Chapter 25 - Transforming by Participating

Summary

Barbara Rogoff reflects on the sources and pathway of her work on understanding culture and individual learning as aspects of a mutually constituting process. She describes her efforts across decades to convey the idea that learning is a process of transforming one’s participation in cultural communities, which simultaneously contributes to transforming and maintaining the communities’ cultural practices. As ways of getting traction on understanding and researching from the mutually constituting perspective, Rogoff offers the metaphors of lenses that bring aspects of the overall process into focus, and fractals that aid in seeing the similarity of cultural patterns across both small moments and generations. She connects these ideas with several concepts and lines of research that she and her colleagues have contributed: everyday cognition, guided participation, Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI) to family and community endeavors, interdependence with autonomy, collaborative initiative, simultaneous attention, fluid collaboration, and “Barbara’s do-do theory.”