Fascinating work! Thanks for sharing!
I’d love to hear how you think about this work as disrupting hierarchical narratives of intelligence?

The keen attention of Mayan and Mexican-heritage children points to the importance of understanding the different strengths that children bring to their learning.

From the perspective of middle-class teachers, the keen attention of Indigenous and Mexican-heritage children might not be noticed as a strength. Or it might even be misinterpreted as distraction when children notice what is going on around them, when in fact it is very skilled attention and learning.

I love how you are highlighting the strengths that children can bring to their learning experiences. Thank you for pushing people to think about the different ways that children learn, interact, and engage that can be utilized as assets toward new learning, rather than approached as “problems” in educational contexts.

Yes, building on children’s strenghs can bring about a paradigm shift in how learning situations are organized — especially for children who have been poorly served by schools so far.

In the video, the narrator says that “Guatemalan/Mayan children were twice as likely to pay attention to a nearby demonstration…” and I presume this comparison is to the “European/American” children in the next scene. The video doesn’t ponder reasons for this. Now that you have observed this pattern, do you have theories about what drives these differences?

The pattern of differences in children’s learning from surrounding events fits a paradigm that we call “Learning by Observing and Pitching In”(LOPI). Keen attention is part of one of the 7 defining features of the LOPI approach. Another defining feature is that children are included as collaborating contributors to family and community endeavors. If you’d like to know more about LOPI, please ask more questions. Or, you can see more about it at www.learningbyobservingandpitchingin.com

This is really interesting work. Are you to the point where you have implications for classrooms in the US? If so, can you please include them? As a curriculum designer, these would be very helpful.

Thanks! The findings that Indigenous- and Mexican-heritage children are especially keen observers lead to several implications for classrooms:
1. Teachers who are aware of cultural differences in learning by observing could build on it for more effective teaching and learning.
2. Curriculum could be designed more openly for children to observe each others’ and adults’ work.
3. Children whose family life does not prepare them so well for learning from surrounding events could learn from children from backgrounds where this is prioritized.

I agree that this is very fascinating work. I’m curious though: were observations of Mexican-heritage and indigenous children made in Guatemala, Mexico, the US, or a mixture of all three?

These studies have been done in a Mayan community in Guatemala and in Mexican- and European-heritage communities in the United States. We’ve also done a number of studies in Mexico on related themes (especially, children’s collaborative initiative). Several related studies were published in 2014 in the journal Human Development and in 2015 in Vol. 49 of Advances in Child Health and Behavior.

Thank you for sharing your findings!
These correlate with what I have also seen; and I believe they are at least partly explained by differences in strongly oral cultures vs. strongly visual text/mediated cultures (aggravated in the US context by technology and overwork that separates and individuates people and splits families.

I have also advocated that teachers become more keenly sensitized to children from indigenous/oral culture backgrounds in order to understand the social-emotional alienation (loneliness) they may experience when expected to suddenly individuate into text-mediated worlds in school, often an implicit expectation aggravated by language barriers. I generally hear people attribute exclusion and barriers solely to language; it is rare that researchers take orality/literacy and culturally distinct ways of communicating and mediating the ZPD into account. Do any aspects of your work address the oral/text interface and learning and teaching strategies across cultures?

We do find systematic differences based on extent of Western schooling, in European-American families and also within Mexican-heritage and Indigenous populations. Children from families with extensive experience of Western schooling tend to use a narrower focus of attention. This is encouraged by their teachers as well as their parents. Paradise et al wrote about the attempts to control and narrow children’s attention among teachers, in the article “One-two-three, eyes on me! Adults attempting to control versus guiding in support of initiative,” which appears in the journal Human Development (2014).

I know this was designed as a brief overview video, but I would guess there’s a whole lot of underlying research you’ve done that identifies reasons behind these findings, such as your Learning by Observing and Pitching In research. From experience and observation, this is a technique not often practiced in North American households, where children are largely segregated from adults most of the time. Even in our classrooms, we put kids all of the same age in a classroom and then subject them to instruction on subjects, without directly encouraging their input into the curriculum or methodology of instruction. Then we wonder why our kids don’t care about school and lack basic skills in arts, handiwork, home craft and other areas requiring craftsmanship and design understanding. But they can throw a ball and play video games well. It’s a fascinating journey we’re on. Thanks for doing this research.

Your research always fascinates me, Barbara. I meet you back in the early 2000s when you spoke with CILS participants at the Exploratorium. I’ve followed your work ever since. Thanks so much for your wealth of research on important developmental questions across cultures!

Hi Barbara. This is such important work that builds on your longstanding findings about the cultural nature of human development. I really appreciate how the video positions Mayan children’s attention as the normative center. We know that sharing attention is one of the critical aspects of early learning for all children. Have you found that Mayan infants and very young children show different abilities in this regard as well or is it just as they get older that we see this different emerge? It is critical that we come to see children’s cultural practices as resources and that we learn to identify the different resources that children bring with them to organized educational opportunities in and out of school. Thank you for always pressing us to do this!

Thank you for sharing such important findings. My son watched the video and felt proud of his Mayan background.

I wonder to what extent socio-economic factors enter into the explanation. For example, in indigenous communities survival depends on careful observation and quick learning of the tasks at hand. There are serious consequences for those who are unable to to that. In European-descent, middle class families, there are no equivalent serious consequences.

I would be curious to learn what the test would be like with middle class Mexican and Guagemalan indigenous children.

At any rate, thank you for your contributions to this field of study and to my compadre Roberto Estrada for sending me your information.

Thanks Barbara for this powerful research that demonstrates the learning strengths embedded in cultural interactions that are often overlooked in the context of Western, Eurocentric schooling. As one person mentioned above, this also speaks to the separation of children from adult life that often occurs in middle class families here in the US. Any thoughts about the implications for this beyond learning at the childhood level, do adults in learning contexts in cultures that you researched learn in similar ways?