Barbara Rogoff reflects on the sources and pathway of her work on understanding culture and individual learning as aspects of a mutually constituting process. She describes her efforts across decades to convey the idea that learning is a process of transforming one’s participation in cultural communities, which simultaneously contributes to transforming and maintaining the communities’ cultural practices. As ways of getting traction on understanding and researching from the mutually constituting perspective, Rogoff offers the metaphors of lenses that bring aspects of the overall process into focus, and fractals that aid in seeing the similarity of cultural patterns across both small moments and generations. She connects these ideas with several concepts and lines of research that she and her colleagues have contributed: everyday cognition, guided participation, Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI) to family and community endeavors, interdependence with autonomy, collaborative initiative, simultaneous attention, fluid collaboration, and “Barbara’s do-do theory.”

Early years teaching programs at undergraduate level introduce student teachers to sociocultural theorists such as Vygotsky, Bruner and Rogoff. Situating teaching techniques within these theoretical perspectives encourages student teachers to work with children within the metaphor of a ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky) to ‘scaffold’ (Bruner) children from one level of knowledge to the next through ‘guided participation’ (Rogoff). Understanding pedagogical interaction as a social and collaborative event between teacher and child is fundamental, but these metaphors can be challenging – particularly for pre-service teachers – in the practical implementation of early years curricula frameworks. Excerpts of real-life everyday interactions between teachers and young children explored using conversation analysis can demonstrate what the role of the early years teacher might look like when participating in a ‘zone of proximal development’ with children. The skilful ways in which teachers ‘scaffold’ learning with children through ‘guided participation’ in verbal and non-verbal turn taking will then be demonstrated. Through this exploration, the chapter brings together contemporary socio-cultural approaches to early years teaching and ethnomethodology’s concern with the practical achievement of participation to explain how participation frameworks provide a useful lens for understanding pedagogical interaction between children and teachers.

This chapter reviews how people learn during apprenticeships, ways of guiding beginners while they engage in authentic situated activity with more experienced people. Apprenticeship practices are found throughout the world both in cultures with formal schooling and in those without. Traditional apprenticeship practices tend to focus on physical and visible activities, but most schooling is directed toward conceptual learning outcomes which are usually not physical and visible – like formulas in mathematics or theories in physics. This chapter extends apprenticeship research to cognitive apprenticeship, and describes apprenticeships that are designed to lead to abstract or conceptual knowledge. These involve scaffolding, metacognitive reflection, problem-based learning, and situated social practices. Effective apprenticeship often involves productive failure, when learners initially develop potential solutions that are wrong but that can be productively guided toward conceptually correct answers.