Paradigm Shifts in Repertoires of Practices

• In Event: Cultural-Ecological Frameworks for Understanding and Impacting Opportunity to Learn

Abstract

Although there are many calls to get beyond assembly-line instruction in schools and beyond deficit thinking about cultural communities, such changes have been difficult to accomplish to protect status quo and privilege and because it’s difficult for people to recognize paradigms and make paradigm shifts.

The paper describes a paradigm that contrasts systemically with assembly-line instruction. The contrasts are not a simple conglomeration of variables, but instead have a coherence in common repertoires of practices (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) of a number of Indigenous-heritage and Mestizo communities of the Americas.

This approach — Learning by Observing and Pitching In to the activities of the family and community (LOPI, Rogoff, 2014) — differs from assembly-line instruction in paradigmatic ways: in their theories of learning, social organization at an organizational level, social organization at a personal level, the means of learning and supporting learning, basis of motivation, goals of learning, forms of communication, and ways that learning is assessed. These two paradigms connect with cultural values regarding the importance of relationships versus task completion, assumptions about the nature of time, worldview, and relations between humans and the natural world.

An important underexplored research area is how people navigate across settings, as noted by Kris Gutiérrez and Carol Lee. Many children daily navigate between contrasting paradigms, as they move between home and school or between the cultural heritages of different branches of their families. In the process, they may develop repertoires of practices that allow them to function skillfully in several paradigms. Accordingly, the next generation combines, adapts, rejects, and invents cultural practices that allow them to manage their daily lives. Research on the ways that children from nondominant or mixed backgrounds navigate the contrasting paradigms of different settings is an important theoretical and empirical tool, in addition to having great practical importance.

An important part of the picture involves the adults who populate and control the different settings, many of whom have experience in only the dominant paradigm (such as assembly-line instruction, in many school settings). For these adults, recognizing and becoming skilled in the repertoires of practices of another paradigm may be very challenging.

The paper discusses research examining difficulties for well-meaning adults in shifting paradigms. Even when they want to enlarge their repertoires of practice, it is often difficult to avoid value judgments based on their familiar paradigm and to see the paradigmatic basis of their own cultural experience as well as the paradigms in ways of life that are new to them. Data are from several design experiments in which adults from different cultural backgrounds attempted to scaffold supports for learning with students from different cultural backgrounds from the adults. These studies revealed challenges for teachers and parents who are trying to expand their practices to be able to engage effectively with institutions and children whose cultural background is likely to involve a paradigm for learning that contrasts with the adults’ own experience

These findings document the challenges of navigating repertoires of practice across settings.

Author

• Barbara Rogoff, University of California - Santa Cruz