Paper short abstract:

This paper synthesizes methods drawn from comparative human development, cognitive science, and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Two cases are examined to frame collaboration as embodied interaction in a singular, continuous process, rather than divided into biological and cultural domains..

Paper long abstract:

This paper articulates an approach to understanding collaboration that treats embodied interaction as a singular process rather than as the linking of separate divided-off skills, treated as objects. By describing two specific cases, I offer a synthesis of research stemming from comparative human development, cognitive science, and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. I contrast this process approach with research in mainstream social cognitive development that is based on the idea that collaboration develops by putting together separate abilities or skills widely thought to underlay collaboration, such as joint attention, imitation, helping, gaze following, pointing, and symbolic play, as if they are objects (or domains) existing independently of each other (Callaghan, Moll, Rakoczy, Warneken, Liszkowski, Behne, & Tomasello, 2011). Instead, I describe collaborative engagement in terms of culturally variable interactional synchrony events. This is simpler than an object-based approach. I focus on key cases from empirical work that describes collaborative engagement at a scale of fractions of seconds (Dayton, Aceves Azuara, & Rogoff, in prep) as well as theoretical work that contends that collaboration across micro and historical scales is a unified, continuous process (Dayton & Rogoff, 2016). This paradigm fundamentally includes cultural variation rather than introducing it as an additional empirical question. Likewise, this approach requires no presumption of “mental” activity for coherence. Finally, it allows me to generate and examine new theoretical predictions that conventional theory and methods cannot.