Socio-Historical Change and Cognitive Development

Abstract

Everyone interested in the cross-cultural study of cognitive development, everyday cognition, informal education, and learning processes will remember the landmark paper by Greenfield and Lave, first published in French [1979] and later in English [1982]: Cognitive Aspects of Informal Education. Together with some other research reports [e.g., Greenfield & Childs, 1977] and theoretical discussions on learning processes [Greenfield, 1984], the paper described a landmark research program carried out in 1969–1970 in Zinacantan, a remote highland village in Chiapas, Mexico. It was one of the first field-studies using video recordings for microanalysis of learning processes, and proved fundamental in the development of research on everyday cognition. Well, Patricia Greenfield has done it again! She went back to the same village 21 years later, and the outcome (reported in this book) will no doubt be pathbreaking once more. I summarized this important research earlier in Segall, Dasen, Berry and Poortinga [1999, pp. 80f, 190–193], but the publication of this volume now adds many more details to the second part of the fieldwork, particularly illustrations of the increasing rate of change over the last decades in the patterns that are woven and now also embroidered. In the 1970’s, the Zinacantec women basically produced only very few patterns of cloth involving red and white stripes. Young girls learned to respect the tradition and to weave these patterns without error; the teaching-learning process was based mainly on scaffolding, in which calibrated adult intervention allows the learner to complete a difficult task (such as weaving real cloth on an adult backstrap loom). Scaffolding implies that the adult continuously assesses the ability level of the learner, intervening less and less in the course of the apprenticeship until the girl can weave alone. Greenfield hypothesized that scaf-