Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur

Locating Social and Emotional Learning in Schooled Environments: A Vygotskian Perspective on Learning as Unified

This article contributes to the emerging literature on social and emotional learning (SEL) from a Vygotskian perspective. A critical perspective on SEL in the context of schooling in the United States situates current interest in SEL programs. Vygotskys foundational work from the 1920s and 1930s is used to clarify learning as unified, and the concept of feeling is elaborated with literature relevant to learning in school environments and across the life course. Potential next steps for research are noted, in particular given the unity of speech, thinking, and feeling and the literature on the role of social speech and dialogue in learning and development.

Constructing and Reconstructing Teaching Roles: A focus on generative metaphors and dichotomies

Over the last several decades, a shift in thinking has brought to the fore the power of language as more than simply a method of expression. Indeed, language is a constituent part of social practices and social identity. For teachers, both pre-service and in-service, teaching roles are often represented through surface and generative metaphors, the latter of which are tacit. In order to study the way in which language, and in particular metaphor, influences thinking about teaching roles, the authors of this article combined their data to examine the metaphoric discourse of both pre-service and in-service teachers. Contextualizing two separate studies in their respective teacher education programs, this article highlights the obstacle of unexposed generative metaphors and the value of ongoing professional development. In addition, it emphasizes the importance of deconstructing traditional dichotomies as central to teacher education reform.

Spaces of Difference: The Contradictions of Alternative Educational Programs

Drawing upon the concept of thirdspace (Soja 1996), this article extends sociocultural theorizations of space in relation to alternative educational programs: programs designed to re-engage youth who have been pushed out of mainstream schools. Snapshots of educational programs, provided by ethnographic research gathered in the United States, Australia, and Canada, foreground the contradictions inherent in these alternative spaces: on one hand, the possibilities obtained for youth through participation, and on the other, the production of these programs through displacement. Alternative educational programs expose the tensions between a democratic ideal of engaging all young people in excellent and equitable public schools and a neo-liberal economic rationality that currently fuels the “sorting machine” function of compulsory schooling.

Who's/whose at risk? answerability and the critical possibilities of classroom discourse

Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we challenge the essentialized notion of adolescents and young people as perpetually driven to resist the authority of adults. At the same time, we disrupt linguistic conceptions of adolescent discourse, along with the discourse of youth at risk, by analyzing a transcript of classroom discourse that reflects an exchange between a highly regarded and well liked preservice teacher and his students. This representative transcript highlights the preservice teachers ability to query, without a concomitant ability to listen, respond, and build a classroom dialogue with his students; what we call here a Socratic monologue. Second, we link the notions of dialogue and responsiveness to Bakhtins concept of answerability, emphasizing the joint construction of classroom discourse as an ethically answerable relation between teacher and students. He is currently doing research on new Asian pedagogies. Her research interests include applying sociocultural and critical lenses to the study of identity construction, in particular, the social construction of “at risk” identities for young people. Her current research documents the experiences of students and teachers in alternative high school programs. She is co-editor of Re/constructing “the adolescent”: Sign, symbol and body forthcoming from Peter Lang, Educational imaginings: On the play of texts and contexts with Shaun Rawolle published by Australian Academic Press, and Crossing boundaries: Perspectives across paradigms in educational research, with Paula Jervis-Tracey, also published by Australian Academic Press.

The Discourse of Parent Involvement in Special Education: A Critical Analysis Linking Policy Documents to the Experiences of Mothers.

Parent involvement is acknowledged as a crucial aspect of the education of students with special needs. However, the discourse of parent involvement represents parent involvement in limited ways, thereby controlling how and the extent to which parents can be involved in the education of their children. In this article, critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to examine the discourse of parent involvement in excerpts from policy documents and interviews from a larger study on immigrant Chinese Canadian mothers’ involvement in the education of their children with disabilities. Contrasting policy documents and interviews, the discourse of parent involvement positioned mothers as over- or underinvolved, subordinate, and inexpert.

Spatializing sociocultural research : a reading of mediation and meaning as third spaces

We, the editors of this special issue, began our lives on other continents and in other countries. As we traversed the globe, finding our way to Australia, we became embodied examples of global movement: flows of humans, belongings, lives, and languages from one location to another. In making sense of our mobility, our memories and experiences, identities and identifications, discourses and social languages, we recognize that we are multiply situated in different discourses of spatial (re)production, and therefore our identifications with particular spatial-discursive locations can be both empowering and disempowering. Our ongoing negotiation with, and hybridization of, identities makes the work of positioning ourselves complex and messy. We are “in between,” ambivalent reporters who can only tell partial tales of Australia. Our hybridity positions us as latecomers to Australia—those who have come to find a better or a different life, those who are still seeking—and we are cautious of essentializing the identities of those who were here first and of those who came before us. To approach our task as editors of a regional special issue (the authors here are or were affiliated with Australian universities) and an issue on semiotic, dialogic, and material spaces, no less, we looked across our own hybrid identities at our general differences and overarching similarities. What stood out immediately to us were those aspects of our identities that are racialized, our abilMIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 13(3), 163–175 Copyright

Mediation in cognitive socialization: The influence of socioeconomic status

Social activities and adult–child interactions form the basis for cognitive socialization. The extent to which everyday activities differ by socioeconomic status (SES), and the extent to which they are employed differently, becomes a contentious topic when different outcomes in social and academic competence are linked. Socialization results in attitudes, values, and cognitive and linguistic skills that children use as they grow and ultimately become means or tools for development. Children develop competencies through various patterns of adult–child and other social interactions. Often what is seen as important and valuable for socialization varies across communities. Only some of the literature on adult–child interaction addresses elements of SES differentiated activity settings – for example, family structures, scripts, values, and task demands – that are historically embedded. This chapter focuses on a cultural–historical analysis of research linking SES to variations in adult–child interaction.Although the scope of the chapter limits the extent to which these topics may be explored, a sample of research is examined and framed within the structure provided by Cultural–Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), along with examples of adult–child interaction research approached from a CHAT perspective. CHAT is characterized by a developmental and social analysis of human action that is mediated generally by different cultural tools. To understand differences in individual development, variations in the latter must be considered across activity settings, as well as the way a person responds in terms of shared values, expectations, and practices.

Telling in Time

Readers of this journal have come to expect that each new issue will bring greater diversity to our ongoing investigations into the nexus of Mind, Culture, and Activity (MCA). The range of activities and practices being investigated at the present time is imposing in its variety. Recent issues have included research on children’s engagement in crafting and e-textiles, the contribution of adult musicians to orchestras, preschoolers playing computer games, the dissemination of digital technology and digital literacies in Portugal as organized by social class and locale, a deep reading of a book by A. N. Leontiev, the routines of everyday life, contributions to changing educational practices in Botswana, and family interaction in Cameroon. In MCA, diversity is unpacked to include differences across activities; ages; contexts; cultures; and, emphasized in this issue, time scales. In this introduction, we highlight diversity of three kinds; diversity in:

Rebuilding attendance practices with youth: the role of social mediation

This article highlights the experiences of students and educators from a larger sociocultural study of participation and engagement at a senior alternative high school programme in British Columbia, Canada. Drawing on participant observation, active interviews and document analysis, school attendance was remediated as a meaningful social practice as a result of the relationships young people formed with educators and peers, rather than meaningful in and of itself or in relation to academic performance. These findings trouble school attendance policies that locate absenteeism as a problem within individual students and as decontextualised from their lived experiences. Findings also foreground the importance of examining how school attendance may be interpreted by students. For some students, participation in relationships and communities lies behind school attendance, highlighting the necessity of attending to the role of identity and values alongside of the construction of knowledge as central to the work of schools.

Health Care “As Usual”: The Insertion of Positive Psychology in Canadian Mental Health Discourse

The recent shift to a “positive psychological” approach that emphasizes a “health model,” rather than a “disease model,” in mental health discourses is intended both to reduce the stigma around mental health issues and to enable people to play a role in monitoring their own mental health. As a component of a larger study on access to and utilization of mental health services by immigrant women, and a partial reflection of the current ideological context of mental health policy and practice in Canada, this shift was examined by analyzing the Canadian Mental Health Associations mental health discourse as posted in Web-based text using features of critical discourse analysis. Although considered an improvement over previous approaches by some, the current mental health discourse continues to reflect ideologies that assume a universal psychology of individual mental health. Framing this research with aspects of sociocultural and postcolonial theories, this article seeks to identify the possibilities of this new discourse and expose its limitations in relation to immigrants to Canada.