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Education as an Intergenerational Process of
Human Learning, Teaching, and Development
Michael Cole
University of California, San Diego
In this article I argue that the future of psychological
research on educational processes would benefit from an
interdisciplinary approach that enables psychologists to
Editor’s Note
Michael Cole received the Award for Distinguished Contri-
butions of Applications of Psychology to Education and
Training. Award winners are invited to deliver an award
address at the APA’s annual convention. A version of this
award address was delivered at the 118th annual meeting,
held August 12–15, 2010, in San Diego, California. Arti-
cles based on award addresses are reviewed, but they dif-
fer from unsolicited articles in that they are expressions of
the winners’ reflections on their work and their views of
the field.
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
 locate their objects of study within the cultural, social, and
historical contexts of their research. To make this
argument, I begin by examining anthropological accounts
of the characteristics of education in small, face-to-face,
preindustrial societies. I then turn to a sample of
contemporary psychoeducational research that seeks to
implement major, qualitative changes in modern
educational practices by transforming them to have the
properties of education in those self-same face-to-face
societies. Next I examine the challenges faced by these
modern approaches and briefly describe a multi-
institutional, multidisciplinary system of education that
responds to these challenges while offering a model for
educating psychology students in a multigenerational
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system of activities with potential widespread benefits.
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Keywords: educational practices, deliberate instruction, cogni-
tive apprenticeship, community of learners, serious gaming
In recent decades, there has been a growing chorus of psy-
chologists interested in education calling for broadening the
unit of psychological analysis from one in which an individ-
ual person confronts a well-defined task to one that includes
both the person and the task “in context” (Barab & Plucker,
2002; Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Brown & Campione, 1994; Cog-
nition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt [CTGV], 1992;
Forman, Minnick, & Stone, 1993; Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch,
1998). Sasha Barab stated the issue clearly:
At the very core of the traditional pedagogy is the polariza-
tion of the learner and the learning context. Such polarization
inevitably leads to the production of impoverished knowledge
(inert knowledge), which is knowledge that can be recalled
when students are explicitly requested to do so, but is not
something that can be readily applied to relevant real world
situations. (Barab, 2005, para. 1)
The term context ordinarily goes underspecified in such
accounts, but the spirit of the call to take context seriously
is clear enough. For Bronfenbrenner (1979), the most in-
clusive level of context was culture, embodied in the domi-
nant ideology of the social group and its constituent insti-
tutions. Barab and Roth (2006) linked context with the
ecology of the educational activities being studied, con-
ceiving of ecology as a lifeworld, which they referred to as
“the environment from the perspective of an individual” (p.
3). Others have identified the relevant level of context with
a group of people who spend time together engaged in
joint activities in some institutionalized setting, such as a
school, a classroom, or a work setting. This line of think-
ing identifies the relevant unit of analysis as the commu-
nity in which the individual is located, as indicated by such
terms as communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991),
community of learners (Brown & Campione, 1996), and
communities of inquiry (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991).
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
Psychological researchers seeking to develop effective
modes of education by expanding the unit of analysis, de-
spite differences among them, have often turned for inspi-
ration to work in anthropology and sociology, those disci-
plines that have traditionally been taxed with analysis of
the contexts toward which psychologists gesture. This shift
in focus is often accompanied by invocation of processes
that generally go ignored in traditional psychological stud-
ies of the educational process. So, for example, Varenne
and McDermott (1998) argued that cultural and institu-
tional contexts, as well as the social ecology of the school
itself, play a crucial role in shaping the processes that lead
to educational success or failure. In her well-known work
on communities of practice, Jean Lave (1993) argued
forcefully that learning is a pervasive process in all of hu-
man life; consequently, a narrow emphasis on deliberate
teaching in rigidly controlled classroom situations should
be replaced by research acknowledging the fact that “de-
veloping an identity as a member of a community and be-
coming knowledgeably skillful are part of the same pro-
cess, with the former motivating, shaping, and giving
meaning to the latter, which it subsumes” (p. 65). She and
Etienne Wenger invoked the notion of “legitimate periph-
eral participation” in communities of practice as the crucial
process inducing learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Efforts by psychologists to reorganize formal schooling
on the basis of these ideas have taken a wide variety of
forms. These include instituting pedagogical procedures
that permit children greater agency in planning and orga-
nizing their own lessons (DePalma, Matusov, & Smith,
2009; Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001), organizing for
teachers to become personally familiar with community
“funds of knowledge” by arranging for them to spend time
in the community (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005), and
creating computer virtual worlds and modes of small-group
educational activity that seek to bring the lifeworld into the
classroom (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Carteaux, & Tuzun,
2005; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt,
1992).
Below I return to examine specific examples of psycho-
educational research in this tradition. But first I must back
up, historically, and branch out geographically and discipli-
narily in order to explain what makes these intellectual
currents especially interesting. If the main argument of this
article is correct, there is a striking similarity between the
basic impulse of educational psychologists who wish to
make persons in contexts their unit of analysis and the pro-
cess of education observed by anthropologists and sociolo-
gists who have worked among people in nonliterate, nonin-
dustrial societies in relatively small, face-to-face groups.
The major issue is to determine how and if the educational
processes observed in those societies can be adapted to
achieve contemporary educational goals, by modern means
under modern conditions.
797
 Educational Practices in Small, Preliterate,
Preindustrial Societies
Children were not a major focus of early anthropologists,
but from the late 19th century onward, a steady trickle of
reports, peaking in the 1930s, purported to describe the
content and process of education among “primitive” peo-
ples (Chamberlain, 1896; Firth, 1936/1957; Hoernlé, 1931;
Malinowski, 1928; Whiting, 1941). My discussion draws
on two major sources, Meyer Fortes’s (1938/1970) essay
on education derived from his broader ethnographic work
in Ghana in the 1930s and Mariëtte de Haan’s (1999) care-
ful ethnographic study of learning and teaching among the
Mazahua people of Western and Northern Mexico in the
1990s.1
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Meyer Fortes published his essay “The Social and Psy-
chological Aspects of Education in Taleland” in a special
supplement to the journal Africa: Journal of the Interna-
tional Institute of African Languages and Cultures in 1938.
At that time, the Talensi were a largely agricultural people
living in the savannah land in the north of the country that
is now called Ghana. There were a few missionary schools
in the area at the time, but by and large, people grew up
illiterate and monolingual in their native language. It is
education in this sociocultural context that was the focus of
Fortes’s interest.
Education among the Talensi, he wrote,
is a social process, a temporal concatenation of events in
which the significant factor is time and the significant phe-
nomenon is change. Between birth and social maturity the
individual is transformed from a relatively peripheral into a
relatively central link in the social structure. (Fortes, 1938/
1970, p. 202)
The challenge is to understand this process of change.
Fortes included in his view of education both knowledge
required as a practical matter to sustain oneself and the
social group in its local ecology as well as the beliefs and
customs at the center of moral life of the group that gov-
erns social relations. Neither of these forms of education is
“an unwitting process” he informed us, but they occur in
somewhat different ways.
Common to Fortes’s view of Tallensi educational pro-
cesses of both kinds is that they take place within what he
refers to as the social sphere (or social space). Crucially,
the participation of children and adults in the social sphere
is distinctly different from that encountered in modern, in-
dustrial societies. Fortes (1938/1970) defined the social
sphere in the following, prescient, terms:
An individual’s social space is a product of that segment of
the social structure and that segment of the habitat with which
he or she is in effective contact. To put it in another way, the
social space is the society in its ecological setting seen from
the individual’s point of view. The individual creates his so-
cial space and is in turn formed by it. On the one hand, his
798
range of experiences and behavior are controlled by his social
space, and on the other, everything he learns causes it to ex-
pand and become more differentiated. In the lifetime of the
individual it changes pari passu with his psycho-physical and
social development. . . . In the evolution of an individual’s
social space we have a measure of his educational develop-
ment. (p. 213)
What is special about the social sphere of the Tallensi,
he wrote, is that
the social sphere of adult and child is unitary and undi-
vided. . . . As between adults and children, in Tale society,
the social sphere is differentiated only in terms of relative
capacity. All participate in the same culture, the same round
of life, but in varying degrees, corresponding to the stage of
physical and mental development. . . . They are actively and
responsibly part of the social structure, of the economic sys-
tem, the ritual and ideological system. . . . [This] means that
the child is from the beginning oriented towards the same
reality as its parents and has the same physical and social ma-
terial upon which to direct its cognitive and instinctual en-
dowment. The interests, motives, and purposes of children are
identical with those of adults, but at a simpler level of organi-
zation. Hence the children need not be coerced to take a share
in economic and social activities. They are eager to do so.
(Fortes, 1938/1970, p. 202)
In addition, Fortes (1938/1970) emphasized that
the training of the young is seldom regularized or system-
atized, but occurs as a “by-product” of the cultural routine;
that the kinsfolk, and particularly the family, are mainly re-
sponsible for it; . . . it is conducted in a practical way in rela-
tion to the “actual situations of daily life.” (p. 202)
These comments should not be taken to mean that there
is no differentiation of educational experience among the
Tallensi and, by well-documented extension, among “prim-
itive” peoples more generally. There are activities such as
blacksmithing, bone setting, and midwifery that are spe-
cialized by kinship group and gender. It is in such special-
ized areas that the form of education referred to as appren-
ticeship arises, a topic to which I return. But the general
picture is very clearly that of children participating will-
ingly in a wide variety of practical activities, while adults
adjust the difficulty of their participation, in a continual
social process in which relative ability is the measure of
the forms of participation.
De Haan’s (1999) research, despite its distance in time
and place, both confirms and extends Fortes’s (1938/1970)
account, in part because the teaching/learning process was
the focus of her work and in part because she had data-
1
For a broad review of similar materials taken from a diverse set of so-
cieties with special reference to the issues raised in this article, see Ro-
goff, Paradise, Mejı́a Arauz, Correa-Chávez, and Angelillo (2003), to
which I refer later in the article.
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
 recording tools that were unimaginable when Fortes did his
work. “Learning,” she wrote, “was not set apart, nor was a
completely different domain created for the sake of learn-
ing. . . . Learning was to take place by participating in the
normal course of the activity and by meeting ‘authentic’
challenges” (de Haan, 1999, p. 224).
De Haan (1999) also documented how subtle adjust-
ments are made by the parents for the sake of encouraging
learning:
For instance, the activity was slowed down, “unnecessary”
risks were taken to involve children, modeling was organized
and feedback given. However, these learning opportunities
served the task activity at the same time and were an integral
part of it. The child was never oriented on a task without be-
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ing actually an integral part of it. (p. 224)
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The most striking aspect of the role a child was given when
engaging in a learning situation is that she was not treated as
a learner but a full participant. Children were treated, as far
as possible, as if they were already proficient and were ex-
pected to learn from the demands this kind of situation pro-
vokes. . . . Once engaged in an activity children’s proficiency
is taken full advantage of although their level of competence
is different from that of an adult. (pp. 224 –225)
As a result of these arrangements, de Haan (1999) con-
cluded that such situations were arranged so that children
were given repeated opportunities to increase their compe-
tence while at the same time subtly shifting their roles to
become more and more responsible for more of the joint
task. One consequence of this form of joint activity is that,
although adults and children have different statuses, they
are both full-fledged performers, so the child is both able
to identify with the adult role and to develop new skills
and acquire knowledge without such learning being the
focus of joint attention. Another consequence is that when
the child cannot carry out a part of the joint activity, the
adult takes over the child’s role and, without distracting
either party from the task at hand, thereby provides a
model for the child to learn from without detracting from
the child’s status as a full member of the group or from the
flow of the activity.
With these two accounts as my “data” concerning the
educational practices of people living in two small, face-to-
face communities where schooling plays a negligible role
in everyday life (and the extensive documentation of simi-
lar patterns from around the world summarized by Rogoff,
Paradise, Mejı́a Arauz, Correa-Chávez, & Angelillo, 2003),
I now return to my central argument: Contemporary schol-
ars who seek to reorient educational research to study edu-
cation in its cultural, ecological context, and to re-embed
education in what they refer to as lifeworlds or communi-
ties of practice, are seeking precisely those qualities of ed-
ucation that are characteristic of the learning of people for
whom formal schooling is absent from, or peripheral to,
their everyday lives.
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
Examples of Psychoeducational Research Modeled on
Traditional Educational Practices
Clearly it is impossible deliberately to turn back the histor-
ical clock and undo all of the cultural/technological, social,
and economic changes that distinguish the lifeworlds of
children living in contemporary industrial societies from
those of the Tallensi of the 1930s. Nor would most readers
of this article wish to trade places with the Mazahua, or
the millions of people around the globe who live in near-
subsistence circumstances or worse. For such people, for-
mal schooling, years of formal schooling, is seen as the
road to progress measured in life expectancy, health, and
all of those material circumstances that make it hard to
keep their children down on the farm once they have seen
the lights of the city. So it is something of a paradox that a
great many contemporary psychologists wish to reform
modern educational practices precisely by reinstituting the
qualities of educational experience that I have just been
citing.
I do not plan to rehearse here all of the negative fea-
tures of modern schooling that have created this apparently
paradoxical attempt to reform modern educational practices
based on the model of small, nonliterate societies. The
painful shortcomings of modern schooling, including low
levels of achievement, widespread student disinterest, high
dropout rates, and massive disparities among children ac-
cording to ethnic and social class backgrounds are the daily
fare of the news media (for a thoroughgoing critical analy-
sis, see Varenne & McDermott, 1998). Rather, I concen-
trate on contemporary work by psychologists who seek to
refocus their research on a unit of analysis that includes
learners in their contexts, variously conceived. Individual
research efforts of this kind are by no means all of a piece;
they differ with respect to the particular units of analysis
they focus on, the particular qualities and kinds of joint
activity they consider most important, the role they assign
to modern technologies, their methods of research, and, of
course, the particular theoretical traditions on which they
draw to justify their methods and to interpret their results.
How successful are such efforts, and what challenges do
they face?
Cognitive Apprenticeship
In an influential early article, Collins, Brown, and Newman
(1989) coined the term cognitive apprenticeship to signal
their desire to reorganize instruction on models of interac-
tion derived from apprenticeship arrangements observed in
small, face-to-face, nonliterate societies for specialized ac-
tivities. They took as their model the observations of Jean
Lave (1977) among Vai tailors in Liberia (the work of
Maynard & Greenfield, 2006, on weaving among a group
in south-central Mexico provides an even more elaborated
case to think about).
799
 Instruction based on the idea of cognitive apprentice-
ship, Collins and his colleagues (1989) argued, should cen-
ter on students carrying out tasks in a content domain
through observation and practice, combined with teacher
modeling, coaching, and dynamic support (“scaffolding”
and “fading”). In principle, at the outset, cognitive appren-
tices, like Lave’s (1977) apprentice tailors or Maynard and
Greenfield’s (2006) apprentice weavers, should know the
end result of the work and have access to the entire pro-
cess of successful practice in the domain, which should
provide them with a coherent goal toward which to strive.
Traditional apprentices typically work in a group setting
where many levels of expertise are simultaneously on dis-
play, which provides further guidance for their own efforts
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and feedback concerning their skills relative to those of
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others. So, too, with cognitive apprentices.
Concerned as they were with reading, writing, and
mathematics, Collins and his colleagues (1989) knew they
must modify their apprenticeship approach while maintain-
ing the key properties they valued. As they noted, in focus-
ing on tasks such as farming or weaving, they were dealing
with tasks involving processes that were open to observa-
tion, so that adjustment of behavior could be more or less
transparently related to achievement of the desired out-
come. By contrast, the processes involved, say, in reading
and comprehending a text in an alphabetic language are
not, strictly speaking, even communicable, let alone exter-
nally visible. As a consequence, successful use of cognitive
apprenticeship instruction must “bring these tacit [internal]
processes into the open, where students can observe, enact,
and practice them with help from the teacher and from
other students.” (Collins et al., 1989, p. 458).
Another challenge to adopting a cognitive apprentice-
ship approach is that in traditional apprenticeships, the
problems and tasks arise from the practical work to be
done. Again, by contrast, when applying an apprenticeship
approach to modern school subject matter, manifest and
measurable learning and conceptual change are the goal.
Moreover, it is not considered sufficient to master the task
at hand—learning should be generalized, transferable, and
“decontextualized,” putting further constraints on the struc-
turing of joint activity that could easily distort the very
quality of interaction that one wants to achieve. Despite
these challenges, there are plausible examples of the effec-
tive application of the significant aspects of the cognitive
apprentice approach.
Reciprocal Teaching
A primary example invoked by Collins and his colleagues
(1989) is the procedure referred to as reciprocal teaching
(Palincsar & Brown, 1984). Reciprocal teaching was de-
signed for students who had learned basic decoding skills
but in so doing had failed to learn to read for meaning.
The method uses several procedures to externalize and
800
make visible the ordinarily invisible processes central to
reading comprehension: formulating questions based on the
text, summarizing the text, clarifying difficulties in the text,
and making predictions about what follows next in the text.
Reciprocal teaching is implemented by having the teacher
and students silently read a paragraph, which they then
discuss in terms of the four key procedures. Initially the
teacher models each procedure and the methods of discus-
sion. Then, gradually, the structure of the activity morphs
as students take on the role of the teacher, at first with ex-
tensive coaching that allows them to take over whatever
part of the overall task they can while filling in the remain-
der. The whole task always gets done, but the structure of
the doing changes.
Brown and Palincsar (1989) illuminated the affinities as
well as the differences between reciprocal teaching and
traditional forms of apprenticeship. For example, the orga-
nization of the activity makes clear that serious work is
being conducted; the adult sets the overall goals, but all
must contribute. When engaged in the group activity, the
adult teacher closely monitors students engaged in the
teaching role while giving them room to control the discus-
sions as much as they can, provides feedback tailored to
their current levels of ability, and takes over the responsi-
ble role if progress falters, just as Fortes and de Haan de-
scribed for the learning activities they observed in the ev-
eryday activities of the communities they studied.
Reciprocal teaching also differs from the cases de-
scribed by Fortes and de Haan. For example, in traditional
learning, the goals of the activity are shared by the adults
and children from the start, whereas in reciprocal teaching,
adults initially understand the goal, but the children clearly
do not and cannot precisely because they do not know how
to read. Moreover, teachers are not kin, and schools are not
villages, making the emotional bonds between participants
as well as the motivations for engaging in the activity sig-
nificantly different. Despite such differences, Brown and
her colleagues reported the effectiveness of this kind of
cognitive apprenticeship using a variety of content domains
(Brown & Palincsar, 1989).
From Cognitive Apprenticeships to Communities of
Learners and Intent Participation
Over time, the approach dubbed cognitive apprenticeship
has expanded and morphed to include a wide variety of
approaches that move beyond specialized activities to in-
clude a broad range of curricular contents and means of
structuring the roles of teachers and students.
The Jasper Program
An important variation on the cognitive apprentice ap-
proach was carried out over several years by the Cognition
and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (CTVG; (1997). Like
others who complained that standard schooling produces
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
 inert, encapsulated knowledge, the CTGV researchers
sought a means of organizing what they referred to as gen-
erative learning, which results in flexible expertise and
generalizable knowledge.
To implement this goal, the CTGV researchers used
then-state-of-the-art technology to create a series of 15–20-
min videos that engaged middle school students in various
problem-solving scenarios constructed something like a
children’s television series. Their design goals were (a) to
immerse learners in a motivating environment using clear
but incomplete narrative structures in a manner that pro-
vided many opportunities for the students to generate novel
problem solutions, seek new information, and engage in the
use of school-relevant knowledge to solve problems in the
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simulated real world and (b) to provide various supports to
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the students to deal with unusual (for school) levels of
problem complexity.
The adventures that constituted the Jasper programs
posed sequences of problems whose solutions required var-
ious kinds of mathematics, planning, decision making, and
so forth. For example, the first episode involved planning a
trip up a river and required calculations of interrelation-
ships between an ultralight plane’s fuel consumption,
weight limits, and other factors that had to be taken into
account to reach the group’s destination. The second pro-
gram continued from the first but introduced a new set of
challenges to be dealt with, culminating in the need to fig-
ure out the fastest way to rescue a wounded eagle, which
involved students in the use of mapping skills, geometry,
and trade-offs in the use of resources of various kinds.
The CTGV researchers studied this problem-solving ac-
tivity in a wide variety of classrooms, where teachers im-
plemented it in a variety of ways. Their own preferred
method was for the teacher to engage in anchored instruc-
tion, which emphasizes procedures that help students to
understand why it is important for them to learn the sub-
skills necessary to solve the problems embedded in the
overall program. They also sought to have teachers engage
in flexible support of the students to ensure that all bene-
fited from engaging the processes of solving the complex
problem, creating what they termed generative learning.
The students sometimes encountered teachers who were so
thoroughly imbued with a “basics first” approach to teach-
ing that they deconstructed the careful attempts to provide
an environment that would constantly motivate subskill
learning in the service of larger, authentic goals. In such
cases, students did learn subskills, but they proved unable
to use them in a meaningful way to deal with the complex
problem that motivated their use. Other teachers provided
worksheets to help students to minimize errors but at the
cost of being able to generate successful subproblems or to
monitor the relative success of different ways of organizing
to solve the overall problem. When implemented as in-
tended, evaluations supported the effectiveness of the re-
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
searchers’ approach to organizing cognitive apprenticeships
expanded to be group activities linked to problems beyond
the classroom.
Communities of Learners
Two major programs of research, each of which began
with ideas similar to the idea of cognitive apprenticeship
but were theoretically motivated by notions such as
“guided participation” and “zone of proximal develop-
ment,” morphed into systemic approaches to classroom
design that highlight the qualities of interpersonal interac-
tion and relegate the particular curricular content and the
tools to implement it to a subordinate, although important,
role. I describe two such programs that differ in their ap-
proaches in instructive ways.
Fostering a community of learners. As described by
Brown and Campione (1996), the overarching goal of the
Fostering a Community of Learners (FCL) program was to
engage students in authentic, generative inquiry into the
“Big Ideas” of an academic discipline (their own focus was
on evolutionary biology, but the approach has been applied
to a variety of disciplinary topics including English and
mathematics). Their guiding ideal was to transform the
classroom into a research community by organizing chil-
dren’s activities according to several distinct participation
structures. These included benchmark lessons, reciprocal
teaching, and a cycle of activities in which students re-
searched, discussed, and then performed (perhaps in a re-
search report, perhaps in a play, etc.) the topic at hand in
order to develop their understandings of the “Big Ideas.”
Benchmark lessons refer to whole-class lessons or dem-
onstrations intended to activate children’s existing knowl-
edge, to introduce central new concepts, and to serve as
anchors to which participants refer throughout the project.
Reciprocal teaching, as I have already described, is in-
tended to enhance reading comprehension in small-group
joint reading activities. To organize research-discussion-
performance cycles, Brown and Campione (1996) em-
ployed jigsaw groups (Aronson, Blaney, Stephin, Sikes, &
Snapp, 1978) in which a “Big Idea” was divided into con-
stituent subconcepts. Working in small groups, students
were helped to develop expertise in one constituent sub-
concept; then the groups were reorganized so that as an
ensemble, each group had “all the pieces of the puzzle,”
which they then had to integrate through discussion. Fi-
nally, at the end of a research cycle, students had to “per-
form” their new knowledge in action. In sum, the FCL pro-
gram was designed to create forms of participation that are
highly dialogic and anchored in core disciplinary concepts
and to foster authentic immersion in real-life concerns
(e.g., species survival) that provide natural linkages to the
larger social ecology of the classroom and the students’
lives in their communities.
As implemented by Brown and Campione (1996), FCL
801
 proved to be an extremely effective form of education that
fulfilled the goals of linking individuals to their socioeco-
logical contexts and treating the community of students in
their community as the unit of analysis. In experimental
tests, students engaged in the program outperformed con-
trol students to a striking degree.
The Open Classroom community of learners. Barbara
Rogoff was not the originator of the Open Classroom (OC)
school in Salt Lake City, but she participated in it as a par-
ent for several years while her children were enrolled
there. By her own account, her ideas about the organization
of students’ learning and her subsequent research on cul-
tural variations in the organization of students’ learning
were markedly shaped by the experience. The most com-
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plete description of this work is to be found in a book that
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
she edited together with two of the school’s teachers (Ro-
goff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001; contributors include the
editors as well as parents, other teachers, and students).
The OC school was opened in 1971 by a group of par-
ents dissatisfied with the curricula offered in either public
or private schools in their area. The originators wanted to
create a child-centered curriculum, with significant daily
participation by parents, in which everyone would be con-
sidered a learner. Child-centered is a term with many
meanings, but as it evolved, child-centered at the OC came
to mean “to build instruction on children’s interests in a
collaborative way—learning activities are planned by chil-
dren as well as adults, and adults learn from their own in-
volvement as they foster children’s learning” (Rogoff et al.,
2001, p. 33).
A central principle underpinning the organization of the
OC community of learners is balancing, as in balancing
between a totally open, child-run classroom and an adult-
run, tightly scripted classroom; balancing parent, teacher,
and student roles; balancing the Utah state curriculum stan-
dards with the interests of the students and parents; and
balancing the use of worksheets and hands-on projects. In
common with the FCL classrooms, the OC focuses on “Big
Ideas,” defined broadly as understanding key patterns in
the world and ways of learning about them.
The affinities between this mode of organizing the
teaching/learning process and those of prior examples
should be clear if only from the overlap of vocabulary.
What appears to be different in this case is the insistence
that students engage in tasks of genuine interest to them;
the resulting diversity of activities that students, even in a
single classroom, are engaged in on a daily basis; and the
difficulty of figuring out who is teaching and who is learn-
ing. The idea that everyone is a learner in the OC is clear
from the difficult learning process that parents, who spend
three sessions a week at the school as the “price of admis-
sion,” typically go through before they can contribute ef-
fectively and comfortably to the ever-changing mixture of
activities and their proper role in them. That everyone is
802
also a teacher is evident from the ubiquity of activities
when students are teaching each other or adults.
It is difficult to do justice to the richness and complex-
ity of this pedagogical strategy in a few paragraphs. As-
suming that the reader can glean the basic spirit of this
model of organizing the learning process, a natural, but
difficult-to-answer question is whether it works. Given the
nature of the school (there is no standardized testing, the
children’s parents self-select them into the school, etc.),
two criteria of success stand out. First, the school became
an accredited public charter school in the Salt Lake City
school system and has been in operation for almost 40
years; it has community support and has been institutional-
ized. Second, children graduating from the school are suc-
cessful when they move on to regular public schools at
graduation time. Less conventional, perhaps, is the finding
that the children left the school enthusiastic about going to
school, indicating that the school was achieving one of its
goals: to create lifelong learners. (Indirect evidence is pro-
vided by a study of a different school implementing a simi-
lar philosophy in which students were studied as they tran-
sitioned to a traditional public high school; DePalma,
Matusov, & Smith, 2009). The OC students were generally
successful academically in their new schools, but they also
made a sharp distinction between what they considered
authentic learning and the strategies they had to adopt to
achieve academic success in the new, conventional school.
“Serious” Gaming in Microworlds: Quest Atlantis
By serious gaming I refer to the burgeoning genre of digi-
tal video games that have been designed for a primary pur-
pose that goes beyond pure entertainment. Such games
have become prevalent in many domains of contemporary
life, including education, and the process of design is ordi-
narily guided by principles derived from psychological re-
search (Gee, 2007; Prensky, 2000). I have selected the
game Quest Atlantis as an example because it has been
specifically designed to go beyond individuals confronting
well-defined tasks as its unit of analysis and because its
designer has explicitly drawn on the same family of theo-
ries that has motivated the other examples described above.
Moreover, drawing heavily on design strategies used in the
commercial 3-D, massive multiuser gaming environments,
it has been used on an extraordinarily broad scale, involv-
ing some 10,000 children in several countries.
The core activity in Quest Atlantis is to complete quests
on the mythical planet of Atlantis, which is presented as a
place much like Earth. Quests are designed to engage chil-
dren in simulated and real-world activities that are deemed
to be socially and academically meaningful: for example,
fish are dying in the local lake, a strange disease is killing
people, a mayor needs information about how to solve the
city’s problems. Children conduct research by a variety of
means, develop plans of action, implement those actions,
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
 find out about the consequences of their actions, and en-
gage with other participants in discussions about their ex-
periences. Quests are also designed to include standards-
based academic skills, and a number of evaluation studies
have demonstrated learning gains in science, language arts,
and social studies. At the same time, the real-world anchor-
ing of the quest contents serves to link the child in the
context of the game with the game in the context of the
real world and other participants, wherever they may live.
Not only do children appear to find the game and its ancil-
lary activities attractive in school; they also seek to engage
the game outside the classroom. Moreover, they and their
teachers report increased levels of engagement and interest
in pursuing the curricular issues modeled in the game out-
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side of school (see http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu/).
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Is It Possible to Go Back to the Future?
I hope that at this juncture I have established two basic
points. First, the variety of efforts to extend psychological
analyses of educational processes beyond children engaging
in well-defined tasks to include the larger context of the
child’s activity, situating it in the child’s community by a
variety of means, bears a strong affinity to forms of educa-
tion that predominated in preliterate societies studied by
anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries, forms that
continue to dominate the educational practices of millions
of children today for whom formal schooling is, at most, a
peripheral part of their personal experience. Although only
one of the psychologists whose work I have reviewed re-
ferred to Fortes (1938/1970), many actually did seem to be
quoting him when he wrote that the process of develop-
ment is one in which during development “the individual is
transformed from a relatively peripheral into a relatively
central link in the social structure” (p. 202) or that “in the
evolution of an individual’s social space we have a mea-
sure of his educational development” (p. 214), the social
space being “the society in its ecological setting seen from
the individual’s point of view” (p. 216).
Second, I hope to have established that by reasonable
criteria (sometimes including randomized experimental
tests but more often by using less formal indicators such as
children’s meeting or exceeding state performance stan-
dards or achieving success in later schooling), such alterna-
tive practices are successful. In several of the cases re-
ported, such practices also result in children who become
self-motivated learners and who seek to engage in socially
responsible activities related to the real-world problems
they face in their communities.
Granted these two points, new questions arise that take
us well beyond the confines of psychology, requiring us to
consider issues most often addressed by political scientists,
sociologists, historians, and economists. To begin with, if
such programs are indeed successful, why do they not per-
vade education in the United States and every other indus-
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
trialized country? The fact of the matter is that such pro-
grams, despite the enormous efforts it takes to implement
them and the equally arduous efforts made to sustain them,
are very difficult to find. Why? One place to look for an-
swers is in the fate of the programs I have reviewed.
Consider reciprocal teaching. As implemented by
Palincsar and Brown (1984), there is no doubt that it mark-
edly improved comprehension skills. Moreover it proved a
successful component in the broader FCL program. But
when others sought to implement the program, they often
failed to obtain the same effects although they sought faith-
fully to replicate the correct procedures. Why? Perhaps
because the procedure itself requires flexible expertise for
its implementation? Palincsar (2006) reported a case in
which the four key strategies underpinning the activity
were treated mechanically as four discrete kinds of action
to be taught by direct instruction, not as tools to help shape
genuine dialogue in a collaborative group process. The fail-
ure to implement the underlying dialogic principle for
which the four strategies were intended to serve as an in-
frastructure totally undermined the original design. Brown
and Palincsar (1989) referred to such changes as “toxic
mutations.” Despite extensive efforts to support teachers in
their efforts to implement the procedure effectively and
descriptions of this method in many leading educational
textbooks (see, e.g., http://edr1.educ.msu.edu/CompStrat/
login.asp [username: demo, password: demo]), at present
there is no information available on how widely reciprocal
teaching is used and/or abused (A. S. Palincsar, personal
communication, December 19, 2009).
The same is true of the FCL program. Despite concerted
attempts by Brown and Campione’s (1996) colleagues to
replicate their achievement, generalization of this method
beyond its initial implementation has proven elusive, with
at most partial implementations being reported (see the
special issue of the Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2004,
Vol. 36, No. 2).
The OC program, based on principles that Rogoff has
more recently referred to as “intent community participa-
tion” (Rogoff et al., 2003), continues to exist and is a part
of the Salt Lake City school system. Moreover, even a cur-
sory search of the Internet turns up millions of entries on
open classrooms and more than a thousand mission state-
ments of specific schools implementing some form of this
strategy. As Cuban (2009) noted, there are many class-
rooms adhering to some version of the principles of the
OC school, and many more in which teachers use a mix-
ture of teacher-directed and child-centered approaches, ac-
cording to their inclinations and circumstances.
Nonetheless, there are clearly restrictions on how wide-
spread this form of education is likely to become. As Cu-
ban (2009) pointed out, the educational forms that domi-
nate a modern society are subject to myriad ideological and
economic vicissitudes; it would be foolish to expect a sin-
803
 gle form to dominate in a pluralistic, democratic society
where one family’s virtuous education is another’s invita-
tion to perdition. It is significant, in this regard, that most
schools that adopt open classrooms and require heavy adult
participation are attended by children of highly educated,
generally professional people. This is true of both the Salt
Lake City OC as well as the similar program studied by
DePalma, Matusov, and Smith (2009).
Such considerations should cause one to pause and think
about for whom and under what conditions transmission/
industrial-assembly-line education can be considered appro-
priate. Since its inception in the ancient world, mass
schooling has always been associated with large aggrega-
tions of people living in close proximity to each other as
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part of something akin to a state political organization
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(Guthrie, 2003). It has always had as its primary mission
the teaching of literacy and numeracy (Goody, 1975). It
has also always been associated with the creation of social
hierarchy and economic privilege. And failure has always
been one of its essential characteristics (Varenne & Mc-
Dermott, 1998), an idea often spoken about by those who
consider schooling nothing more than a social “sorting ma-
chine” (Spring, 1989).
Elaborate hierarchy, marked economic inequality, and
widespread failure are not characteristics of the forms of
education associated with the education practices found
among the Tallensi, the Mazahua, or the myriad other
small, face to face communities that have served as a
model for psychoeducational practices that seek to study
children in their sociocultural-ecological contexts. Conse-
quently, whatever the merits of the psychological theories
of learning and development that seek to go beyond the
individual child confronting a predesigned task, the perfor-
mance of which will be assessed on an equally individual
basis (and I firmly believe as a psychologist that these ap-
proaches are scientifically correct), they will ineluctably
fail to provide a theory of how to provide successful edu-
cation, as specified by educational policymakers, because
they fail to look beyond the limits of psychology to incor-
porate the socioeconomic, historically conditioned factors
that limit their applicability.
We seem to be caught in a double paradox. To begin
with, I have argued, and I believe demonstrated, that con-
temporary psychological theorizing about the educational
process that adopts persons-in-their-contexts (communities,
lifeworlds, ecologies) as the unit of analysis has overtly or
unconsciously sought to reinstitute forms of education that
are characteristic of historically extinct or contemporane-
ously marginalized peoples. To the extent that they are
successful in doing so, they appear to be successful in cre-
ating the kind of broadly educated, self-motivated, lifelong
learner whom educational policymakers urge upon us as a
national norm to be met or exceeded by all. But when we
go beyond existence proofs that substantiate our theories of
804
learning and development, we are faced with the uncom-
fortable fact that the social ecologies that will support the
forms of education our psychological theories urge upon us
are very difficult to find. The basic form of education dom-
inating the classrooms of the United States and every other
industrially advanced country is eerily similar to the form
of education to be found in ancient China or Sumeria.
The general pattern seems to be as follows: Exceptions
to what Rogoff (2003) referred to as the assembly-line
method of mass education can work, but the socioeconom-
ic-cultural ecologies that make them possible are limited.
The existence proofs I have described in this article are
like patches of soil in a rock pile. This situation restricts a
purely psychological approach to educational reforms to
the building of tiny gardens that have to struggle to survive
against forces outside of the analytic lens of the discipline.
We can write manuals galore on how to build these tiny
ecosystems, and we can spend years tending them. But we
cannot break enough rocks to make them spread.
So, What Is to Be Done?
I do not intend to purvey a message of despair. Rather, I
think it is important to recognize that we provide the kinds
of education our social ecologies permit and promote, fail-
ures and all. It is changes in the modes of human life, in-
cluding the role of education in promoting human adapta-
tion, that will ultimately shape the forms that educational
activity takes. Modern mass education is the product of the
socioeconomic forces that gave us the industrial revolution,
the assembly line, and McDonald’s. These forces also
brought about unprecedented welfare for many, savage ine-
qualities, a dependence on forms of energy that threaten
our long-term ability to live on this planet, and the poten-
tial of exterminating our own species in a matter of min-
utes.
But none of those circumstances have quenched human
inventiveness, nor did the circumstances facing the human
beings who stared out of the caves of Lascaux seem any
less challenging to them than our own situation seems to
us. Educational innovations, however limited, are variations
in modes of human life on which natural selection will
work as it has always done. The challenge is to come up
with variations, shaped by the illusion that human life mat-
ters in the grand scale of things that do in fact have a fu-
ture.
To some, perhaps many, reading these words, the inno-
vations of people such as Sasha Barab and the CTGV re-
search group may appear to be the answer. It seems incon-
trovertible that new digital technologies offer enormous
potential for reorganizing human life, including the process
of education for that life. In the current enthusiasm for new
technologies as the answer, my view is that we should take
into account the lessons of history and approach such en-
deavors as part of an answer, an answer that will bring
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
 with it unforeseen consequences with which we will have
to cope, just as we are having to cope with the problems
currently facing us, which not long ago were viewed as the
answer to the problems of prior generations.
In closing, I wish to put forward another strategy for reor-
ganizing educational activity that I believe to be a potentially
productive way to supplement the efforts of those whose work
I have been discussing here. For the past quarter of a century,
my colleagues at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cog-
nition and myself, along with researchers in several parts of
the world (see www.uclinks.org for an overview) have been
designing and implementing educational programs for imple-
mentation during the after-school hours. This work shares
several design characteristics with the psychoeducational re-
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
search discussed above, but it also has some unique features
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
that I believe are addressing several educational challenges at
the same time.
Shared Features
The settings we are creating mix play and education, often
using computers and computer networks as media for pre-
senting intriguing content that is a mixture of entertainment
and academic content; we provide children ranging in age
from 4 to 16 years with a wide variety of potential activi-
ties to choose among and a quasi-structure that serves to
coordinate involvement in the activities. We not only pro-
vide computer-based experiences, but we link these to a
variety of lifeworld concerns. Children come to these activ-
ities voluntarily, and according to a variety of measures,
their academic achievement and social development are
promoted by their participation in these activities (see Cole
and the Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006, and data
presented at www.uclinks.org).
Features Unique to Our Approach
The settings we are creating involve collaborations between
institutions of higher learning and local communities that
we have dubbed a U–C link (a handy acronym that began
as a reference to the University of California but that
works well for universities and communities in general).
As part of an interinstitutional collaboration, each side is
obligated to provide the other with resources that they
could not obtain outside of the collaboration. Community
institutions (youth clubs, schools, churches, community
learning centers) that already engage children during the
after-school hours provide space, a staff supervisor, and
whatever resources such as computers and telephone lines
that they can afford. The college or university provides
supervised undergraduates who spend several hours a week
with the children at the site, participating with the children
and local adults in carrying out the activities the commu-
nity deems most interesting and useful. The college stu-
dents, of course, bring their own enthusiasms and skills,
but these are always subordinated to the wishes of the
November 2010 ● American Psychologist
community. Together, with the children, they conduct a
wide range of projects that they jointly document in digital
formats that are then placed on a website and that become
a growing record of the accomplishments of the local col-
laborative community. In addition, the college students
document their experiences in the activities at the site in
detail following each visit and read academic research on
processes of learning and development, culture, class, and
other topics that their professors think could be usefully
related to their field experiences; their notes then become
the data for research papers and self-reflection on their
own development at the end of each academic quarter or
semester.
An important outcome of this line of investigation is
evidence that participation in such “theory–practice” activi-
ties produces a marked change in the undergraduates’ ideas
about their own education. Difficult readings are not dis-
missed out of hand but interrogated to see if they can be
linked to any useful sort of practice. Students, being forced
by circumstances to take responsibility for the children in
collaboration with their peers, undergo a change in their
identities as college students and in their feeling of connec-
tion to cultural communities to which they would ordi-
narily have no access.
As an ensemble, this interinstitutional collaborative ap-
proach creates a multigenerational community of practice
that makes visible to all participants a variety of futures
that they could not otherwise have imagined. It simulta-
neously addresses a range of educational challenges from
kindergarten through 12th grade, and it is fun, even if it is
a lot of hard work. It carries college students beyond a
focus on individuals engaged in well-specified tasks in
carefully pared-down social situations and requires them to
engage the wider social ecology, motivating the inclusion
of sociology, anthropology, and other social science disci-
plines as a central part of their education as psychologists.
The “gardens for development” created by this form of
theory–practice college education face many challenges.
Those my colleagues and I have created have both pros-
pered and declined over the decades, depending on which
of the entire gamut of challenging conditions faced by the
other persons-in-contexts projects discussed here that they
had to face. But wherever these “gardens” have emerged,
they have provided a rich, multigenerational environment
for education. It is my belief that research strategies such
as this one, which solve several problems at once, seem to
offer at least one promising way for educational programs
to survive both the scythe of natural selection processes
and the rocky ground with which our enormously pluralis-
tic society is currently dealing.
Author’s Note
I would like to acknowledge the extensive assistance pro-
vided by Ray McDermott in helping me work through the
805
 ideas presented here through repeated drafts of the manu-
script on a very short time schedule. Consultations with
Barbara Rogoff and Sasha Barab are also gratefully ac-
knowledged.
Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
dressed to Michael Cole, Laboratory of Comparative Hu-
man Cognition, University of California, San Diego, La
Jolla, CA 92093-0506. E-mail: mcole@ucsd.edu
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