Complexities of Participation in Cultural Practices as Essential and Normative

• In Event: Dismantling Racial Injustice: Contributions of the Science of Learning and Development

Abstract

Among the most consequential dimensions of this evolving science of human learning and development is the centrality of participation in cultural practices. As psychological sciences have slowly moved away from the idea of fixed ability (even though fields still use measures of a presumed I.Q.) to consider participation in cultural practices, in education there has been a more recent history of articulating presumed hierarchies of cultural practices that are presumed to inhibit learning (e.g. the popularized idea of a culture of poverty) that also include pushing pedagogical strategies of academic remediation that are largely imposed on students of color and students from low-income communities. However, there is an abundance of empirical evidence–much developed by members of this panel over the decades– documenting the affordances and human possibilities of learning and development through people’s participation in routine and deeply diverse cultural practices. This body of research incorporates research design and analytical methods that help us understand the multiple communities of practices and associated identities that people recruit as they engage in problem-solving; h the ways that historical contexts make available opportunities and challenges; and windows into resisting the box problem of attributing singular and uncomplicated identities. For example, the conceptions of race in the U.S. do not account for the histories and identity resources that peoples of African descent in this country experience–including those whose ancestors were the enslaved in the U.S., those whose families migrated from Central and South America, those whose families immigrated from the Caribbean, and those who have in recent decades immigrated from the African continent. Understanding movement within and across spaces, understanding what range of identity repertoires people recruit, and understanding how cultural communities evolve over time and space are all tools for how understanding and supporting community efforts to resist and dismantle systems of racism, here and abroad.

Authors

• Barbara Rogoff, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley

• Geoffrey B. Saxe, University of California - Berkeley