September 2024 How do children learn when adults aren’t trying to control their development?                 Lancy, David F. 2024. Learning Without Lessons: Pedagogy in Indigenous Communities. Child Development in Cultural Context. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. How do children learn when adults aren’t teaching them? And what might children—and society—be missing out on when adults attempt to control children’s development? In this new ethnology, David Lancy scours the ethnographic record to understand how children learn across cultures and compares Indigenous pedagogies with the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) approaches that are colonising societies with Western style parenting and teaching practices. As Lancy generalises across diverse Indigenous cultures, from the Kpelle of Liberia to the Inuit of Canada, Indigenous pedagogy is underpinned by a core belief that “children must be autonomous and their learning self-initiated” (p5). This means children create their own, informal “individual education plans,” following their own interests, learning from discovery and direct experience, and rarely requiring adult intervention. Children are not segregated into specialised classrooms but find learning opportunities in the everyday pedagogical spaces in their community, developing skills from observing and mimicking experts at work, and acquiring language and cultural knowledge through overhearing speech. Adults allow toddlers to play with knives and fire because “that’s how they learn.” Eager to demonstrate their competence, find and start acquiring social capital, Indigenous children transition their play into work from as young as two years old, contributing to their societies through running errands, fishing, or herding … Continue reading Spotlight on Scholarship