Fluid Collaboration in Cherokee Families and Communities

• In Event:  Collaboration, Togetherness, and Mutuality; Strengths of Learning among Indigenous Children and Families of the Americas

Abstract

This study describes a specific cultural pattern of collaborative practice that can be observed across developmental time scales from the microgenetic to the cultural/historical. The study examines videotaped social interaction among Cherokee children and their families in three situations, each of which make sense as collaboration at microgenetic scales all the way to historical scales of generations.
The three situations are: 3 groups of 2 children playing a game that can be played cooperatively or competitively; children and their mothers participating in an interview about Cherokee ways of organizing family and community activities; and a group of about 50 middle and high school students in a naturalistic school activity day, some of whom choose to play that same game – all in the context of a Cherokee community aiding a junior researcher to do his dissertation.
At the microgenetic scale, the Cherokee children’s collaboration in the three situations showed a particularly skillful Indigenous embodied approach to learning: fluid collaboration. In close interactions, fluid collaboration is a kind of mutual embodiment often found among Indigenous and Indigenous-heritage children throughout the Americas (Dayton, Aceves-Azuara, & Rogoff, 2022; Mejía-Arauz et al., 2007). The children evidenced fluid collaboration by establishing the pace of shared activity mutually, with their moves flexibly adjusted and responsive to one another and the demands of their shared endeavors, in line with the description of Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors (Rogoff & Mejía-Arauz, 2022).
The observations of Cherokee children's fluid collaboration at a micro scale of 25 millisecond segments, which is faster than individual human reaction time, connect meaningfully and fundamentally with how families collaborate fluidly, actively managing their decision making, in a fluid way that adapts to circumstances spanning days and years.
Patterns of engagement of Cherokee families at a cultural/historical scale include intergenerational collaboration as a traditional Cherokee community practice (Smith, 200, Teuton, 2012). These sophisticated ways of creating, organizing, and sustaining collaborative engagement have persisted in Cherokee communities for countless generations.
This study reveals how the historic scale prioritizing intergenerational collaboration is also seen in the three settings. In all three settings, Cherokee children and adults organized to foster fluid collaboration in community learning contexts, from organizing children’s participation in a researcher’s game, to organizing family intergenerational outings and family supports, to middle- and high-school youth taking care of family relations in a freetime community activity. The study demonstrates that these community values show at all time scales simultaneously, from moment-to-moment interactions between children to community wide collaboration unfolding continuously across generations for millennia. The study puts forward a claim that social interaction can be fruitfully studied using a fractal approach to understand developmental processes at all scales.

Authors

• Andrew Dayton, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author

• Barbara Rogoff, University of California - Santa Cruz