Abstract
This paper brings three bodies of work that share an intellectual and social history into conversation to engage several key ideas in cultural historical theories of learning and development. Anchoring the discussion around the contributions of Luis Moll, the paper highlights the intersections and shared theoretical and methodological commitments across the work of Kris Gutiérrez, Barbara Rogoff and Luis Moll. We discuss how each of us has contributed to understanding the importance of context and everyday practices in youth and children and youths’ learning, attending especially to building on the strengths of Latine children and families in learning activities. We show the relationship between Luis’ concept of households’ Funds of Knowledge and Gutiérrez and Rogoff’s concept of repertoires of practice, Rogoff’s perspective on mutually constituting processes, and Gutiérrez’s contribution focusing on how people develop repertoires of practice and Funds of Knowledge in their movement across the practices and ecologies of everyday life.
We are pleased to be part of this volume to engage some of Luis Moll’s many consequential ideas and contributions that leave an important legacy in the study of culture and learning. We take the opportunity to reflect on several ways that the work of our colleague and friend Luis Moll and our own bodies of work connect and align. We had numerous connections: intellectual, personal and cultural, with many formal and informal conversations about shared ideas. This should not be surprising since we share a cultural historical orientation to learning and development and how we view human learning activity; we also share a number of theoretical and methodological commitments within the transformative aims our work seeks.
All three of us, although in different eras, have had a long history of involvement with the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) and its faculty, especially Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner. It was at the precursor of LCHC, the Institute for Comparative Human Development at Rockefeller University, that Barbara met Luis Moll through Mike Cole. Later, Kris met Luis Moll through Mike Cole at LCHC at the University of California, San Diego, where she has been an affiliated faculty since the early 1990s.
We three were heavily influenced by the 1978 translation of Vygotsky’s Mind in Society. We have all leveraged cultural historical theoretical approaches, in our different ways. A distinguishing premise in our shared cultural historical approach is that the structure and development of human psychological processes emerge through participation in culturally, historically developing everyday activity involving cultural practices and tools (Cole, 1996; Gutiérrez, 2008, 2016; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Moll, 1990, 2010; Rogoff, 1990, 2003).
We all have used this theoretical approach for empirical and practical work studying and supporting the learning of children and youth. This means connecting theory with research and practice, as well as focusing on everyday activities and life to capture the full range of people’s practices. This has involved conceptual and methodological approaches that attend to people’s learning in participation and movement within and across the practices of everyday life. Collectively, we have challenged narrow conceptions of Latine and immigrant communities and their language and other cultural practices. We share a commitment to understanding and leveraging the rich toolkits of Latine children and families, and to countering deficit approaches with evidence of the rich repertoires of students and families.
To delve into our common interests, we focus on several key ideas on which we all have been working: the importance of culture and context in learning, the ‘mutually constituted’ aspects of the process of learning in cultural context, the central role of understanding children and youth’s everyday lives, and their movement across settings with distinct ‘repertoires of practice’ (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Gutiérrez & Stone, 2000).
The importance of culture and context within learning processes
We each have emphasized that studying culture directs our attention to people’s participation in the everyday and valued practices of their communities, how those practices are organized and what tools and relations support their participation. Luis Moll’s commitment to using social science research to advance our understandings of the role culture plays in learning processes has helped to challenge the reductionist tendencies that characterize public schooling. His early cross-cultural research that focused on culture and cognition at the Institute for Comparative Human Development at Rockefeller University and then at LCHC in San Diego served as the crucible for Moll’s groundbreaking research on the cultural context of learning.
Inspired by Vygotsky and cultural historical approaches to learning and development, Moll’s work on the cultural context of learning helped to create a methodology that combined psychological-theoretically motivated methods of instruction with a keen sense of the cultural context within which it was occurring. Working at the intersection of anthropology and the psychology of schooling, Moll was one of the first wave of ethnographers who were breaking trail in a new and innovative research tradition in education.
Across his work, Moll was profoundly interested in the sociological life of human beings, that is, the belief that human life is socioculturally saturated (Moll, 1997). As he noted,
[humans] live in a world of social things, not only small and specific artifacts, tools and symbol systems, or the social contexts created by others with whom we interact, but big, national and global social things, ideological and economic systems that shape, often in mysterious ways, our circumstances of life. (Moll, 1998, p. 58)
Luis wrote about this point so beautifully in a powerful piece for the Literacy Research Association, ‘Turning to the World’, in which he elaborated the concept of the cultural mediation of thinking, noting how we have naturalized the built environments of everyday life, ‘underestimating the significance of the artificial [the cultural as it were] for our thinking’ (1998, p. 60). Drawing on the work of Sylvia Scribner (1990), he argued that the mediation of human actions through cultural artifacts (i.e., material and ideal) plays a critical role in the development of human intellectual capacities. He pointed out that education research and practice have insufficiently considered the contextual factors to thinking, failing to recognize how cognition is embedded within the social and cultural world.
Kris and Barbara likewise have devoted their careers to understanding ‘the cultural nature of human development’ (Rogoff, 2003). We teamed up, building on Kris’ early work positing that cultural experience can be seen as ‘repertoires of practice’ (Gutiérrez, 2005, 2008; Gutierrez & Stone, 2000) and on Barbara’s emphasis that culture can be conceived as participation in cultural practices and not reduced to belonging in ethnic or racial ‘boxes’ (Rogoff, 1995, 2003).
We argued that researchers and educators can better understand and serve children’s learning by focusing on their repertoires of cultural practices rather than making broad generalizations of style based on children’s ethnic or racial membership categories (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). We emphasized the importance of knowing about the histories and valued practices of cultural communities, rather than describing what people do based on their ethnic group or teaching prescriptively according to broad, underexamined generalities about groups (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff, 1990, 2003).
Here learning is understood as a process occurring within and across ongoing activity and not divided into separate characteristics of individuals and contexts (Gutiérrez, 2023, 2025; Lave, 1996; Rogoff, 1982, 1995, 2003, 2024). Our critical point was that understanding processes rather than locating characteristics helps researchers capture the complexity of human learning activity (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff, 1982, 2003, 2024).
Along with Luis Moll, we are interested in how researchers and practitioners might understand regularities in approaches to learning among people of similar cultural background experiences, without reifying those cultural patterns and practices as specific to individuals. Our approaches stand in contrast to the reductive tendency in the field to accept singular effects for explaining social and cognitive phenomena in ways that diminish full understanding of complex cognitive processes.
Reductive approaches treat context as existing independently of the very people that participate, construct and sustain them. A focus on people’s contexts and history of engagement in practices of cultural communities makes evident that cultural differences can be attributed to variations in people’s involvement in shared practices of particular cultural communities. We focus on the regularities and variations in people’s experience of participation in their multiple communities’ practices (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003; Moll, 2000; Rogoff, 1990, 2003, 2024; Rogoff et al., 1993).
Culture and learning: ‘mutually constituted’ aspects of a process
Moll and his colleagues stressed the dynamic nature of culture, focusing on practice — in critique of a static view of culture that ‘presumes coherence within groups’, and stressing that ‘households draw from multiple cultural systems and use these systems as strategic resources’ (González et al., 2005, p. 10). Their substantive body of collaborative work on Funds of Knowledge helped refocus attention on the dynamic networks of productive exchange and knowledge production in the cultural practices of Latine families, instead of a focus on assumed cultural traits.
Moll believed that advancing teachers’ and researchers’ understanding of students’ learning across cultural practices required understanding the pedagogy of households themselves (Moll et al., 1990). They argued that families’ Funds of Knowledge flowed through household social relations. Moll and Greenberg (1990) conceptualized these rich spaces of learning as household zones of proximal development, which varied depending on the household’s cultural practices, the social history of the family, their networks, as well as the goals of the family activity.
Drawing on her longitudinal work with colleagues in the UCLA Migrant Student Leadership Institute (MSLI), Kris similarly conceived of the notion of collective zones of proximal development to theorize Third Spaces, in which high school students from migrant farmworker backgrounds participating in MSLI engaged the sociohistorical reconstruction of what it means to be a migrant and the processes of becoming conscious historical actors (Gutiérrez, 2008, 2016). More recently, Kris (Gutiérrez, 2025a, 2025b) examined how these collective Third Spaces help to co-construct developmental ecologies that span multiple activity systems and practices and foster consequential forms of learning for youth and instructors across decades-long social design experiments (Gutierrez, 2008, 2016, 2025a; 2025b).
Across her career, Barbara has elaborated the idea that culture and context are inseparable from individuals’ development, arguing that cultural/contextual and individual aspects are ‘mutually constituted’ (e.g., introducing this term in her 1982 Handbook chapter, ‘Integrating Context and Cognitive Development’: Rogoff, 1982). She used a metaphor of clapping to explain the idea that culture/context and individual aspects are ‘mutually constituting’ and cannot be separated into independent factors:
For example, the activity of clapping involves the actions of two hands. But a description of the properties or action of each hand without reference to that of the other is meaningless. To understand clapping, it would be perhaps futile but at least unparsimonious to view the activity as a conglomerate that sums the action of the left hand, the action of the right hand, and their interaction or link. Clapping involves the mutual constitution of the activity by both hands, and indeed many other hands (and minds), as the meaning of clapping fits cultural traditions of communication. (Rogoff, 1982, p. 318, our emphasis)
Many of Barbara’s subsequent writings have further developed the ‘mutually constituting’ idea, including her suggestion that we can use distinct lenses to focus on individual, interpersonal or cultural/contextual aspects, while maintaining information on those other aspects in the background (e.g., Rogoff, 1995, 1998, 2003). More recently, she has offered the metaphor of a fractal, as a way to look closely at a particular phenomenon at the same time as recognizing that the pattern occurs simultaneously at a scale of fractions of seconds and at a scale of millennia (Dayton & Rogoff, in prep; Rogoff, 2024).
Kris’ work also makes use of the idea of mutual constitution, elaborating the notion that people live and create culture in a mutually constitutive fashion, and thus we would find it unproductive to summarize people’s characteristics as being constituted independently of culture and its artifacts and practices (Gutiérrez, 2023). As a methodologist, Kris has noted that too often researchers look at pieces of human activity, ignoring context and their mutual relation, still treating context as a variable or a container of human activity, rather than mutually constitutive of people’s cultural practices.
Most analyses focus on levels or discrete units or separate people from the social situation of development. However, understanding the role of mutual constitution in people’s learning across the ecology helps us think in new ways about learning and development, about people’s expansive possibilities and why the mutual constitution of developmental ecologies matters in designing for sustainable and transformative innovations (Gutiérrez, 2016, 2023, 2025a; Rogoff, 1982, 1995, 2024).
The importance of everyday life in family and community
We all three have attended to and sought deeper understandings of the resources and constraints of the ecologies that constitute people’s everyday lives. In Luis’ work, children’s everyday life in their families and communities took center stage, in his focus on the ‘Funds of Knowledge’ that are available to children from their engagement in the household networks of their home communities. When Luis joined the University of Arizona (in 1986), he collaborated with Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez and James Greenberg, whose work called attention to the social networks and informal systems of exchange among Mexican-heritage families across the borderlands of Mexico and the United States. Vélez-Ibáñez and Greenberg referred to the local and transnational skills and knowledge of this informal economic system and social ties as ‘Funds of Knowledge’.
Building on his work in bilingual education settings that challenged reductive approaches to literacy, particularly monolingual models, Luis expanded an approach in which Spanish-speaking children could conceive of themselves as accomplished learners. Drawing on the work of Greenberg (1989) and Vélez-Ibañez (1988), the most well-known work in this domain is his collaborative work (with colleagues Norma González and others) which proffers a pedagogy that builds on and extends the cultural resources of school communities by making strategic connections with local households and their ‘Funds of Knowledge’. These are the repertoires of practice and networks of expertise and exchange that serve as resources for negotiating and navigating everyday life.
Household knowledge and social networks for learning and teaching became Luis’ principal focus. Holding constant his anthropological approach to studying learning, households became the unit of focus, since they served as what he called ‘the built environments constructed by the productive activities and other social actions of their members’ (Moll, 1998, p. 70). The cultural practices of households — from income-generating activities to household chores and social and recreational activities — revealed how social networks central to the exchange of knowledge, labor and distributed expertise were created and maintained (Moll & González, 2012).
Household subsistence may involve establishing and participating in social networks, often with kin, through which such funds of knowledge may be exchanged in addressing some of life’s necessities. For example, in a mundane quid pro quo, one might help a neighbor fix a car because one has the required knowledge and experience as an auto mechanic, and the neighbor incurs an obligation to reciprocate and help paint one’s house, a task that is within his or her areas of expertise. Notice, then, that the exchange here is not of capital for labor, as in commercial transactions; it is an exchange in another currency, that of funds of knowledge, hence the metaphor. (Moll, 2019, pp. 131–132)
Based on these ideas, Moll and colleagues developed a process in which teachers would do ethnographic interviews and observations to learn about the lives of their students’ families and then join together in discussion groups as ‘labs’ to leverage the cultural practices and knowledge to develop innovations for classroom learning, based on local circumstances. According to Luis, these processes were designed to connect household research to teaching and learning in the classroom by creating spaces in homes, libraries or in a classroom after school for teachers and researchers to make sense of what they were learning, using theory and their methods of observation which facilitated new pedagogical imaginations. Moll and colleagues claimed
that by developing social networks that connect classrooms to outside resources, by mobilizing funds of knowledge, we can transform classrooms into more advanced contexts for teaching and learning. (Moll & Greenberg, 1990, p. 344)
Luis’ work has significantly influenced research and practice, particularly the teaching and learning of immigrant and translingual children, with commitment to documenting the role of the home language in expansive literacy learning. As with Moll’s work with bilingual children’s literacy, Kris examined the cultural dimensions of literacy learning, particularly for youth from nondominant communities and translingual student populations, and studied how translingual practices — what she termed hybrid language practices in earlier work connecting everyday home language with academic discourse — mediated children’s and youths’ literacy and general learning (Gutiérrez, 2008, 2018).
Luis’ work on biliteracy was not neutral but deeply situated in issues of historical and present inequities in policies and practices, particularly those with restrictive language policies (see Moll, 2010, as a key example.) His work argued for expansive multilingual literacy practices that were consequential to children and youth across everyday life. Holding that same commitment, Kris’ designed experiments in afterschool environments and in innovative classroom settings privileged polylingual and polycultural practices and the playful imagination in expanding the literacy repertoires and academic trajectories of children and youth (Gutiérrez et al., 2011; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010). This approach was expanded in her longitudinal work with high school migrant students in which syncretic approaches to learning brought together everyday and school-based concepts and language to support the development of transformative forms of literacy for migrant youth (Gutiérrez, 2008, 2014; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016).
The object of this approach was the development of what was termed sociocritical literacies—literacies that developed through their attention to the history of contradictions and possibilities in institutions of schooling, their practices, and those existing in and among texts lived and studied. (Gutiérrez & Jurow, p. 8, 2016)
By studying the social contexts of households and community life, Moll and colleagues highlighted the knowledge imbued in everyday family and community life. In many ways, his work could be considered foundational to subsequent notions of culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies and to critical cultural historical approaches taking hold in the last decades.
Among the Funds of Knowledge available in children’s homes and communities is local pedagogical knowledge (Moll et al., 1992). This household pedagogy is similar to the observations of Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors (LOPI; Rogoff, 2014; Rogoff et al., 2003, 2007; Rogoff & Mejía-Arauz, 2022). Moll and colleagues indicated that children in the borderlands Mexican households that they studied often learn
by watching, questioning, and taking on tasks, thus actively directing their own learning (Moll & Greenberg, 1990). Parents were patient, encouraging, and tolerant of error; they gave children space and time to work through projects independently (Vélez-Ibáñez & Greenberg, 1992). (summarized by Hogg, 2011, p. 671)
Across her body of work, Kris has also found everyday practices to be generative sites of observation and analysis across her group’s decades of work. For example, Gutiérrez focuses on daily routines across studies with youth, educators and families, since understanding people’s everyday lives is essential to learn what matters to them, to document the development of repertoires of practice, to learn how tools and practices are co-constituted and laminated and travel across people, time and space — i.e., the social, cultural and material constitution of ‘learning-in-interaction-across space’ through a continuous and reciprocal relationship (Goodwin, 1995, 2017; Lefebvre, 1974; Soja, 1971, 1996) In this work, daily routines can be viewed as microcontexts of development, which become laminated in a mutually constitutive fashion with the larger cultural context. These microcontexts also provide opportunity to understand how participants organize themselves and others and leverage resources that support individual and collective learning (Gutiérrez, 2023, 2025). Capturing families’ repertoires of everyday practice is especially important in doing multisited ethnographies (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014), following youth and families across the settings of everyday life. Aligned with Funds of Knowledge approaches, one multisited ethnography on the ingenuity in Latine Families’ New Media Practices involved collaborating with schools and families to follow youth in a STEM-oriented afterschool site, El Pueblo Mágico, to their homes to understand household new media practices (Schwartz &, Gutiérrez, 2015).
Across his work, Luis insisted that documenting everyday routines revealed more robust and accurate understandings of people’s fuller language practices than in the experimental conditions which he had previously employed (Moll & Diaz, 1986; Moll & Diaz, 1987). This is reminiscent of Barbara’s emphasis on the importance of understanding children’s learning, thinking and guidance by others within their lived, everyday contexts and routines and practices (e.g., Rogoff & Lave’s 1984 book, Everyday Cognition; Rogoff, 2012; Rogoff et al., 2007, 2018).
Movement across settings
Luis was an ethnographer of movement; Funds of Knowledge was about ‘movement of knowledge-in-practice’ (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014). Luis’ early studies documented the affordances for instruction of leveraging what he termed ‘students’ local knowledge’ in classroom settings, arguing that students’ language and culture were resources, not impediments, to school learning (Moll & Diaz, 1986; Moll & Díaz, 1987; Moll & Diaz, 1987). In his AERA Brown Lecture (Moll, 2010), Luis stressed ‘social, cultural, and linguistic processes of diverse communities as the most important resources for [learning and] producing positive educational change’. Luis’ work on using the knowledge available in children’s families and communities (their Funds of Knowledge) as a resource for children’s learning in school is closely related to Kris’ focus on movement across settings.
Understanding people’s participation and learning across different activity systems involves a focus on people’s movement within and across ecologies to examine what learning occurs, travels and is leveraged in that movement (Gutiérrez, 2023; Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014). As researchers of human learning activity and ethnographers of movement, Kris and her colleagues problematize the analytic ‘snapshot’ common to much inquiry and instead focus on the unfolding and developmental nature of the social life of people developed across the ecology ‘to capture a moving and dynamic picture of social practices and human development as it unfolds’ (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014, p. 607). She calls attention to what she has termed ‘Learning as Movement’ (LAM) (Gutiérrez, 2020): that is, a focus on what takes hold and is made consequential in people’s movement. The methodological issue has been how to capture the mutually constitutive and multidimensional nature of learning, its complex network of relations and the learning that youth develop collectively or accomplish intergenerationally, as they move across everyday contexts — contexts that are sites of educational, cultural and personal struggle, as well as robust sites for learning (Gutiérrez, 2025; Gutiérrez, et al., 2019).
Barbara’s work connects with the theme of movement of knowledge across settings through her discussion of the importance of children learning when to generalize and when to distinguish approaches across different settings, in distinct cultural communities (Rogoff, 2003). For example, US children from families with experience in both Indigenous Mexican communities and Western-schooled middle-class communities adapted their helping practices when they were in home vs. instructional settings, unlike children from families with experience primarily in only one of these cultural settings (López-Fraire et al., 2024). In addition, Barbara studies movement of practices across generations, in her research on the resilience or change of cultural practices among children and families from Indigenous communities with experience of Western schooling and other globalization practices. For example, she has documented how people in a Guatemalan Mayan town have carried cultural practices regarding birthing practices and harmonious mother–child relations across multiple generations, even as they have left other practices behind (Rogoff, 2011; Rogoff, Correa-Chávez, & Navichoc Cotuc, 2005; Rogoff, et al., 1993; Rogoff & Aceves-Azuara, 2024).
Cultural ways of learning; appreciating Luis and our connections
In this paper, we have tried to give an idea of how we and Luis have shared a commitment to addressing the importance of culture and context in learning, as well as our perspectives on the mutually constituting process of learning in cultural context, the central role of studying everyday lives to understand and promote children’s and youth’s learning, and the movement across settings of people with distinct repertoires of practice. We are grateful to Luis for his consequential ideas, research and contributions to school practices. We are especially appreciative of having had the opportunity for our own ideas to travel across venues, in our friendships and movement together across time and place with Luis, and to develop our ideas and work together.
Luis’ incorrigible humor, generosity, sociality and expansive scholarship made him an intellectual padrino in the field, one who cultivated the importance of studying Latine youth, families and households, all while lifting up the rich expansiveness of their cultural practices. Importantly, he boldly addressed the political and unjust nature of the education of Latine children and youth in the US. He was our dear friend, mentor (Kris) and colleague. We hope newer generations of scholars will engage his work with the seriousness and respect it so richly deserves.