Children's management of attention as cultural practice

Abstract

This chapter addresses the idea that a focus on participation in cultural practices is more productive for understanding cultural aspects of young children's learning than comparing membership in racial or national identities. We illustrate this idea with observations of contrasting attentional strategies used by children from 5 communities varying in cultural experience as well as nationality. Children from two communitieswith Indigenous experience-one in theUSA and one in Mexico-skillfully attended simultaneously to multiple events more often than children from threeWestern schooled communities in the USA and Mexico. In turn, children from the three highly schooled communities more often alternated their attention between multiple events, with attention to one event interrupting attention to another.We argue that both patterns of attention relate to participation in broader constellations of cultural practices and histories ofways of organizing learning in children's communities. We situate the children's attentional approaches in community practices organizing learning, especially connecting simultaneous attention with Learning by Observing and Pitching in to family and community endeavors (LOPI), which appears to be common in many Indigenous communities of the Americas.