Moll, Luis (1947-)

As a middle school student in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Luis Moll would have been mystified to learn that he would eventually make education a career. A rebellious youngster, he disliked school, preferring the comradery of friends outside the school building. As an adult scholar, he appreciates the irony of turning that early attention to friendships into a formal study of social networks for learning and teaching. This entry describes his life and career.

Luis Carlos Moll was born on June 28, 1947, in Santurce, Puerto Rico to Carlos Moll Schwartzkopff and Olga Rita del Rosario. Moll entered public first grade and attended several other schools, including an English immersion school. But school had little meaning for the boy. In the seventh grade, he was suspended. Subsequent experiences with schools, he said later, were equally difficult.

In 1962 at the age of 15, Luis moved to Los Angeles, California, with his mother and grandmother; he graduated from high school in Montebello, California, in 1965. The following year, he attended California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, but he was poorly prepared for college and had difficulty negotiating academic requirements. He struggled with a heavy course load and dropped out after one year. Together with several high school friends, Moll joined the army in the summer of 1966. He served for 3 years. His army years included duty in Vietnam, where he was assigned to a medical evacuation unit. He spent 6 months in Vietnam and was released in June 1969 to attend college.

Back in California, he enrolled at the Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier. After a year, he returned to California Polytechnic and graduated with a bachelor's degree in social science in 1972. By then, he was more comfortable with formal education, and he enjoyed increasing academic success. After graduation, he entered the University of Southern California's (USC) masters in psychiatric social work program. During his studies at USC, Moll worked with Latino families at an East Los Angeles mental health clinic. He enjoyed the work, and upon graduation from USC in 1974, applied to the doctoral program in educational psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA, he worked with a professor conducting research on mother-teacher-child interactions with Latino students. This increased his interest in collecting and analyzing data.

While at UCLA, Moll was introduced to the cross-cultural work of Michael Cole and colleagues, in particular their focus on the relationship between culture and cognition. Moll was captivated by this work. This new interest took him to the Laboratory for Comparative Human Development (LCHC) at the Rockefeller University in New York City. There, he worked directly with Cole, director of the Laboratory, among others. At the lab, Moll encountered the work of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist whose writings from 1924 to 1934 continue to influence contemporary research on children's language and cognitive development. While at LCHC, Moll read a draft of Mind in Society, a translated compilation of some of Vygotsky's seminal writings on cultural-historical theory. Vygotsky believed that human thinking was culturally constructed, historical in origin, and social in content. Moll began to read everything he could find on language, culture, and thinking.

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