Sara Pintauro

Theorist Presentation Speech Notes

03/02/17

My theorist presentation is on Barbara Rogof

-Barbara was born on January 5th, 1950 in Brookings, South Dakota.

-She attended Pomona College and University of Geneva then got her Ph. D at
Harvard University in 1997.
-She was married in 1975 to Salem Magarian, a pediatrician and had 3 children with
him named Luisa, Valerie, and David.
-She focused her attention on cognitive development in social context.

She was a field psychologist and ethnographer at the institute of nutrition of central
america and panama, guatemala city, and guatemala from 1974 to 1975.
She worked her way up throughout the years at University of Utah, starting as an
assistant professor, becoming an associate professor, then she became a professor of
psychology in 1985.
She was also a coordinator of the cross-cultural psychology program
On top of this all, she wrote several amazing great works

Rogof supported Piaget and Vygotskys ideas, but mainly focused on expanding on
Vygotskys ideas.
In specifically, she expanded on his idea of zone of proximal development which is
the diference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do
with help.
She created something called guided participation which is a construct that assumes
that both guidance and participation in culturally valued activities are essential to
childrens apprenticeship in thinking.
She believed that both adult-child and child-child interactions are important to a
childs cognitive development.
She thought that adult-child relationships were more meant for important skill
development, as they can assist a child on learning something new more than his or
her peers could.
Although, she believed that child-child peer interaction was necessary to develop a
childs shift in perspective.

Many cultures use apprenticeships as a way of gradually introducing children to

particular skills and trades in the adult community- perhaps weaving, tailoring, or
playing a musical instrument.
Shown in the picture left is a father teaching his child a skill in the adult community-
which in this case is playing the piano.
Adult-child learning is also efective when a child needs to correctly acquire a new
skill such as how to operate a microscope. The guidance from a thoughtful, patient
adult is more beneficial when it comes to this type of skill as well.
Although, child-child learning has a more beneficial efect when childrens
development requires that they abandon old perspectives in favor of new, more
complex ones, regarding their understanding of the purposes of friendship in a
persons life.

Unlike many researchers that believe there are specific times where a child should
have learned something knew, Rogof believes that It is important not to give too
much weight to specific age expectations because the age at which children begin to
contribute to specific activities is strongly related to the sort of supports and
constraints ofered by their community.
For example, the picture on the right shows a 10 year old boy splitting the firewood.
Here, Mayan children in the Guatemalan town Rogof studied in began to make a real
contribution to household work by age 4-6 years, tending infants, delivering
messages, helping with meals, and running errands around town. By 8-10 years they
were valuable and competent assistants, making meals, weaving, supervising the
household or family shop and tending crops.

Rogofs ICP model is about investigating how children learn by observing activities of
their families and communities It has 7 important parts.

The first one is the center of the diagram. It explains that community organization of
learning is when the learner is incorporated and contributing to family and
community endeavors.

The second one is about motive. It states that the learner is eager to contribute and
belong. While others motive is to accomplish endeavor and possibly to guide.

The third on the chart is social organization of endeavors, which is collaborative,

flexible ensemble, fluidly coordinating and blending ideas, agendas, and pace. Here
all engage, and anyone may take the initiative.

The 4th part of the chart is the goal of learning which is to transform participation,
learn consideration and responsibility along with information and skills, to contribute
and belong in the community.

The 5th part of the chart says that learning is by means of wide, keen attention and
contribution, current or anticipated, to events. With guidance from community wide
expectations and sometimes people.

The 6th part of the chart says that communication is based on coordination through
shared reference in collective endeavors, using nonverbal and verbal conversation.
Such as narratives and dramatizations

Lastly, the 7th part of the chart explains that assessment appraises both the
learners mastery and the supports that are provided. This is in order to aid learners
contributions, during the endeavor. Its about receiving feedback from satisfactory of
contribution and its acceptance or correction.

People develop as participants in cultural communities. And their development can

be understood only in light of the cultural practices and circumstances of their
communities.
The left is a picture of a 6-year old Mayan girl who is a skilled caregiver for her baby
cousin. The right is a picture of an 11 month old in the Ituri Forest of the Democratic
Republic of Congo, skillfully cutting a fruit with a machete, under the watchful eye of
a relative

So at what age do children develop responsibility for others or sufficient skill and
judgment to handle dangerous implements? IT DEPENDS on their circumstances and
traditions

Many of Rogof's ideas about the understanding of human development and how a
relationship is conceptualized stemmed from whiting and whitings psycho-cultural
model and bronfenbrenner's ecological system.
On the left, it describes a child's human development as the product of a chain of
social and cultural circumstances surrounding the child..
-began with environment, led to the history, then groups maintenance systems,
child's learning environment, the childs individual.
Similarly, Bronfenbrenner's model on the right, as we are all familiar with, also shows
that an individual and larger contexts are conceived as existing separately,
definable independently of each other, related in a hierarchical fashion as the
larger contexts afect the smaller ones, which in turn afect the individual.

Key to Rogofs approach is the emphasis on the processes involved in human

activity.
Emphasize that human development is a process of peoples changing
participation in sociocultural activities of their communities
People contribute to the processes involved in sociocultural activities at the
same time that they inherit practices invented by others
Rather than individual development being influenced by culture, people
develop as they participate in and contribute to cultural activities that
themselves develop with the involvement of people in successive generations.
As people develop through their shared use of cultural tools and practices,
they simultaneously contribute to the transformation of cultural tools,
practices, and institutions.

Here, Information about relations with other people and the purpose and setting of
the activity is removed. Here, social relations are being investigated first by studying
the child apart from other people. When she asked people to guess what this child is
doing, their speculations are hesitant and vague: Thinking? Being punished?
Reading?
The roles of other people such as parents, peers, teachers, and so on are relevant.
Here, the social influences are examined through correlating the actions of separate
entities. The arrows are to include an efect of the active child on the other people.
When she asked people to make further guesses about what the child was doing,
they didnt come up with anything more specific than the previous picture
The arrows in this photo relate the child with culture. When cultural influences are
added, represented by the book and the cupboard, the child remains separate from
them, analyzed without regard for what they are doing together in sociocultural
activities. When she asked people to guess what the child was doing, people became
more certain that the child is reading.

Here, the child is highlighted, with him being the focus of analysis. At the same time,
interpersonal and cultural-institutional information is available in the background. A
general sense of these things are necessary to understand what the child is doing,
although the child's eforts have more of an emphasis. When she asked people what
the child was doing, they now got much more specific saying playing a game.. Oh
its scrabble.. Hes thinking about his next turn.. Its in a classroom..

If instead you wanted to study the development of the child, we would be interested
in the relationships among that child and the people beside him, focusing on what
they are doing together. This would involve interpersonal focus of analysis.

Here, we background the details regarding the particular people and their
relationships with each other.
By doing this, we see the history of the activities and the transformations toward the
future in which people and their communities engage.

This picture represents the problem when researchers recognize the importance of
culture but leave out the equally important role of the people who constitute cultural
activities. Its just like the first picture, with the child alone, where it doesnt make
sense to try to study cultural processes without considering the contributions of
people involved.
With these images we are able to see how personal, interpersonal, and cultural
aspects of human activity are conceived as diferent views of mutually processes,
and how important it is to involve human activity.
OPTIONAL - Go back to the first picture.
So basically here, when youre observing the child alone you dont know whats going
on, and here where you incorporate the roles of others but leave them separate, you
acknowledge they exist but you still dont know whats going on. When you add in the
cultural information of the book and cupboard, you can take better guesses of whats
going on but you still dont know. Now when you put everything together but only
focus on the child, you only think about what the child might be doing. Although the
best way to observe a child is by looking at him interacting with others here, where
you can see the childs relationships with the other people and what they are doing
together. Here is where you get the true and whole sense of what is going on.
There isnt necessarily a single best or right way for a culture to promote
cognitive development People can and should learn to do things more than one way
-Programs should usually not substitute one cultural pattern for another.
-Instead, programs can assist people in learning new ways of doing things while
maintaining other ways, and can help people learn when to use each approach.
Discipline It depends!
-Soften your directives to students in the interest of creating a more equal climate.
-There are situations in which reprimands can be confirming, and can strengthen
relationships.