Barbara Rogoff

Barbara Rogoff is UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. She investigates cultural aspects of children’s learning and how communities arrange for learning, finding especially sophisticated collaboration, attention, and community-mindedness among children from some Mexican and Indigenous communities of the Americas.

She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education, and a Fellow of the AAA, APS, APA, and AERA. She has received Distinguished Lifetime Contributions Awards from the Society for Research in Child Development, the Jean Piaget Society, the Latinx Caucus of SRCD, the Cultural-Historical Research Interest Group of AERA, and the Chemers Award for Outstanding Research (UCSC). She has held the University of California Presidential Chair and Fellowships of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Kellogg Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and the Exploratorium, and served as Editor of Human Development. A cat that lives at a University in Pakistan is named in her honor (the cat’s full name: “Doctor Barbara Rogoff”).

Her books have received major awards, such as Learning Together (finalist for the Maccoby Award, APA); The Cultural Nature of Human Development (APA William James Book Award); and Developing Destinies: A Mayan Midwife and Town (Maccoby Award, APA). A journal special issue published in Spanish and English provides an overview the theoretical framework that she and her colleagues have developed: LOPI, “Learning as a community process of observing and pitching in.” Journal for the Study of Education and Development / Infancia y Aprendizaje (2022).