UCSC Review Winter 1996

Rogoff appointed to newly endowed chair in psychology

Ask psychologist Barbara Rogoff to discuss her latest work, and get ready for a barrage. Just her list of upcoming publications is enough to give one pause: She is co-editing a book about an innovative elementary school in Salt Lake City where she has conducted research since the late 1980s; she is writing a textbook on children and culture; she is contributing a book-length chapter to the fifth edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology; and she has a new children's book in the works.

A new children's book? Of course. In addition to being one of the nation's leading developmental psychologists, Rogoff writes and illustrates books for children.

Rogoff, who joined the UCSC faculty in 1991, was appointed last summer to the newly created UC Santa Cruz Foundation Chair in Psychology. The endowed chair will support Rogoff's research on children's intellectual development, which she has spent more than twenty years exploring.

Rogoff studies children in the everyday environments of their communities--at home, in school, and with family and friends. It's what she calls the "cultural setting" of learning, and she believes that children must be studied in their own environments if researchers hope to glean insight into how youngsters learn.

Since 1991, Rogoff's primary research has focused on the school in Salt Lake City. The public school is built on collaboration-- between students, teachers, parents, and administrators. Parents are required to spend three hours a week per child at the school, and children are intimately involved with curriculum development. Unlike traditional U.S. schools, says Rogoff, teachers do not rely on the lecture format, and students are motivated by learning--not grades and threats.

For example, students choose monthly themes around which the teachers and parents develop lesson plans. One challenging theme chosen by first- and second-graders was pizza, recalls Rogoff. But parents, teachers, and students got to work, and it was a very successful theme: Pizza turned out to be a great way to teach fractions, the students had a good time reading books about food and learning about Italy and immigration, and for economics, the class went on a field trip to a pizza parlor and heard from the owner about how he plans his purchases and runs his business. "Of course, pizza art was easy!" says Rogoff. Best of all, the kids were interested and motivated to learn.

This collaborative style of learning appears to address the desires of many advocates of school reform--and some business leaders, who complain that public schools do a poor job of preparing the next gene-ration. Rogoff strives to integrate what she has learned into her own classes at UCSC. "It's hard to collaborate with 150 students, but my goal is to have them talk with me and each other and for all of us to learn from each other," she says.