Search

The notions and ideas of the United Nations (UN) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which are outlined in Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2015), can be seen as an introduction to how exploration can be brought more directly into early childhood education, thus leading to children’s cultural formation both locally and globally. In this document, the UN and UNESCO ask for a loci-based, ecological, integral education. This educational process combines historical knowledge recognizing cycles and planetary boundaries with children’s equity and well-being in efforts to build better education programs for the future also along with critique that challenge the UN and research for not going far enough (Boldermo & Ødegaard, 2019; Holden, Linnerud, Banister, Schwanitz, & Wierling, 2018). With this book, we hope to take a step in this direction by bringing exploration and cultural formation into the debate while outlining our visons for future early childhood education (EEC). In line with Arjen Wals (2017), we find that children’s exploration and cultural formation are important for their creation of meaningful and compassionate lives, where both the nonhuman and human worlds on the Earth is the key questions of our time.

This article addresses a dilemma in relation to researching children's thinking and concept formation as an intentional process of competence acquisition and at the same time seeing children as persons in their life contexts, where the researcher also is a participant. Davydov's concept of theoretical knowledge and thinking helped me to tackle this dilemma as a dialectical process of moving from the general to the particular and back again by analysing children's concrete social situations starting from the societal conditions, then examining institutional objectives, and children's motive orientations in activity settings - in order to gain an understanding of children's social situations in their everyday activities. In this article I illustrate the problems of getting knowledge of children's conceptual and motivation development, by drawing on several of my research projects to illustrate, through my own biographic development, the dilemmas that psychology has to overcome in studying children's activities in their different social situations. The discussion particularly relates to the potential demands of the situation and children's motive orientations in these situations.

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.

Cultural–historical theory is grounded in the idea that learning and development are consequences of a person's meaningful interactions in societal practices. This article builds further on the idea by emphasizing the part played by the demands from practices in these interactions. These demands themselves may be a function of an intertwining of different institutional practices. First an analytical framework is introduced and illustrated through analyzing an example of how school demands are present in the home setting. This is followed by an example from school to illustrate that demands and motives that a child encounters have to be seen in relation to the objective of the institutional practice. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some implications of the analytical perspective for theories of learning and development. Particular attention is given to the unity of person and activity settings and their transformative interactions in activities.

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.

We emphasize that pedagogical practice was not just a way of validating and testing scientific findings but it has also, to generate new hypotheses and new challenges and research directions. This relationship between research, knowledge, and practice was recognised from the beginning days of the cultural-historical tradition, such as Vygotsky’s focus on practice for resolving the crisis in psychology. In a dialectical conception, pedagogical research should be developed as an interaction between theoretical conceptions in the cultural-historical tradition and the demands and needs of the societal practices. This article illustrates this idea concretely, using the idea of radical-local teaching and learning (HEDEGAARD; CHAIKLIN, 2005). The discussion starts with a brief comment about the dialectical tradition; than we illustrate one way to engage with the idea of full human development, viewing this in terms of personality development. We first explain the general idea of radical-local teaching and learning as a way to address the practical problem, and then show how it embodies the philosophical concerns of the dialectical tradition. The main idea is that core conceptual relations within subject-matter areas have to be related specifically to children’s life situation so that this academic knowledge can become integrated with local knowledge, thereby qualitatively transforming children’s everyday concepts and their possibility to use this knowledge in their local practice. We want to highlight the idea of how working with subject-matter content in a radical-local perspective can provide conditions for children to develop theoretical thinking and motive orientation, which is relevant to personality development, and which can be oriented to their full human development.RESUMO: Enfatizamos que práticas pedagógicas não são somente formas de validação de investigações científicas, mas são também formas de se gerar novas hipóteses e novos desafios para a pesquisa. Essa relação entre investigação, conhecimento e prática foi reconhecida nos primórdios da teoria histórico-cultural quando Vygotsky discutiu a prática como forma de resolução da crise da psicologia. Na concepção dialética, a pesquisa pedagógica deve se desenvolver em interação com as concepções teóricas presentes na tradição histórico-cultural e as demandas e necessidades da prática social. Este artigo ilustra essa ideia concretamente, utilizando a ideia de radical-local ensino e aprendizagem (HEDEGAARD; CHAIKLIN, 2005). A discussão começa com um breve comentário sobre a tradição dialética, então, ilustramos um caminho para relacionar com a ideia de totalidade do desenvolvimento humano, considerando-o em termos do desenvolvimento da personalidade humana. Nós primeiramente explicamos a ideia geral sobre o modelo radical-local de ensino e aprendizagem como uma forma de chegar ao problema prático e então mostrarmos como esse processo de insere numa tradição dialética. A ideia principal é que concepções teóricas relacionadas como assuntos/temas-problemas precisam ser relacionados com as situações de vida das crianças de forma que os conhecimentos acadêmicos integrem-se aos conhecimentos locais/do contexto social dos sujeitos, com a finalidade de transformar a qualitativamente os conhecimentos cotidianos das crianças para que possam utilizá-los nas suas práticas sociais. Queremos enfatizar o quanto a proposta de trabalhar com assuntos/temas-problemas numa perspectiva radical-local possibilita condições para o uso desses conhecimentos na prática social local dos sujeitos para que eles possam desenvolver pensamentos teóricos diferenciados e orientar o desenvolvimento de sua personalidade na sua totalidade histórica e social.http://dx.doi.org/10.14572/nuances.v24i1.2151

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

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 Vygotsky's cultural–historical theories of the zone of proximal development and developmental crises. A theory of children's development should include mor...

The aim of this article is to analyze how schoolchildren's thinking and concept formation generated in classroom teaching can relate to daily life situations. Situated thinking and learning and theoretical thinking and learning are discussed as learning forms that can accomplish this integration. According to Vygotsky, subject-matter concepts are transformed into personal concepts through children's ability to use them in daily life. The relation between skill and content has to be presupposed in this transformation of subject-matter concepts into everyday concepts, because everyday or daily-life concepts are learned through and interwoven with practical activities in cooperation with other people. The analyses are based on distinctions between (a) societal and personal knowledge, (b) subject-matter and everyday concepts, (c) subject-matter methods and content, and (d) thinking as related to subject-matter methods and concepts as related to subject-matter content. For the personal aspect of knowledge, eve...