This article provides an extensive overview of my research on children's learning and development, spanning over 50 years. The research is anchored in the cultural-historical tradition and phenomenology, integrating these two traditions to understand children's development. The article discusses three central areas of research: perspective taking, concept learning, and a wholeness approach to evaluating and supporting children's development. I emphasize the importance of taking children's perspectives to analyze their activities and development in daily life practices. Methods oriented to children's perspectives are formulated to evaluate and support their development as whole persons. The article also argues for integrating the phenomenological focus on children's emotional experiences with the cultural-historical conception of children's cognitive and motive development. One substantive point presented is the conclusion that spatial perspective taking is a learned conceptual process rather than a maturational one. Another key point is the development of the Double Move approach to education, which integrates children's everyday knowledge with subject matter concepts to enhance their learning and motivation.
The environment's role in child development is central in all of Vygotsky's theoretical works. This article explores the role of the environment in the production of developmental problems in children with disabilities. Using children with the genetic condition 22q11.2 DS syndrome as a concrete example, our aim is to advance the theoretical articulation by analyzing developmental incongruence in light of the pedological concept of periodization and its intersection with defectology studies. Drawing on central ideas from both traditions, we reinterpret biomedical research on children with 22q11.2 DS to highlight how developmental difficulties emerge from incongruence in the structural relations between the child and their environment. These incongruences generate a specific social situation of development characterized by disruptive contradictions, in which the demands, supports, and activities shaping the child's development conflict with its current developmental level, producing distress and developmental arrest. We argue that the frequent psychopathology observed in this group is best understood as psychological neoformations arising from this structural contradiction between cultural-historical age periods and the child's developmental needs, rather than as a direct consequence of the genetic condition itself.
Youth participation is of great interest across many fields and disciplines. In recent decades, the modes, spaces, and timings of civic and political participation have shifted, with increased emphasis on individual action, reflexivity, and the blending of online and offline spheres. This qualitative study, based on 13 in-depth interviews with young Catalans, explores the factors shaping their engagement and commitment, through a critical analysis linking structural conditions with individual experience. Different profiles of young people regarding participatory activities and their sense of agency have been identified. All of them contribute to projects of collective transformation from individual standpoints, although some display a stronger collective agency, grounded in transformative and prefigurative perspectives. The results reveal how superstructures such as neoliberalism and meritocracy influence not only opportunities for social participation, but also the capacity to imagine and articulate desirable futures. Most feel disconnected and disaffected from public institutions. In response, new forms of social participation have emerged as more accessible mechanisms, offering spaces of resistance aligned with their needs and values. Nevertheless, doubts remain about their effectiveness in confronting a global context marked by uncertainty and multiple crises. The findings highlight the need to rethink public policy and community approaches.
This paper examines how cultural-historical legacies, sociopolitical ideologies, spatial and economic arrangements organize educational responses to human differences at the intersection of disability, race, culture, and language. Drawing upon cultural-historical activity theory, we examine systemic contradictions within the inclusive education system in two national contexts: Ukraine and South Korea. The first case investigates how post-Soviet legacies of conformity and deficit-based professionalization continue to mediate inclusive practices in Ukrainian schools. The second study interrogates how monoethnic nationalism, postcolonial ideologies, and deficit discourses shape the identification and schooling of students with disabilities from multicultural families in South Korea. Despite the presence of progressive policies, both cases reveal how deeply rooted exclusionary structures and historical ideologies constrain the transformative possibilities of inclusive education. We argue that inclusive education is far from being a neutral, universal construct divorced from its social and cultural contexts. Rather it requires a reframing of inclusive education as a cultural-historical system, constituted through histories, artifacts, and relations of power. Such a reframing is essential for unpacking systemic contradictions and for reimagining the sociopolitical, institutional, and cultural shifts to re-mediate educational systems and advance equity for all students.
This article presents an empirical analysis from an international project that combined in-class microblogging and jointly created ground rules for talk. The analysis resulted in a conceptual framework that highlighted three key interactional processes: (1) the intermingling of oral and written communication, (2) the traveling of ideas within classrooms, and (3) the occurrence of concurrent interactions. In this article, we argue that these processes are intensified by specific affordances of microblogging tools that are designed around short-text formats and a shared presence. We discuss how this setup creates new opportunities and challenges for teachers considering changes in participation patterns across lessons in the project. We illustrate the processes, showing the need for cognitive and social structuring to guide students' exchange of ideas across individual, group and whole-class work to widen participation and facilitate the co-creation of an inclusive classroom culture. The article contributes to a broader discussion about how augmented dialogic spaces in classrooms can be better understood and shaped, beyond the specific microblogging tools covered in this empirical analysis.
The transition to primary school is a complex dynamic process widely recognized in the literature, but few empirical studies have explored how this process unfolds. Grounded in cultural-historical theory, this study researches the periodization of children's transition to school and its mechanisms. A case study of three children was conducted over two years (138 hours of observations and 16 hours of interviews). Findings show that the transition to school is a heterogeneous process in which children start their transition at different points and experience distinct phases. Children's social situation of development (SSD) conditions the transition trajectory, and the emerging crises drive this trajectory. Children may experience development, stagnation, or regression depending on how the crises are managed.
This study examines how language teachers enact relational agency to address language, culture, pedagogy, and power differentials in co-teaching, using Edwards' (2007, 2010) conceptualization grounded in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Through qualitative analysis of interviews with a local English language teacher and a native English-speaking teacher co-teaching at a Chinese university, the findings show relational agency is manifested in three core practices: establishing mutual support for professional learning, flexibly shifting roles to leverage complementary expertise, and consistently recognizing and integrating each other's relational expertise. Central to this process is the dynamic co-construction of common knowledge, which mediates their joint action and progressively expands the shared object of activity from language instruction to encompass intercultural understanding and professional growth. The study demonstrates how relational agency transforms potential disparities into productive resources, enabling more equitable and sustainable co-teaching partnerships.
This article analyses how professional teacher identity is constructed by examining a series of experiences cited by 26 final-year future teachers as having been key to their learning process. Using positioning theory, we examine identity changes based on the positional movement that occurs in each narrative. The data were collected during interviews with students from various teacher education programs in Chile and were analyzed at both the thematic and discursive levels. Results highlight how certain emotionally intense experiences serve as anchors in the configuration of professional identity. These experiences allow future teachers to construct an image of themselves in their professional role. We also observe that active participation and decision-making are essential to fostering agency and strengthening identity. In addition, formative experiences in informal contexts beyond the school environment help to broaden understanding of the teaching role. Overall, our findings underline the importance of subjective experiences in the construction of professional teacher identity.
Although sleeping and waking are everyday activities and inherent parts of being human, they are rarely considered social, collaborative, or educational. In this study, we explore practices of waking young children up in institutional interaction. Taking a cultural-historical approach and using a video-observation method, we investigated how young children (1-5 years old) and adults participate in joint waking activity after nap time in early childhood education. We asked how joint waking activity creates learning opportunities for children to collaborate as valuable members of the early childhood education community. Our results show that waking activity creates opportunities for children to learn to care for each other and to become sensitive to other children's needs. Waking moments that involve encountering sleeping and just-awakened members of the community invite caring responses from co-participant children and create collaborative configurations of care. We discuss how our concept, collaborative configuration of care, offers cultural-historical theory new insights into everyday guiding and learning.
The purpose of this article is to explore how young people's possibilities of participation are connected to institutional conditions that enable the social processes that promote and prevent situated inequality. To do so, empirical examples from a school located in a marginalized residential area in Denmark with young people aged 12-14 are analyzed. This draws on a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, including participant observations, situated interviews, and explorative statistical data. By zooming in and out on everyday life at school, the analysis connects young people's situated experiences to wider structural and institutional conditions beyond the immediate classroom context. The article illustrates how societal and political changes taking place, such as the transformation of a local residential area, take on concrete and situated meanings for young people's conditions of participation in everyday school life. With this, the article contributes to developing a social psychological perspective on inequality, focusing on the situated processes through which unequal conditions for young people's participation develop - and possibly can be transcended.
This paper presents a vector addition learning intervention by incorporating concreteness fading to explore how students use gestures to establish common ground and how their gestures reflect their transitional state of understanding vector addition. Sixteen eighth-graders from a charter school in a large U.S. Midwestern city were recruited to participate in the intervention. We conducted a focused video analysis to observe two students' use of gestures in two conditions, concreteness fading and concreteness introduction (learning activities in reverse order). We found that students tended to use gesture to create common ground for effective group communication and shared understanding. Also, observing gestures can reveal learners' transitional states, in which they may have multiple and diverse hypotheses. This study exemplifies how to understand learning in a concreteness fading intervention through gesture analysis and reveals how common ground and transitional knowledge emerge in a concreteness fading intervention.
We look at how families tell stories about their migration histories with data. Taking a cultural historical approach, we used video analysis methods to examine clinical interviews in which youth and parents together explored socioeconomic data visualizations to answer the question, "What moved my family?." We provide examples to illustrate how families reflected on personal experiences in relation to power systems, what we term criticality, and expanded the generality of stories to broader social contexts, what we term scope, in data discussions. Our study suggests that family storytelling grounded in data explorations can shape learning personal and broader histories.
This article examines how teachers interpret a global education curriculum in an ethnically diverse secondary school in Hong Kong. It contributes to broader discussions about the intersections of global and multicultural education. Using zone theory, we analyse how a group of global education teachers navigate the school's institutional and cultural contexts, particularly in relation to their curriculum decisions. Our findings indicate that these teachers' understanding of global education is closely tied to their commitment to cultural inclusion, which underpinned the active expansion of schooling infrastructure and resources. Mediated by these expanded resources, the teachers enacted the curriculum with various strategies: organizing a cultural carnival, recruiting ethnic minority teachers, and designing learning activities that reflect students' ethnic backgrounds. The coalescing of the school's commitment and strategies reflects what we call "Zone for Ethnic Diversity," a learning climate that empowers teachers to promote cultural inclusion within the global education curriculum. We conclude by discussing the use of zone theory in identifying a global education curriculum trajectory, which helps assess the alignment between commitments and possibilities of achieving multicultural aims.
Drawing from cultural-historical activity theory and the theory of expansive learning, our study investigates an expansive learning process in a Change Laboratory intervention in a Finnish teacher training elementary school, facing a transformational curriculum reform. New subtypes of expansive learning actions and a novel analytical category within expansive learning are induced, employed and discussed for a more nuanced understanding of the learning process in which the participants tackled a contradiction between historically formed individualistic teacher-autonomy vs. collectivistic curricular demands of collaboration and interdisciplinarity. As an outcome, a model of distributed leadership was produced and later implemented as new school practice.
This paper critiques traditional educational practices based on cognitive transmission, advocating for education as a self-formative process that embodies knowledge through practice. It challenges the notion of skills and knowledge as detachable, transferable assets, promoting instead an understanding of learning as inherently situated across diverse cultural and social contexts. By discussing Huberto Maturana's relational ontology, the paper aligns his ideas with contemporary sociocultural theories, proposing a paradigm shift towards educational frameworks that emphasize embodied, relational learning. This shift aims to replace reductionist methodologies with approaches that recognize the complex interconnections in knowledge and learning.
While Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) research has a significant role in investigating change, it often overlooks historical aspects. This article addresses this gap by exploring the historical dimension and its connection to creating collective and professional models in schools requiring changes in their activity systems. The study involved two Change Laboratories (CL) with 42 participants addressing issues of equal access to educational success in two lower secondary schools in Sweden. The research revealed that despite similar characteristics in for example experienced and well-trained teacher staff, the schools' staff developed different models to tackle similar issues. The analysis examined historical conditions and developments linked to current cultural and social contexts, suggesting that the models varied related to different collective interpretations of historical experiences. Participants' historical understanding influenced current practices and the creation of new models during the CLs to address inequality. The study underscores the empowering role of history in studies of change, emphasizing a shift from mere participation in practice to active contribution through practice. It stresses the importance of clarifying historical contexts and demonstrates how this can be achieved.
