Abstract
This chapter addresses the idea that a focus on participation in cultural practices is more productive for understanding cultural aspects of young children’s learning than comparing membership in racial or national identities. We illustrate this idea with observations of contrasting attentional strategies used by children from 5 communities varying in cultural experience as well as nationality. Children from two communities with Indigenous experience—one in the USA and one in Mexico—skillfully attended simultaneously to multiple events more often than children from three Western schooled communities in the USA and Mexico. In turn, children from the three highly schooled communities more often alternated their attention between multiple events, with attention to one event interrupting attention to another. We argue that both patterns of attention relate to participation in broader constellations of cultural practices and histories of ways of organizing learning in children’s communities. We situate the children’s attentional approaches in community practices organizing learning, especially connecting simultaneous attention with Learning by Observing and Pitching in to family and community endeavors (LOPI), which appears to be common in many Indigenous communities of the Americas.
We greatly appreciate the participation of the children and the permission for their involvement from their parents and teachers and the children’s schools in Guadalajara, México, and Santa Cruz, CA. Thanks to Sofia Jiménez Mejía, Karime Infante, Isaac Andreu, and Julia García Mejía and the team of research assistants and coders at ITESO in Guadalajara for their contributions to this project. This project has been made possible through the support of the Center for Informal Learning and Schools, UC/MEXUS-CONACYT (Grant No. CN-02-68), the National Institutes of Health and Human Development (Grant No. T32 HD046423), and the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 0837898). Please address correspondence to: Rebeca Mejía-Arauz rebmejia@iteso.mx.
Amy L. Dexter is now at California State University San Marcos.
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Arauz, R.M., Dexter, A.L., Rogoff, B., Aceves-Azuara, I. (2019). Children’s Management of Attention as Cultural Practice. In: Tulviste, T., Best, D., Gibbons, J. (eds) Children’s Social Worlds in Cultural Context. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27033-9_3
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