Mariane Hedegaard

Children's Development from a Cultural–Historical Approach: Children's Activity in Everyday Local Settings as Foundation for Their Development

A central dilemma in developmental psychology has been to combine general concepts with research of the individual child in all her complexity in everyday life activities. Psychologists such as Riegel, Bronfenbrenner, Burman, Morss, Hedegaard, and Walkerdine have criticized research approaches that study child development from a functional view. Sociologists and anthropologists, such as Corsaro, James, Jenks, Prout, and Qvotrup have instead argued for childhood studies as the alternative to developmental psychology. None of these approaches is alone sufficient; instead, it is important to formulate a theoretical approach of child and youth development that combines general psychological concepts with research of children and youth in concrete settings, such as home or school. The aim of this article is to argue that this will be possible by building on Vygotskys cultural–historical theories of the zone of proximal development and developmental crises. A theory of childrens development should include more directly than it has in the past the practice in childrens everyday institutions and the conditions the society give children for development and at the same time attempt to grasp the childs perspective. A theory of childrens development has to be anchored in societal values, that is, what different institutions value as a good life. Examples from my research on children in Danish kindergartens and immigrant children in Danish schools are used to exemplify the arguments.

Analyzing Children's Learning and Development in Everyday Settings from a Cultural-Historical Wholeness Approach

The main point in this article is to conceptualise how demands connected to childrens life conditions influence both children and caregivers. To pursue this aim I advocate an extension of Vygotskys cultural-historical theory of childrens learning and development. Vygotsky pursued a wholeness approach to childrens development with his concept of “the childs social situation of development” as the childs dialectic experiential and motivational relation with his or her surrounding. This conception I extend with the concepts of institutional practice and activity setting. The conditions for childrens activities are the institutional practice and its activity settings. But a childs activities in these settings also has to be seen from the childs perspective, that is, his or her motive orientation. To focus on the childs motive within an activity setting—requires the researcher to focus on the childs social situation of development to discern how the dialectic between the childs orientation within an activity setting and the demands from the setting and other persons influence the childs activities within the childs zone of proximal development.

Children's Development as Participation in Everyday Practices across Different Institutions

Children participate in different institutional collectives in their everyday life. Home, school, and kindergarten are the institutional contexts that most children share. Although there are variations between home practices and school practices, they collectively share a common core framed by societal conditions. In drawing upon Vygotskys (1998) theory of the social situation of development and Hedegaards (2009) theory of development conceptualised as the childs participation within and across several institutions at the same time, it has been possible to examine how school practices influence home practice and the childs social situation of development. A case study of an Australian childs participation across different institutions (family and school) was undertaken to capture and analyse the dynamic processes through which development was afforded. In the case study there was a large disjunction between institutional practices of the home and school that the child had to negotiate. Due to teacher knowledge of only the childs relation to the school institution, and not the home institution, the affordances for development and the childs changing relations to his environment, were invisible to the educators in this study. The findings suggest foregrounding an understanding of childrens development as changes in childrens activities and thereby changing their relations to reality across institutional practices in order to support a broader view of development in early childhood education.

Strategies for Dealing with Conflicts in Value Positions between Home and School: Influences on Ethnic Minority Students’ Development of Motives and Identity

A theoretical model is presented in which participation in the school community is viewed as a multifaceted activity. In this model, culture is conceptualized as traditions of practice and as a societal field. The school practice and the role of the family and their differences in value positions about school life are interpreted as a central factor for children’s involvement and participation in school practice and for the type of conflict they may face. The type of conflict and the individual’s strategy for dealing with it influence the children’s development of motives and identity. Discrepancies and conflicts between Turkish-Danish students’ motives and their parents’ value positions about school life are analysed to see how this influences young persons’ feelings of well-being and development of motives and competencies. The analyses draw on (a) interviews with Turkish-Danish youth about their school life, friends, subject matter learning, family and future plans, and (b) interviews with parents about their conception of their children’s school life and future.

The dynamic aspects in children's learning and development

Part I. Motives, Emotions and Development: 1. The dynamic aspects between childrens learning and development Mariane Hedegaard 2. The connections between motives and will in the development of personality Elena Kravtsova and Gennady Kravtsov 3. Advancing on the concept of sense: subjective sense and subjective configurations in human development Fernando Gonzales Rey 4. Early stages in childrens cultural development Vladimir P. Zinchenko Part II. Cultural Practice Motives and Development: 5. The development of motives in childrens play Marilyn Fleer 6. Developing motivation through peer interaction: a cross-cultural analysis Jose Sanchez Medina and Virginia Martinez 7. Developing social identities and motives in school transitions Ditte Winther-Lindquist 8. Motives matter: a cultural historical approach to IT mediated subject matter teaching Kare Stenild and Ole Iversen 9. Motivation for school learning: enhancing the meaningfulness of learning in communities of learners Willem Wardekker, Annoesjka Boersma, Geert ten Dam and Monique Volman Part III. Creating Conditions for Childrens Engagement: 10. Expertise in the childrens workforce: knowledge and motivation in engagement with children Anne Edwards 11. Changing situations and motives Harry Daniels 12. A conceptual perspective for investigating motive in cultural-historical theory Seth Chaiklin.

Cultural Minority Children's Learning within Culturally-Sensitive Classroom Teaching.

Abstract The personal aspect of knowledge – the everyday concepts – is located in the life setting of a person. These personal concepts are the foundation for the childs appropriation of subject matter concepts that qualify the childs personal concept so they can function as theoretical concepts. However, subject matter concepts are not universal, they are related to national curriculum traditions. The connection between personal and subject matter concepts is often much weaker for immigrants and refugees coming to a new country than for children with generations of ancestors in a society. One problem for teaching subject matter concepts to cultural minority children is: ‘How can societal relevant knowledge be taught which is sensitive to both cultural and social differences and become functional in culturally different life contexts?’ This question has motivated two teaching experiments with history and social science subjects. The first was an after-school project with Puerto Rican children in New York City and the second was a school project with young Palestinian boys in Aarhus, Denmark. The aim of both projects was to create a form of teaching that was (1) meaningful for the children (2) contributed to their acquisition of skills and knowledge, and (3) created a positive identity and acceptance of their cultural background, as well as the society in which they were living.

Motives in children's development : cultural-historical approaches

Part I. Motives, Emotions and Development: 1. The dynamic aspects between childrens learning and development Mariane Hedegaard 2. The connections between motives and will in the development of personality Elena Kravtsova and Gennady Kravtsov 3. Advancing on the concept of sense: subjective sense and subjective configurations in human development Fernando Gonzales Rey 4. Early stages in childrens cultural development Vladimir P. Zinchenko Part II. Cultural Practice Motives and Development: 5. The development of motives in childrens play Marilyn Fleer 6. Developing motivation through peer interaction: a cross-cultural analysis Jose Sanchez Medina and Virginia Martinez 7. Developing social identities and motives in school transitions Ditte Winther-Lindquist 8. Motives matter: a cultural historical approach to IT mediated subject matter teaching Kare Stenild and Ole Iversen 9. Motivation for school learning: enhancing the meaningfulness of learning in communities of learners Willem Wardekker, Annoesjka Boersma, Geert ten Dam and Monique Volman Part III. Creating Conditions for Childrens Engagement: 10. Expertise in the childrens workforce: knowledge and motivation in engagement with children Anne Edwards 11. Changing situations and motives Harry Daniels 12. A conceptual perspective for investigating motive in cultural-historical theory Seth Chaiklin.

A Cultural-Historical Approach to Children’s Development of Multiple Cultural Identities

This chapter falls in two parts. In the first part the concept of cultural identity is discussed from a cultural-historical developmental perspective. In the second part this discussion is the foundation for analysing interviews with young persons from immigrant families. Cultural identity is seen as an aspect of children’s psychic development that is created through their participation in everyday life in institutional practice. The primary institutions during childhood are the home, day-care and school. This conception of development of identity as multiple cultural identities is based on a theory of children’s development as dependent on the conditions and demands children meet in the home, day-care and school settings and how they engage in activities in the different practices in which they participate. Both the general conception that guides daily practice and the children’s concrete ways of acting in their historical concrete family and school creates the practice traditions of which a specific child’s life becomes a part. A child’s development of cultural identity is related to these diverse institutional practices and his/her personal identity is grounded in how problems between cultural traditions are tackled and how they proceed, giving room for the child’s forward-oriented activities. In this development the interconnections between a child’s social relations, capacities and motives are central. In the concrete research project presented here young persons, from Turkish cultural minority families that had just finished 9 years in a Danish school were interviewed about their experience and conceptions of school life – subject matter, friends and teachers. The analysis focuses on the problems they experienced as children of immigrant parents and how these problems contributed to their identity, i.e. who they are today. In this regard how the children tackled these problems can be seen as developmental or as a hindrance – for their feeling of happiness in relation to who they are – and for creating future plans for education and life.

Exploring tension and contradictions in youth’s activity of painting graffiti

Graffiti as writing and painting with spray cans in public spaces was recognised as a special youth movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York City. From there, it spread to other metropolitan cities around the world. Through graffiti activity, young people positioned themselves in a youth movement that violates public spaces. This article focuses on the contradictions and tensions of being part of an illegal subculture and being recognised as painting art. The tensions will be analysed from the perspective of societal conditions as well as painters’ experiences, drawing on literature about graffiti and an interview project with graffiti painters in Denmark. Psychological aspects of the young person’s engagement are analysed using concepts from Vygotsky’s theory of creativity and art. The analyses contribute to understanding what graffiti activity means for a group of young persons in their change of position from childhood to young adulthood, and to a differentiation of Vygotsky’s theory of art.

Children’s Cultural Learning in Everyday Family Life Exemplified at the Dinner Setting

The aim in this chapter is to propose a way to conceptualize children’s learning through their participation in activity settings in everyday practices at home. I argue that children learn practice traditions and values through the demands that children experience both indirectly through the setting and directly from parents and siblings. Children’s also put demands on the setting and its participants and how these are met leads to children’s development of new forms of social interaction, new motive orientation, and competences. The argument builds on a research project following children through participant observations in their everyday activities in two families (Hedegaard & Fleer. 2013. Play, learning and children’s development. Everyday life in families and transition to school. New York: Cambridge University Press). The family members in the two families got an instant camera and were asked to take photos of what were important for them. In this chapter, the focus is on how demands and motives influence both parents and children at the dinner setting.