Family storytelling can support the development of children's cognitive skills and sense of identity. The current study explored Latine caregivers' storytelling as a resource for promoting their young children's science learning. One-hundred and fifteen U.S. Latine caregivers were video recorded sharing a nature- or science-related story with their 3- to 5-year-old children and reporting why they shared that story. Most caregivers told autobiographical narratives, including reminiscing stories about shared events and caregiver memories from their own childhood. Others told fiction stories (i.e. invented stories, retellings of popular children's stories) and fictionalized personal stories. Stories covered many science topics, including animals, outdoor recreation, natural environments, and plants and farming. Although STEM learning is often presented as acultural and objective, many caregivers chose to tell nature- and science-related stories that connected to child and family identity development.
This cognitive-ethnographic study investigates how learning processes unfold in engineering research labs. We observed several instances of advisor-student interactions that resemble the instructional strategy of scaffolding. Interestingly, the advisor neither knew about the scaffolding strategy nor intended to use it. We described this unplanned scaffolding as an organic scaffolding. From our observations, we found that the advisor continuously encouraged each student to be an independent researcher, the lab had a nonhierarchical, collaborative environment, and students were inclined to do self-directed learning. These features appeared to make organic scaffolding possible. In addition, when we observed an individual advisor-student interaction to solve a problem, we observed a co-constructive scaffolding process. The scaffolding process was initiated by the student and while the advisor provided support by structuring the learning process, the student also actively led the process during the motivational phases of learning. This co-constructive scaffolding is an example of self-directed learning that occurs in the engineering lab. Based on our findings, we suggest that organic, self-directed scaffolding can be a useful learning strategy in the engineering lab when it is properly adapted to each lab's situation.
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.
