The Cultural Nature of Human Development

Three-year-old Kwara'ae children in Oceania act as caregivers of their younger siblings, but in the UK, it is an offense to leave a child under age 14 ears without adult supervision. In the Efe community in Zaire, infants routinely use machetes with safety and some skill, although U.S. middle-class adults often do not trust young children with knives. What explains these marked differences in the capabilities of these children?
Until recently, traditional understandings of human development held that a child's development is universal and that children have characteristics and skills that develop independently of cultural processes. Barbara Rogoff argues, however, that human development must be understood as a cultural process, not simply a biological or psychological one. Individuals develop as members of a community, and their development can only be fully understood by examining the practices and circumstances of their communities.

Barbara Rogoff is UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Kellogg Fellow, and Editor of Human Development. Her books Apprenticeship in Thinking (OUP, 1990), Learning Together (OUP, 2001), and The Cultural Nature of Human Development (OUP, 2003) have received awards from the American Psychological Association and the American Educational Research Association. Her current book, Developing Destinies, deepens the ideas presented in her previous books, building on her three decades of research on human development in a Mayan community in Guatemala.

Barbara Rogoff received the 2013 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Cultural and Contextual Factors in Child Development, from the Society for Research in Child Development.
The citation read: "For her brilliant insights about and specification of development as a cultural process;
For her highly influential research and writing underscoring the influences of parental practices;
For illuminating how inclusion and participation in adult settings are critical to children's development;
For underscoring the necessity of multicultural perspectives on development through her exemplary contributions to the development of ethnic minority scholars."