Abstract
In the following four short chapters, Geoffrey Saxe, Barbara Rogoff, Kris Gutiérrez, and Pascal Deboeck (with John Geldhof and Dian Yu) articulate a methodological framework that illuminates the dynamic interplay between the development of individuals and historically shifting contexts in which they participate. These crucial dynamics are often neglected in mainstream treatments of methods. Although the frameworks differ, they share a common assumption: To avoid problematic distortions, research cannot ignore collective history in a treatment of individual development or ignore individual development in a treatment of collective history (past and emerging)—or examine them separately. These four short chapters each address ways that can aid researchers in moving to a greater understanding of the dynamic nature of people in their contexts.
In the first chapter, Saxe introduces his methodological approach for understanding sociogenesis, the emergence and spread of representations and ideas in a community. As an arena for analysis, he targets the reproduction and alteration of collective practices through time, like economic exchanges in the context of shifting economic conditions. To understand sociogenetic processes, he illustrates the use of ethnographic, interview, archival, and quasi-experimental methods. He shows how their coordinated use can illuminate the dynamics whereby individuals’ participations in collective practices lead both to continuities and discontinuities of representations and ideas and the functions they serve through time.
In the second chapter, Rogoff focuses on learning/development as people transform their participation in sociocultural activities in a mutually constituting process involving both individual and cultural contributions. The focus of analysis can be on individual, interpersonal, or cultural/institutional aspects of the process while maintaining some attention in the background to their involvement with other aspects in the whole dynamic process. Singling out one or another aspect is a convenience for analysis—but the analytic focus is not “reality”—the map is not the landscape. Rogoff describes how using the perspective of learning/development as transformation of participation changes the central research questions, from mainstream approaches that separate individuals from culture, and argues that fractal analyses help make the study of individuals in context tractable.
In the third chapter, Gutiérrez discusses a “utopian” methodological approach that involves conceptualizing the past and future within the present. She presents the social-design-based experiment as one illustration of a utopian methodological approach in which “human flourishing in [the context]] of possible futures” (Levitas, 2013, p. xi) serves as a central object of learning. Gutiérrez suggests that by focusing on what is acquired and generated through people’s activities as they move across contexts, researchers will challenge rigid and limited notions of learning and approaches to design research, which often perpetuate hierarchies and negative perceptions of learners. To illustrate how these goals are realized in her work, Gutiérrez details methodological commitments to capturing complexity in human learning activity as it centers equity understood as world-making. To capture the dynamic and expansive nature of youth and intergenerational learning, a review of a range of methodological tools employed across studies is presented, with particular focus on how people’s repertoires of practices are constituted through participation in everyday activity, as they move in and across the ecologies of everyday life.
In the fourth chapter, Deboeck, Geldhof, and Yu discuss ideas from the perspective of dynamic systems literature. Their chapter makes use of three scenarios, each with implications for methodology in the social and behavioral sciences. The focus is on the dynamic interplay between individuals and contexts, which entails the development of theories, collection of data, and analytic approaches. As methodologies move from static to dynamic representations of individuals and contexts, the authors argue that researchers may find dynamic systems ideas promising for the analysis of change. The chapter closes by considering available methods for quantitative analysis of the dynamics of mutually influential relations between individuals and contexts.
We hope that the four brief chapters give readers food for thought regarding distinct approaches to understanding and studying the inherently complex ways that humans learn and develop, ever mindful of how our methods are consequential to the communities and people in our work.
Footnotes
Authors
GEOFFREY B. SAXE is a distinguished professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on cognitive development with a concern for culture-cognition relations in the domain of mathematics. His most recent book, Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas, has received book awards from the American Anthropological Association, the Cognitive Development Society, and the American Psychological Association; more generally, his work on culture-cognition relations received two Presidential citations from the American Educational Research Association.
BARBARA ROGOFF is UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. She investigates cultural aspects of children’s learning and how communities arrange for learning, finding especially sophisticated collaboration and attention among children from Indigenous communities of the Americas. She has received the Distinguished Lifetime Contributions Award (Society for Research in Child Development), the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Science (Jean Piaget Society), and the Chemers Award for Outstanding Research (UCSC). She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the AAA, APS, APA, and AERA. She has held the University of California Presidential Chair and Fellowships of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Kellogg Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and the Exploratorium and served as editor of Human Development. She is author of Apprenticeship in Thinking, Learning Together, The Cultural Nature of Human Development, and Developing Destinies: A Mayan Midwife and Town. Recent edited volumes include Learning by Observing and Pitching In to Family and Community Endeavors, Children Learn by Observing and Contributing to Family and Community Endeavors, and Learning as a Community Process of Observing and Pitching In.
KRIS D. GUTIÉRREZ is the Carol Liu Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research employs a social-design-based utopian approach to examine learning in designed environments, with attention to culture, historicity, and ecological resilience. She is Past President of AERA and is a member of the National Academy of Education and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. Her research is published in Education Researcher, Journal of the Learning Sciences, Cognition & Instruction, Review of Research in Education, and Reading Research Quarterly, for example. She received the 2024 Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award from the American Educational Research Association.
PASCAL R. DEBOECK is an associate professor in developmental psychology at the University of Utah. His research focuses on methods for modeling repeated intraindividual measurements, specifically, the methodological development and application of differential equation models and dynamical systems to social science, behavioral, and medical data.