Books in the Cultural Psychology of Education series

This volume addresses the current situation in higher education and what creative action needs to be taken for the future development of the various systems of higher education.

This book represents the first extensive introduction to the emerging construct of Educational Self. The new concept describes a specific dimension of the Self, which is elaborated in the course of a person's school life and is reactivated anytime the person is involved in an educational activity, whether as a student, teacher or parent. The Educational Self (ES) approach was created by the volume editors and is currently being developed at various universities in Europe and Latin America as a way of understanding and operating in educational contexts. The book presents the theoretical framework and the empirical developments of the construct, paving the way for further applications in education. The main locations of the empirical studies are Denmark, Italy, Brazil, Portugal and Colombia, but the research network is steadily expanding to other countries, so that the concept here can be generalized to different cultural contexts. The book addresses a range of contexts and moments in school life. The editors' introduction presents the construct of ES, the opportunities for further theoretical and empirical developments of the concept, and its potential applications in educational practices. In the remainder of the volume, ES is explored for different age groups (from children to adolescents to higher education), different actors (peers, teachers, parents and their interactions), different contexts (formal education, special institutions, school-family relationships) and different phenomena (disruptive behavior, special needs, value orientation, school failure, etc.). All the studies share a qualitative idiographic approach, which is characteristic of the perspective of cultural psychology in which the ES construct was elaborated.

In a world where the global engagement and international dialogue intensifies, some areas of cultivated knowledge suffer from this dialogue and this has consequences for people and communities. We propose education to be such a case. The global dialogue in education tends to be restricted to and mediated by standardized measurements. Such standards are meant to measure qualities of education and of student behavior and create the sought for condition for normative comparability and competition. The obvious drawback is that cultural variability ¿ in local living as well as in education ¿ is rendered irrelevant. Are there alternatives? The book insists on maintaining the discussion about education on a global level, but rather than moving towards homogenization and standardization of education, the attention is drawn towards the potential for learning from creative fits - and misfits - between concrete local cultures, institutional practices and global aims and standards of education. This work brings together a group of educational and developmental researchers and scholars grappling to find culturally informed and sensitive modes of educating people and communities. Case studies and examples from four geographical contexts are being discussed: China, Brazil, Australia and Europe. While being embedded in these local cultures, the authors share a conceptual grounding in cultural developmental theorizing and a vision for a culturally informed globalized perspective on education. As the theme of the book is learning from each other, the volume also includes commentaries from leading scholars in the field of cultural psychology and education.

This book represents the first extensive introduction to the emerging construct of Educational Self. The new concept describes a specific dimension of the Self, which is elaborated in the course of a person¿s school life and is reactivated anytime the person is involved in an educational activity, whether as a student, teacher or parent. The Educational Self (ES) approach was created by the volume editors and is currently being developed at various universities in Europe and Latin America as a way of understanding and operating in educational contexts. The book presents the theoretical framework and the empirical developments of the construct, paving the way for further applications in education. The main locations of the empirical studies are Denmark, Italy, Brazil, Portugal and Colombia, but the research network is steadily expanding to other countries, so that the concept here can be generalized to different cultural contexts. The book addresses a range of contexts and moments in school life. The editors¿ introduction presents the construct of ES, the opportunities for further theoretical and empirical developments of the concept, and its potential applications in educational practices. In the remainder of the volume, ES is explored for different age groups (from children to adolescents to higher education), different actors (peers, teachers, parents and their interactions), different contexts (formal education, special institutions, school-family relationships) and different phenomena (disruptive behavior, special needs, value orientation, school failure, etc.). All the studies share a qualitative idiographic approach, which is characteristic of the perspective of cultural psychology in which the ES construct was elaborated.

This volume addresses the current situation in higher education and what creative action needs to be taken for the future development of the various systems of higher education.

This book elaborates on issues regarding alterity, values, and human development in different educational contexts, serving from young children to adolescents to adults, and it claims for the need of educational contexts to consider their responsibilities regarding the development of the sociomoral dimension of human beings.

This book opens up a fruitful conversation by and between invited academics from Europe and Latin America on the features of online learning in higher education.

¿This book is the outcome of a joint collaboration between East China Normal University and the University of Luxembourg, initiated by the Center of Ideas for the Basic Education of the Future (IBEF), and focuses on kindergartens in China from a cultural psychology perspective. By coupling young scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds as research tandems, this book uses an innovative methodological method to reveal a deeply immersing research perspective of the often complicated issues in the Chinese social reality, where long historical tradition and strong motivation for a ¿modernized¿ future are fused together and continuously evolve itself into a vibrant and intricate landscape. Meanings and values consciously or unconsciously promoted and conducted in the kindergarten are semiotic devices and they mediate children¿s and educator¿s daily behaviours and activities, which are constantly navigating among different social institutions and crossing the border of kindergarten. The book discusses the process of children¿s socialization in the kindergarten from different angles such as cultural objects, moral education, conflict negotiation, children's drawing analysis and the role of Lego in numeracy development. It also provides an overview of basic educational needs in Chinese kindergartens as well as three commentaries to provide background information and to add a reflective angle for the readers. By reading the book, readers will hopefully go through a constantly transforming process between familiarizing and de-familiarizing along with the research tandem and develop their own understanding of the complex landscape of the Chinese kindergarten and its children as developing subjects constantly living and transcending the context.