Review_Author: Baoguo Li
Book_Author: Barbara Rogoff
Book_Title: Apprenticeship in thinking
Reference: New York: Oxford University Press.
Date: 4/29/00
Time: 10:18:35 AM
Remote Name: 128.175.34.122
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In this book Barbara Rogoff talks about child cognitive development from social cultural perspective. She opens her book with the statement that "child cognitive development is an apprenticeship--it occurs through guided participation in social activity with companions supporting and stretching their understanding of and skills in using the tools of culture". There are two key terms in her book, one is guided participation, and the other is intersubjectivity. By guided participation she means it is a collaborative process, between children and caregivers, of "building bridges from child's present understanding and skills to reach new understanding and skills and arranging and structuring children's participation in activities, with dynamic shifts over development in children's responsibility.” Intersubjectivity, which underlies guided participation, is “sharing of focus and purpose between child and caregivers.” Or in Trevarthen's terms it is "both recognition and control of cooperative intention and joint patterns of awareness". There are two conflicting ideas as for its originality. (one said it is innate the other contended that it was the adults who ascribed meaning to infant's facial expression, movements etc and inserted social meaning into their autonomous patterning of their behavior.)
This book is divided into three parts. The first part is the theoretical basis for her concept of guided participation. in this part she discusses the mutually embedded relationship between the children and their social cultural contexts, she emphasizes that individual and society are not analytically separate influence on the course of child's cognitive development. She draws on Piaget and Vygotsky's theory while talking about the issue of mutuality. Besides, she also dwells on the cultural contexts of cognitive activity in this part. For her the social cultural contexts of thinking include such things as institutions--economic institution, religious system, political system, instructional system so on and so forth. She gives more attention to the relation between schooling and cognitive development and uses two cognitive skills that seem to be closely linked to schooling to illustrate her point. One is the memory of disconnected information, the other is verbal syllogism we discussed earlier in our class. At the end of this part she sums up by saying that "cognitive activity occur in socially structured situations that involve values about the interpretation\ and management of social relationship s. individual's attempts to solve problems are intrinsically related to social and societal values and goals, tools and institution in the definition of the problems and the practice of their solution".
Part two is the essence of this book. First she talks about the two ways that are generally used to carry out guided participation by children and their companions, that is, two ways to build bridges from the present to new (nonverbal communication and verbal communication). When it comes to structuring situation and transferring of responsibility, she states that it is the social world that first determines which activities are available to children for observation and participation and who are their partners, then it is the partners turn to make arrangement for children by providing appropriate materials and activities. But don’t think that the children have no say in this arrangements, they also decide which activities to participate. Parent’s assistance varies with the development of the children's skills and understandings, and children take over more and more responsibility from the hands of their partners. So guided participation is a two way process in which the parents govern the kids and the kids also guide the parents. The transfer of responsibility is carried out by the adult's adjustment of their assistance and children's adjustment of their level of responsibility. She warns readers that different cultures have different goals of development and these different goals decide the skills and values that are to be promoted. To illustrate this, Barbara gives a detailed description on how cultural variations in communication strategies influence the ways in which parents and children collaborate in children's socialization.
In part three she discusses the similarities and differences in mechanisms of social interactional influence on cognitive development posited by Piaget and Vygostky focusing on the importance and of expertise versus equal status. For Piaget, who took individual as starting point, development was a continual conflict between antagonistic forms of thinking; Vygotsky, who focused on social basis of mind, maintained the model of social interaction was joint problem solving with guidance by more skilled adults. Thus Piaget thought young children was impervious to social influence because of their egocentricity and it was not until middle childhood when social interaction began to exert influence on child. Vygotsky's view was that from the beginning the child was a social being involved in social exchange that guided the development of higher cognitive processes. Barbara cites many evidence to show that children learn more from skilled adults (for example language development, conceptual development, object exploration and construction) One interesting phenomena she found was that kids of 4 years old who worked with their parents did no better than those who worked alone when they were asked to do planning task, but 9 years old did better with help than those without guidance. Of course kids can benefit from peer interaction because peer interaction may facilitate balanced discussion and produce quicker cognitive development in logic problems. What's more, children have more control in the interaction with peers than with adults. Anyway, in many countries, childcare is mainly in the hands of older sisters or brothers who are only 2-3 years older, peer interaction is more popular.
I think the strength of her book lies in that she uses so many empirical evidences, illustrations and pictures to support her arguments. Her discussion of child development is convincing and exhaustive. From her book, we can see she has profound knowledge in many fields. I recommend this book to every one who is interested in child cognitive development and every mother and father who care about the development of their kids. I also recommend it to teachers in schools. (This is the second time I post this review, my first post failed)