Laura Méndez

Transcending the zone of learning disability: learning in contexts for everyday life

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate a sociocultural approach to studying disability in educational contexts grounded in the cultural‐historical and activity theory approaches. From the sociocultural viewpoint, disability is regarded as being located in particular types of activity systems and learning cultures rather than within an individual. This helps to explain why children who demonstrate disability in one situation may be competent in other contexts. The paper offers a sociocultural analysis based on a case study of a transition made by a teacher and a student from a traditional pedagogical approach of covering a curriculum aimed at teaching money maths to a new system based on the concept of a community of learners. We combined a qualitative field study approach supported by ecological and ethnographic perspectives with micro‐ethnographic discourse analysis and an action research perspective. We show how the special education teacher, with the help of the researcher, began to transform the set of classroom activities, moving from a traditional pedagogical context to that of a community of learners. The analysis focuses on this process, presenting the specific cases that occurred in the special class and involving Marias conversations with her special education teacher about useful tasks for her everyday life. This experience permitted us to examine how the transformation of the learning scenario enables changes in ways of learning to appear, in the participation of the learner in her own learning process and the relationship between teacher and student.

Digital communities and videogames as educational tools in participatory culture

This study examines how innovative educational contexts facilitate the development of new literacies in a participatory culture. The study was carried out in a Spanish secondary education school, where students used online conversational environments and video games. The data were collected from a workshop carried out in an English class. It was conducted in two scenarios, inside and outside the classroom. While students were playing, they talked about the game, planned their actions and took decisions together. Moreover, they participated in a virtual conversational space to support the game’s sessions by facilitating reflective gaming among the participants. The results show that social relationships evolved from a social network, in which individual contributions are important, to an online community in which the group was predominant. Participation made it easier for students to approach the discourse and the rules of the game and enhance the new literacy training process.

El aula de una escuela infantil: ¿qué buscamos y qué hay en ella?

ResumenEl objetivo de este articulo es explorar las actividades que tienen lugar en un aula de preescolar. Consideramos la interaccion educativa entre la maestra, los ninos y las ninas, como una situacion organizada por las personas adultas y definida por las metas que los participantes hacen presentes en la situacion. Nos fijamos en sus conversaciones como uno de los elementos esenciales para comprender el proceso interactivo. Tras exponer el marco teorico, siguiendo de cerca las aportaciones de Bruner, y presentar algunas cuestiones metodologicas, analizamos una experiencia que se ha llevado a cabo en un aula de preescolar. La investigacion incluye una discusion relacionada con el pensamiento del profesorado.

Becoming a tutor: student scaffolding in a game-based classroom

Student interaction in school contexts is a topic that has been researched from many different perspectives. However, the role of students as tutors scaffolding other peers is not normally addressed, since studies are usually focused on the teacher. Moreover, considering the many technologies that can support students’ work nowadays, studies describing specific practices are still needed in order to understand the many possibilities and constraints that can emerge from the use of these tools in the field of education. This exploratory case study aims to extend research on scaffolding between students, presenting data from an ethnographic study where a commercial video game was introduced as part of the curricular activities. Analytically, the scaffolding metaphor is the departing point to describe in detail how the scaffolding process took place, focusing on its purposes and on the role of students as tutors. Our findings reveal how students offered mostly procedural scaffoldings, performing tutor functions such as highlighting relevant features, reducing levels of freedom or controlling the frustration. Results highlight that students can perform scaffolds, and this should be considered as part of the classroom design, making this process visible. Moreover, specific features of the video game enhanced these interactions, which should also be considered when designing game learning environments in the future.

Public and Private Adolescent Lives: The Educational Value of Entertainment

In this chapter we explore the educational value of entertainment to build bridges between young people’s everyday scenarios, when commercial video games and other digital tools mediate their practices. The research focuses on the interaction between the private and public lives of a group of teenagers, 12 girls and 6 boys aged 16 to 18, in the process of building their identities when they use social media and play commercial videogames. Participants played The Sims. We focus on informal educational contexts, an extra-curricular scenario, and examine how teachers and children use commercial video games. Adopting an ethnographical and action research point of view, the analysis of the adolescents’ blogs and multimedia productions are the main focus to explore private and public sphere. Our results show how youth identity today is built around virtual and real worlds, public or private, where differences between them matter less than a need to communicate with other people, far away in space and time, which was unthinkable a few years ago. All this sets up a real or virtual world that educators, parents and researchers often forget.

La comunicación entre padres y educadores. Un camino de ida y vuelta

Resumen Este artículo aborda la relación entre padres y educadores desde una perspectiva ecológica y contextual, considerando la escuela y la familia escenarios o microsistemas donde el niño crece y se desarrolla. Para entender la relación que el niño establece en un escenario de crianza tendremos que conocer los vínculos que establece con otros escenarios y su participación en ellos. Desde este planteamiento, para comprender y potenciar el desarrollo del niño cuando está en el hogar o en la escuela, ambos entornos y los adultos que actúan en ellos deben conocerse. Con este fin, a lo largo de estas páginas se señalan algunas características que definen y diferencian la comunicación que establecen las familias y la escuela en la etapa infantil, resaltando aquellos aspectos que, por las edades tempranas de los niños, comparten ambos entornos.