Hands on: Nonverbal communication in Native and non-Native American parent-child dyads during informal learning.

Parent-child communication is a rich, multimodal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly White) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their 4-year-old children (N = 39, 25 boys) across two communities: Menominee families (low to middle income) living on tribal lands in rural Wisconsin, and non-Native, primarily White families (middle income) living in an urban area. Dyads participated in a free-play forest-diorama task designed to elicit talk and play about the natural world. Children from both communities incorporated actions and gestures freely in their talk, emphasizing the importance of considering nonverbal behaviors when evaluating what children know. In sharp contrast to the stereotype that Native American children talk very little, Menominee children talked more than their non-Native counterparts, underlining the importance of taking into account cultural context in child assessments. For children and parents across both communities, gestures were more likely than actions to be related to the content of speech and were more likely than actions to be produced simultaneously with speech. This tight coupling between speech and gesture replicates and extends prior research with predominantly White (and adult) samples. These findings not only broaden our theories of communicative interaction and development, but also provide new evidence about the role of nonverbal behaviors in informal learning contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning by Observing, Pitching in, and Being in Relations in the Natural World.

This chapter describes a central tenet of Indigenous American social interaction, which emphasizes mutuality in collaboration and caring in Indigenous communities. This includes interactions with an agentive natural world, in which more-than-human beings act as participants in the lives of humans and vice versa. We argue that research on children's learning should take a broader view of interactional partners to include the natural world.

Human-centeredness is Not a Universal Feature of Young Children's Reasoning: Culture and Experience Matter When Reasoning About Biological Entities.

We consider young children's construals of biological phenomena and the forces that shape them, using Carey's (1985) category-based induction task that demonstrated anthropocentric reasoning in young urban children. Follow-up studies (including our own) have questioned the generality of her results, but they have employed quite different procedures and either have not included urban children or, when urban samples were included, have failed to reproduce her original findings. In the present study of 4-10-year-olds from three cultural communities, our procedures followed Carey's more closely and replicated her findings with young urban children. However, they yielded quite different results for young rural European American and young rural Native American children. These results underscore the importance of a complex interaction of culture and experience--including both day-to-day interactions with the natural world and sensitivity to the belief systems of the communities--in children's reasoning about the natural world.