Pilar Lacasa

Mutual Contributions of Individuals, Partners, and Institutions: Planning to Remember in Girl Scout Cookie Sales

This paper argues that planning entails distributed, mutual contributions of individuals, their social partners, and their community institutions. We suggest that these mutually involved contributions can be viewed through shifts in focus of analysis, contrasting with analyses of cognitive development that treat individuals as though they exist apart from their social and cultural worlds. We illustrate this argument with a study examining the distributed nature of planning to remember in a complex everyday task. We investigated the personal, interpersonal, and institutional cognitive contributions of 16 Girl Scouts, their mothers and customers and other companions, and institutions (the national organization and the cookie company) in keeping track of deliveries and planning collection of money in Girl Scout cookie sales and deliveries. The article also discusses an analytic methodology (Functional Pattern Analysis) for abstracting findings from the details of rich ethnographic data. Individual scouts, their mothers, customers, and the scouting organization and cookie company all played significant roles in keeping track of progress. In particular, tools and supports provided by the cookie company played a key role in organizing the cognitive tasks, and the scouts collaborated in planning with other people (usually their mothers and customers). Our findings illustrate the importance of examining contributions beyond those of the individual, while still recognizing the active roles of individuals in thinking. We argue that conceiving of individual, interpersonal, and institutional/cultural contributions as mutually constituting aspects of cognitive activities supports this aim beyond the usual focus on separate individual and ‘external’ factors.

A Bakhtinian Approach to Identity in the Context of Institutional Practices

This study deals with the construction of identity in institutional contexts, taking as a starting point a Bakhtinian approach. We focus on the idea of author and hero and consider it as a metaphor allowing us to look for new models through which to understand human learning. We consider in particular the ethical and aesthetic dimension of human activity, which relate to the concepts of ‘I’ and ‘other’, respectively, and pay special attention to personal and interpersonal dimensions of consciousness. After exploring some of Bakhtin’s earliest texts, we focus on classroom conversations in which children worked together with their teacher and the researchers on the production of a web page which was to include their own comments and reflections following a discussion of violence on TV programs. Our examples are drawn from a wider investigation carried out in a Spanish elementary school, where we have been working from within an ethnographical and action research perspective. The analyses show that when mass media are present in the classroom, and children and adults talk about violence on television, specific situations are created that favor the construction of identity from an ethical-aesthetic perspective: that is, children are capable of assuming responsibilities and, furthermore, they create heroes who are also responsible for their own actions.

Adults and Children Share Literacy Practices: The Case of Homework

Abstract This article explores how literacy practices when homework is being done give rise to different interaction experiences among children and their parents. We wished to know whether such experiences might contribute to the establishment of relationships between what children learn at home and in school. After reviewing certain issues related to the concepts of families and schools as communities of practice and to how discursive practices are woven into them, we focus on a small number of family interactions, in the course of which a father or mother collaborates on homework with his or her child by writing various texts. From a methodological perspective, we take an ethnographical approach, working in an elementary school in Cordova, where we have been participant observers for 5 years. Two different written texts were proposed as homework in relation to the health education program. The first was a composition about an out-of-school task, in which the children shared fruit and conversation with other children in the public park; the second was a poem about the same topic, written on the basis of the previous texts. The two tasks were carried out on two different days in the course of the same week. All the conversations that took place during the homework sessions were transcribed and analyzed. Our analysis shows three main types of interactive scripts that seem to be influenced as much as by what the mother or father considers what can be a good text as by the role that she/he plays when teaching. The final discussion focuses on how communities of practice can be understood in relation to dynamic processes that allow relationships to be established between them. From this perspective, homework becomes an example of how specific practices may help create pathways that enable participants in both families and school communities to end up sharing goals.

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.

Leer y escribir: ¿cómo lograrlo desde la perspectiva del lenguaje integrado?

El enfoque por tareas en la ensenanza de la lengua extranjera ha recibido una gran atencion en los ultimos anos. Sin embargo, existen pocos trabajos que, desde la propia practica educativa, reflexionen sobre sus ventajas e inconvenientes. La experiencia que presentan los autores en este articulo llena esta laguna.

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.

Lenguaje integrado: ¿simple práctica, un método o una filosofía?

?Quees realmente el movimiento conocido como «lenguaje integrado»?, ?se trata solamente de un conjunto de practicas que han adoptado en el aula un numero cada vez mas numeroso de ensenantes?, ?cuales son los principios en los que se apoya?, ?querelacion existe entre este movimiento y otras aproximaciones innovadoras en educacion? Este articulo es un intento de responder estas y otras cuestiones.

Introducción: Contextos de aprendizaje y desarrollo. Una mirada desde Latinoamérica

Resumen El objetivo de este artículo es contextualizar diversos estudios producidos en el ámbito latinoamericano. Este número monográfico ha surgido de un interés por reflexionar sobre algunos problemas que están presentes en la investigación psicológica y educativa en ese ámbito geográfico. España y Latinoamérica son dos mundos próximos si nos fijamos en la lengua castellana como instrumento de pensamiento compartido. Pero son dos mundos lejanos por el desconocimiento mutuo de la situación social, cultural e histórica, muchas veces desfiguradapor la historia oficial. Para reflexionar sobre el tema profundizamos en algunos conceptos tomados de la psicología ecológica y socio-cultural.

Aprendices en la Zona del Desarrollo Próximo: ¿quién y cómo?

ResumenEl objetivo de este trabajo es explorar y contribuir a operativizar el concepto vygotskiano de ZDP. Reflexionamos a partir de una experiencia llevada a cabo en un curso de octavo de E.G.B. cuando el profesor y sus alumnos y alumnas aprenden a utilizar un instrumento cultural, la escritura. Ponemos el acento en los procesos de construccion conjunta del conocimiento fijandonos, sobre todo, en dos aspectos: por una parte, los cambios que se producen en el papel que ninos y adulto van aceptando durante el tiempo en que se desarrolla una unidad didactica y, por otra parte, las transformaciones que se producen en “la actividad del profesor”.