native American or Latino. That is a very different population than most of the research that has been done.

The question of generalization must attend to questions of culture, and it has not done very much so far, although I’m going to be showing you in subsequent slides is a little brief case history of where we have come from and are in the study of culture and learning than I have to say, I hope it’s - I mean, a 20-minute sort of overview of this large area won’t really do it justice, but I am going to give a flavor for - when we talk about knowledge accumulation - I like that revision of the term. When we talk about knowledge accumulation, it is a developmental question, not development of the individual children, but development of fields of knowledge, fields of understanding, and in the case of culture and learning, there have been cycles, and I hope that you’ll see them as I put the next slides up, from theoretical assumptions and ways of looking at things to empirical work based on the theory, to revisions of theory and methods that go with revisions of theory to more empirical work and so on.

And I think that when we think about knowledge accumulation it is important to think not of the magic-bullet study that is going to solve everything at once, but of the process of learning which, for a field, is not too different from what it is for an individual where it is - it gets revised. It requires thinking about changes, about methods as well as general assumptions, as well as gathering information.

So let’s look at the next slide.

And starting in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with research that these three - I am going to tell you about three lines of work. I put an overhead on - I mean, I put a piece of paper on almost every seat. I didn’t have quite enough. So I’m sorry. If you don’t have one, look on your neighbor’s. Well, actually, don’t look on your neighbor’s. It’s just to have, because I’m going to show you on the overheads.

I’m going to tell you about three lines of research in the ‘60s and ‘70s, to start us off. The first, cross-cultural psychology. That basically involved taking ideas about cognition and taking tests to other places overseas and applying the test to see if the people over there did things the way that the people over here - wherever “here” is - usually, Europe and the United States - whether they did our tricks(?) our way.

That research was done in the areas of memory, conservation, that kind of work, and the results of work - there were a huge number of studies, I should mention. I want to give you an idea of where the heavy empirical work has been. There were a number of studies, 100. That is huge in this area, 100 studies, and they kind of petered out in the late ‘70s, and one of the reasons was that the findings were quite clear, that it mattered what context one was evaluating learning in, both the context of the evaluation and the kind of context the learning experiences of the people who were participating in the study.

This led to a questioning about assumptions that, until that point, had been held about the generality of thinking, that if you gave a test in one area, you would know about how much a person knew, and it made the whole area step back and say, “Hey, we have been making some assumptions,” and it was across developmental and learning theories at that time that there was not much attention to the domain of understanding or the context of the evaluation or the learning experience of the individuals involved.

Next overhead.

At the same time, there was a lot of work going on in the area of cultural “disadvantage” poverty kind of research, and that research involved a lot of IQ testing and testing of academic achievement as well as tests of maternal teaching or observations of maternal teaching styles. Most of that work also assumed generality and had problems associated, and most of that work worked on a deficit model, the idea of, “Why aren’t those people doing our tricks our way?” And the deficits in the case of ‘60s and ‘70s were not just assumed to be in the genes, but in family practices. So I am criticizing , and so would everybody else in this field, that approach.

The third area of research in the 1960s and 1970s was - there was a body of anthropological work that was examining folks’ systems of thought, including the kind of ethno-botany that was mentioned earlier, and ethno-graphic studies of how skillfully skilled navigators could sail across from one end of Polynesia to the other, based on the kinds of knowledge that are used in traditional navigation, legal reasoning and so on, and those results were very different than what one would get in the cognitive tests that were also being given at the same time.

Similarly, there was research going on in the United States on socio-linguistic variation, where it was clear that people who - observed in a laboratory sort of mumbled around with their words. If you went outside the laboratory, they were persuading the researcher to do - they were using their fancy argumentation and rhetoric to get what they needed done done.

So this whole line of work really - it was occurring rather separately in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but it had in common the assumption of generality, and then the research results that questioned that assumption.

Next overhead.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s - I’m putting it ‘78 to ‘90s, although this is rather rough - the field of cultural psychology, socio-cultural research - I’m using those roughly equivalently for today’s purposes - it emerged, and one of its main goals, as I see it, was to search for a theory that allowed us to take context into account, rather than assuming, as had happened in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that whatever you looked at in your test was a window on general functioning.

One is the very influential events was the translation of Vygotsky’s work in 1978 into English. There had been a little bit of translation before that, but Mind in Society was translated in 1978. It was very influential as a theory that gave a chance to see how we could use both context and individual aspects of development in the same view, so that Vygotsky’s theory, in short, argued that individual development is a function of social and cultural involvements. That is very brief, but before - and there were some other - and I should say there is some other theoretical - that also had an influence, but I’m just, for the sake of today, referring to the - 1978 was very influential in being able to use Vygotsky’s theory to get beyond the assumptions of generality.

I put up a little site there to - a paper that I brought along, and some of you have access to, and I have put in parenthesis a few other things that I happen to have brought along, my own work, that I brought along in case anybody wants to see in more detail the kind of empirical work that I am reviewing in a 20-minute little stretch here, not my own, but the kind of work of the field.

At the same time as Vygotsky’s theory was becoming influential, there was a connecting up with language socialization research. This is work out of anthropology and linguistics that looked at - very closely - in ethnographic discourse analysis kinds of ways how little children in Samoa, in New Guinea, in the Carolinas, how those children learned to speak in their own communities. That was also very influential in this direction.

Another line that was connected with this, but not so much theoretically as empirically influential, was all the work that I think probably most of you have read about in the newspapers or maybe even have been involved with on international studies comparing math and other kinds of performance across nations. Why are the Japanese ahead of U.S. students in math? A whole line of research in that area, which emerged from the earlier research that was done in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and that research also underlined the importance of not looking at simply the performance independent of the context of performance, so that if we want to understand how Japanese and U.S. children perform in math, we have to think about class size, resources, national budget, values regarding achievement, teaching practices of many sorts, parental support of many sorts, population variations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The idea of the single variable it was questioned through all of this.

At the same time, U.S. minority research was really pressuring to get beyond the deficit model. This is still happening in the ‘70s and ‘80s and into the ‘90s fairly independently of the cultural psychology line, although there are some overlaps.

One of the conclusions drawn from that work is there is no such thing as a culture-free test. There was a call for normative developmental research because so little research with U.S. minorities had involved understanding, “Okay. How do the so-called minority kids develop?” Most of the work was sort of focused on a deficit model that we didn’t and still don’t have much information on ordinary, normal development in those groups.

And then there was a call for getting beyond the idea that the dominant group on whom most of the normative research had been done, that the dominant group was normal for standard.

This is, I think, one of the most important aspects of all the lines of research that I have been talking about so far questioning the kind of research that has been done that is focused on mainly middle-class European American kids that made generalizations to the world. So if we are trying to talk about science, one of the most important conclusions from this work is to make generalizations about human children. We need to get beyond regarding one population as a stand-in for normal human development and realize that all humans are participants in cultural communities.

Okay. Next - oh, wait. Not next. Throughout this, in these lines of research in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, there was a growth of interest in interdisciplinary work and ethno-graphic methods. It was clear that the testing that had been done in the ‘60s and ‘70s was a really shallow form of information all by itself, and the ethno-graphic information, looking very closely at what happened within families or within communities, was an essential part of interpreting what was going on. So there was a growth of interest in ethno-graphic methods and also in using the wisdom of a variety of disciplines coming together.

So where we are now is that the socio-cultural research and “minority research” are coming together. There is a whole lot more speaking together of the two lines. There is a greater recognition that cultural processes are involved in all children’s learning, and there is, among some, although I don’t think enough yet, the idea that quantitative and qualitative research are both necessary and integrating them can provide us something beyond what we could do with either alone.

Within the current directions of research, to just sort of sum up where we are in current theory and research, the cognitive aspects of current research on culture and learning emphasize the importance of understanding cognition in terms of the cultural practices that are involved.

Looking at tests, for example, as a socio-cultural setting where you need to know how to do what is done in tests - and some of us have a lot of experience in that if we have a lot of - spent a lot of time in school and our parents have spent a lot of time in school, we know how to do test questions from age one year. Whereas, people who have never been given a question like, “Where is your belly button?” - and it’s not a question that the questioner doesn’t have the information on, very much like Mehan(?) has pointed out as being very common in the discourse of schooling, huge differences in whether people have familiarity with the kinds of formats that are used in testing.

There has also been attention to - this has brought attention to the formats of engagement in families and in schools like to what extent are people collaborating versus excluded from collaboration, and how much known-answer testing goes on in families and in schools, the kind of question I just gave you about, “When did Columbus cross the ocean?” or, “Where is your belly button?” It’s the same question.

Also, there is a great deal of attention now to cultural tools as an aspect of our thinking. Tools like number systems. If you were asked to multiply 324 by 576 and you didn’t have your pencil and paper, you might give a little bit more attention to the cultural tools that were missing that you usually count on and don’t think of - most of us don’t think about the cultural tools we are using as a part of our cognitive processing, but we depend on them in ways that the work on culture and learning has come to realize is an important part of our understanding, how cognition works.

In terms of how we currently think about cultural processes, it is much more looking at culture dynamically, historically, rather than as a static characteristic of individuals. So we need to understand culture dynamically in order to understand changing cultural tools, understanding cognitive opportunities like who has access to - observing adults in their ordinary activities. Middle-class children often don’t. Children in some rural communities more often do.

For understanding changes across time and historical circumstances in who has access to schooling itself and what kind of schooling, the kinds of things that were talked about in the two talks previously.

And for understanding the formats of schooling itself, so looking at culture in a much more dynamic fashion.

Some of the challenges that are - and controversies that are currently going on is that often the word “culture” is used interchangeably with race and ethnicity, and I would argue, and I think that there would be disagreement on this, that we need to distinguish what communities of people do when we talk about culture, not just what ethnicity or racial group they could be labeled as.

There is also a need for a focus on community-level cultural processes, rather than just identifying individual categories, so that - there is not really very much work on how we can characterize the practices of whole communities, in terms of how we understand learning.

The question of generality is one that is controversial. I would argue that it is an empirical question that we can’t simply take any one of the labels that are commonly used for ethnic groups and assume that what we find in one group with that label applies to other groups with that label, that we need to be doing empirical work to find out to what extent there are similarities, say within different Latino groups labeled “Latino.” To what extent are there similarities between people from the community of San Pedro in Guatemala, where I have done research, and people from the next community over, San Juan, where I have done no work, but I would assume there are some similarities, and there are some differences. I think it is empirical work that needs to be done to understand the generality, rather than assuming that we should be getting representative populations that will automatically fit that whole category.

We also need to be, at this point - I think there have been a lot of theoretical advances in how we think about culture and learning, but it is time for us to be doing more empirical work on it. I think there is a shortage of empirical work, and it is up to the practitioners of research to be turning their attention more to that.

And then next overhead. There are some impediments to some of the research that needs to be done. One is that I think it is commonly accepted that most of the journals protect turf and the turf is often defined on disciplinary lines. Whereas, a lot of the interesting work is interdisciplinary, and this involves methodological rigidity. Rather than what methods are needed to answer what question, the methods are somehow driving things, and we saw this in an earlier discussion today, that a particular method is seen as the only one, and some of those say, you have to have control groups, and others say you can’t have control groups, and some have - and, depending on which journal you go to, you’ll see which methodological rigidity is being protected.

Next.

There is also a problem of premature standardization, not that there has been a lot of it, but that the calls for standardization I think would short circuit the empirical work that needs to be done in order to find out what are the regularities across communities and across contexts that we could use to develop some statements of - I think general laws is a little bit too much to state, but regularities and actually the book that I have - I brought a copy of a book that I have written recently, The Cultural Nature of Human Development, in which I am trying to lay out what are some of the regularities in how culture plays a role in human development, and just to give you an idea of the extent of literature, there’s 40 pages of references there, most of them empirical. There is a lot of literature, but most of what we have done so far is say that culture matters, and there haven’t been enough efforts yet to state in what ways does culture matter. What are the regularities of cultural aspects of human development? That is a goal for the future.

In order to achieve it, we need to have lines of research that build on prior studies, not standardization, because from each study, we learn something that allows us to refine our questions, our theories and our ways of doing research. In some areas, standardization may be a good thing, but in terms of understanding culture and human development it is not something that we should be doing at this point in a big way, some small ways may be appropriate.

And, finally, we need to have interdisciplinary conversations in working-group meetings, and that is also hard to achieve, because most societies are also disciplinarily organized. So some of the ways that progress could be made in having discussions across disciplinary - across people doing research - among people doing research across disciplines is hard to arrange, because people don’t just naturally run into each other at their standard annual or biannual meeting, and if there were working-group meetings that brought people together around problems, I think that that would help the progress in this area.

I hope that in these remarks you have an idea, as a case study, how this field has had sort of ebbs and flows of heavy empirical work, theoretical reconsideration, methodological changes, methodological developments, and I don’t know to what extent this field generalizes to other fields, but hopefully it serves a purpose for the meetings here, as a case study in which to talk about the accumulation of understanding as sort of a - making qualitative changes in understanding - I don’t know if that term will speak to all of you. In developmental psych it means rather than thinking of knowledge being accumulated in little bits, it can have stages of change that are not straightforward and just accumulation, but cumulation with revision, argument, discussion and revision that changes the shape of things as it goes.

So thank you very much.