Initial teacher education faces a persistent challenge: helping future teachers use the cultural-historical approach not only to understand child development theoretically but to interpret concrete educational practices. Although this framework offers powerful concepts for analyzing children's learning and socialization, students often struggle to apply them when observing real situations. This study examines the potential of a multimodal methodology, inspired by visual anthropology, to promote situated learning in teacher education. Using a qualitative, interpretive approach, it analyzes a formative experience involving 143 primary education-degree students at a public university in Barcelona. The proposal combined academic reading, systematic observation of everyday child interactions, visual or audiovisual recording, narrative-argumentative writing, and collective discussion. Inductive thematic analysis was conducted on the multimodal corpus produced by the groups, complemented by open-ended questionnaire responses. Findings indicate that the methodology acted as formative mediation, transforming observation into evidence, writing into conceptual elaboration, and audiovisual editing into reasoned analytical selection. It fostered theory-practice articulation, situated professional vision, and collaborative, ethically informed reflection on visual data involving children.
This study examines how parents interpret playful learning and how these interpretations are negotiated in home and school contexts, comparing the contexts of T & uuml;rkiye and the United States (US). This study approaches learning through play not as a pedagogical method but rather as a field of meaning negotiated between parents' visions of childhood, learning, and academic future. The research was conducted using a comparative qualitative case study design; semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 parents living in Massachusetts (USA) and Ankara (T & uuml;rkiye) who had children aged 3-6. The data were analyzed using interpretive thematic analysis. The findings indicated that parents do not view learning through play as a universal and unconditional pedagogical principle; rather, they evaluate it conditionally based on future-oriented academic concerns, perceptions of parental responsibility, and cultural expectations. Play emerges in both contexts as both a learning tool and a parenting practice that regulates children's daily lives. The study contributes a unique theoretical perspective to the early childhood education literature by demonstrating that the play-learning relationship is temporally and contextually constructed.
This essay focuses on Vygotsky’s attention to long-term, mediated human development, with primary emphasis on the role of play, imagination, and games in the socialization of children and adolescents, and on the role of schooling in shaping the experiences of students toward cultural ends. To Vygotsky, both play/imagination/games and schooling have long-term goals and effects in human development, designed to promote the labor available to Soviet Marxist citizens. Vygotsky is often represented as a daily instructional planner via scaffolding, in spite of its absence in his writing. Vygotsky’s attention to cultural development is quite different from the short-term teaching and learning for which he is primarily, and erroneously, referenced in much educational writing. Furthermore, his view of play is often treated as an immediate experience rather than as a key facet of a lifelong developmental process. This essay is designed to interrogate such misconceptions and integrate two areas of his work that are not ordinarily treated as a continuum in educational writing.
Design history is a culturally organised way of seeing, yet school materials often reduce it to names, dates, and isolated styles. This post-test-only study compared two existing vocational classes taught through different instructional arrangements. One class received a 100-min bundled lesson combining redesigned visual representations, explicit comparison dimensions, cross-period cases, a team quiz, and collaborative judgement; the other received established textbook-supported instruction. Valid samples were 28/29 participants for a selected-response Renaissance knowledge test and 27/28 for adapted questionnaires. The bundled-lesson class had higher post-test factual and conceptual knowledge (Hedges’ g = .91, 95% CI [.36, 1.46]) and exploratory self-reports of core competencies and situational interest, but not self-efficacy or social participation. Experimental-class open responses associated joint visual attention, comparison, peer correction, and reason-giving with their experience, while negative and blank cases showed uneven participation. These perceptions offer provisional clues, not direct measures of visual reasoning. With no pretest, random assignment, fidelity record, or direct reasoning task, the findings describe class differences and motivate stronger tests rather than establish intervention effects.
Vygotsky, basing himself on Spinoza, identifies the driver of the differentiation of psychic functions as the development of the affects themselves. This transformation of affectivity is played out through the ludic imagination of the child. Since, according to Spinoza's Ethics, one affect may only be overcome by a stronger affect, the child can free herself or himself from the temptations of reality and from his or her own affective tendencies only by opposing them with a stronger affectivity, born of the imaginative pleasures of playing by rules-born, therefore, from the transformation of a concept into an affect. It is this concept becoming an affect that brings the child to a zone of proximal development-to "a notch above himself/herself." We examine, through this use of Spinozism by Vygotsky, in what sense the ludic imagination of the child, but also the esthetic imagination of the poet, is a true work of de-realization-what Vygotsky also called, from Shklovsky, "enstranging" [making strange]-such that the experienced emotions become intelligent ones.
