Suchergebnisse

Educational practices are constituted through the junction of cultural artifacts, beliefs, values, and normative routines known as activity systems. Classroom activity is a particularly important nexus for understanding cultural processes in that thinking and doing are linked in social practice. An activity-based, problem-oriented approach to understand development in school contexts focuses analysis on the cultural practices of learning environments. Studying classrooms and other learning contexts as cultural activity reveals how different microcultures for teaching and learning emerge, and it links forms of participation to the kinds of cognitive forms individuals construct to accomplish cognitive and social functions. Ongoing studies of the literacy practices of formal and nonformal learning environments serve as the context for examining culture in educational activity.

Accounts of how culture constitutes the learning activities we accomplish with others are flourishing. These accounts illustrate how participants draw upon, adapt, and contest historically situated social practices, tools, and relations to accomplish their learning goals [Vygotsky: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978]. Yet, they often lack attention to the ways that these social features reify and are reified by broader power structures and hierarchies. One way that power plays out in everyday social interaction is through the stories, narratives and ideologies that serve as resources for interpreting and organizing ongoing activity. Individuals become attuned to, coordinate and mobilize around these broader narratives through the <i>frames</i> they engage in moments of interaction. We offer frame analysis as a means of investigating both access <i>to</i> learning environments and opportunities to learn <i>within</i> them. To situate learning opportunities within and across different components of multilevel systems, a distinction is proposed between <i>framing within</i> a classroom or learning environment and <i>framing access to</i> educational processes and institutions. This paper recommends that researchers analyze, and design for, framing that disrupts predominant power structures and expands the possibilities for learning within more equitable social practices.

Throughout the U.S., Latinx communities represent a growing and critical segment of local, regional, and national electorates, but they are underrepresented at the polls. Their political disengagement stems from their historical sociopolitical marginalization and a lack of investment in their political integration. To foster more civic engagement among Latinx students, we propose recognizing their communities' past and present "lived civics," which are the actions that address community concerns but are often forgotten or not considered as political. The conception of lived civics that we propose provides a road map for fostering Latinx agency and political efficacy, and our "civics on the move" framework aims to strengthen democratic institutions, ensuring that they represent the needs of this critical segment of the U.S. population.

This article addresses an approach to design-based research informed by cultural historical activity theory and ecological approaches to inquiry in which historicity, prolepsis, remediation, diversity and equity, transformability, resilience, and sustainability are organizing design principles. Social design-based experiments seek to co-design learning ecologies in which learning is made equitable and consequential for youth from nondominant communities. In this article, we focus on the ways the design of <i>El Pueblo Mágico</i>, an after-school STEAM-oriented 5th Dimension program,<i></i> involved saturating the environment with new tools and forms of assistance and privileged intergenerational learning to engage youth and their university amigxs in new technology-mediated practices. In particular, we examine how designing around the leading activity of play opened up opportunities for youth to engage in consequential forms of learning across <i>El Pueblo</i> <i>Mágico</i> and home practices, as well as how digital tools and practices traveled and mediated new learning for young learners.

Verlagsinfo: "The Complex Web of Inequality in North American Schools analyzes and challenges the critical gaps and inequalities that persist in the American school system. Showing how historical biases have been inherited in current polices relating to non-dominant youth, the text calls for educational reforms that perform in the name of social justice. This edited collection carefully interrogates how technocratic educational policies and reforms are often unequipped to address the interplay of political, social, economic, ideological factors that are at the roots of educational injustice. Considering the most vulnerable student populations, original case studies explore how inadequate structures, practices, and beliefs have increased marginalization, and highlight those instances in which policy has proved effective in reducing opportunity gaps between economically rich and poor students; between white, Asian, Black and Latino youth; between native English speakers and second language learners; highlighting racial integration and unequal American Indian education; and for students with special educational needs. The insights into such policies shed light on the complex web of historically embedded inequities that continue to shape the construction, roll-out, and consequences of education policy for the most marginalized youth populations today. This volume will be of interest to graduate, and postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the fields of education policy, sociology of education, economics of education, and history of education, and well as policy evaluation"--