Repeatedly viewing video of forest walks foregrounded the role of land in coordinating attention and observation. The structure of family’s walks, including ways that parents and children moved and aligned their bodies in order to organize their interactions, was influenced by the environment. The very contours of the land played a role in how families coordinated attention (the orientation of bodies to one another, land, and other MTH), what families attended to and observed, and where they looked for evidence to support their explanations. In addition, the MTHs that were present shaped the content of talk and joint inquiries. For example, the sound of rustling leaves led families to look for chipmunks and develop stories about the chipmunks’ movement throughout the forest.

This camera position foregrounded the movement of the whole body, allowing me to better understand the multi-modal resources families used and the role of bodily positioning in the coordination of activity.

At the same time, working with teachers to create meaningful relationships with Native students, families, and communities is important for transforming power dynamics and structural inequities. Along with my colleagues, I have also partnered with teachers in community and school settings to design learning environments that cultivate forms of nature–culture relations that ground relationality as a principal way of being, knowing, and doing.

Each walk lasted from 30 minutes to one hour and children were given digital cameras and asked to photograph whatever interested them. Participants also recorded themselves using small wearable cameras, capturing their experiences while walking. This method aligns with ethnomethodological approaches (Stevens, 2010) and what Lahlou (2011) calls subjective evidence-based ethnography (SEBE). SEBE affords opportunities to understand how participants orient their “sensory systems to the environment” (p. 617). This method is just one way of presencing how Indigenous families, living in urban contexts, collaboratively learn about and make relations with the natural world.

In LOPI, because young children are regularly included in the wide range of social and productive activities of their community, they are often in positions to observe and listen to ongoing events, and are expected to pay attention in order to be able to contribute to them in the future. Psychological research shows that young children are especially interested in adults and pay close attention to what they are doing (Coppens & Rogoff, 2017a); thus co-presence and collaboration with others is likely rewarding to most young children.

Similarly, acknowledging children’s initiative also means allowing them to observe one another and collaborate while they are engaged in work in the classroom even if that activity were intended to be individual work (which can still be graded as individual work if needed). Although this suggestion sounds modest, it may be difficult to incorporate due to the fact that collaboration may not be recognized as such in cases where children are working without using the kinds of verbal marker that are common to traditional classroom activity. However, we believe that making teachers and administrators aware of the cultural variability in collaboration may lead to increased recognition in schools and classrooms. Recognizing the forms of communication present in interaction when children are working together and building off one another’s work and ideas is an important first step, but an equally important step is acknowledging how important this interaction with others is to learning overall. This interaction and collaboration not only motivates many children to learn, but is also an important way that many children learn in community. Additionally, this interaction with others means being accepting of the variability that is inevitably present in any community of learners.

We’ve reviewed research showing how children from families where LOPI was common were included in productive community work and how, as a result, studies found different patterns in the use of observation, attention, collaboration, talk, and in help with initiative compared to children whose middle-class families were more familiar with ALI. However, school in and of itself does not need to be based on an Assembly-Line model (Brown & Campione, 1990; Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001). There are many ways, big and small, that practices congruent with LOPI can be incorporated into classrooms. Here we would like to suggest a few, although undoubtedly there are many others that teachers and administrators might suggest.

At the heart of LOPI is children’s inclusion in ongoing family and community activity in meaningful ways. Children are not “being prepared” for future participation in community activity (sometimes referred to as adult activity), rather their participation is ongoing and already valued, even if not at an expert level. The example of Daniela making tortillas at the beginning of this chapter clearly illustrates this idea. Although Daniela’s end results still needed work, she was nevertheless able to see that her contribution was important because the tortillas served to feed the family and occasionally its animals. In this example, Daniela was not “playing” at making tortillas, neither was she taking part in a “tortilla-making exercise” where the only purpose was to teach her. Rather, Daniela was involved in the actual activity alongside her mother, observing her mother’s work, and engaging to the best of her abilities even though she was not participating at a competent or expert level. Nonetheless, she was part of the real activity and her contribution was seen as legitimate and important. This inclusion in central and productive ongoing activity is not incidental, but rather fundamental to the organization of LOPI, and has been for centuries (Chamoux 2015; Flores et al., 2015).