Emerging learning ecologies: Mayan children's initiative and correctional directives in their everyday enskilment practices

Abstract

Directives are a central resource for the organization of attention in everyday family activities. Studies in middle class families reveal that they are patterned and repeated in the everyday routines of children's lives, providing the basis for their learning of skills, accountability, and moral discernment (M. Goodwin, 2006; M. Goodwin & Cekaite, 2013, 2014).Scholars studying indigenous children's learning from a cross-cultural perspective have underscored children's agency and self-motivation in learning through observation and participation in everyday activities (Gaskins & Paradise, 2010; Lancy, 2010, 2012; Paradise & Rogoff, 2009; Rogoff, 2003, 2014; Rogoff et al., 2007; Rogoff, Mejía-Arauz, & Correa-Chávez, 2015). Children's establishment of common orientational perspectives in such settings need not rely on high dosages of parental directives to frame activities and to structure and micromanage attention.The ethnographic and talk-in-interaction analysis of two everyday goal-oriented activities of a Mayan family presented here illustrates how enskilment (Ingold, 2000) practices depend in important ways on the child's own initiative to explore new tasks independently of an expert's explicit guidance. The learning event emerges when experts occasionally monitor the novice's actions and identify problems that require correction. Expert and novice thus engage in a process of fine-tuning perception and attention through a correctional directive trajectory that leads to a “professional vision” (C. Goodwin, 1994) of particular fields of activities (e.g., knitting and gardening activity).