Traditional Mayan practices have long promoted unique levels of family harmony: But what effect is globalization having?

UC Santa Cruz psychologist Barbara Rogoff has been working with Mayan communities in San Pedro la Laguna, Guatemala for five decades and noticed a sophisticated type of fluid, inclusive collaboration among children from these communities. During a research study 30 years ago, mothers and their two small children interacted in a very distinct way, with all 3 people mutually engaged in exploring novel objects provided by the research team.

This type of collaboration is one of the foundational elements of a way of organizing learning that Rogoff and her collaborators have come to call Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors (LOPI). It’s a common traditional practice in many Indigenous and Mexican-heritage communities across the Americas, through which children learn by being involved alongside adults in the full range of daily activities of their family and community.

“Everyone contributes, taking initiative to collaborate and foster the direction of the group, and during these shared activities, children get feedback and corrections on their contributions,” Rogoff explained. “Over the years, increased understanding of this way of learning has inspired educators and developmental psychologists around the world and supported Indigenous and Mexican-heritage communities as they work to maintain this way of organizing learning.”

Because LOPI is so different from Western approaches to classroom learning, Rogoff wondered how globalization might be affecting the practice in San Pedro la Laguna. So the research team repeated their study with relatives from the same families who were involved in the initial study.

The new research found that current groups of a mother and two small children now collaborated among all members of the group about half as often as their predecessors 30 years ago did. In this regard, current Mayan families are becoming more like European American middle-class families, who, under similar circumstances, often interacted in ways that left out at least one of the three participants.

Some trends that may be contributing to these changes in Mayan family interaction include declining use of the Indigenous Maya language and cultural practices and growing involvement with Western schooling and digital technology. Rogoff and her graduate student collaborator also noted that increased use of chairs and couches, as opposed to the traditional practice of kneeling on a mat on the floor, created increased physical separation that seemed to impede inclusive collaboration.

However, the Mayan families still differed dramatically from European American families in maintaining harmony in their interactions with minimal conflict. Current Mayan families, similarly to their predecessors, engaged harmoniously in all but about 5% of interactions in the study, compared to European American families that engaged in conflictual or resistant interaction more than 20% of the time under similar conditions.

In related studies, Rogoff and colleagues have also found that, in collaborative settings, European-heritage children are more likely to boss, ignore, or resist and to negotiate their separate ideas and goals, rather than collaborating with mutuality to advance a shared vision.

In contrast, maintaining harmonious relations is a major cultural value of many Indigenous communities across the Americas. Rogoff believes this emphasis is important not only for the Mayan community, but also could help to combat many of the social and environmental problems that globalization has brought worldwide.

“LOPI is a strength for learning for entire communities, including children, who learn as alert, community-minded contributors,” Rogoff said. “This has been known in everyday life in many communities and in the wisdom of the elders long before our research efforts. Bringing an understanding of LOPI to more people across cultures can help us all learn to be more community-minded.”