The cultural-historical approach started in the 1930s by Lev Vygotsky, who held that learning and instruction are the means to development, is the foundation for the Radical-Local Theory of Teaching and Learning formulated by Mariane Hedegaard and Seth Chaiklin in the first part of the book. The central concern in this approach to education is how to integrate particular historical and cultural conditions that the children encounter into educational practices. The second half of the book is an extensive case study of an after-school programme for Puerto Rican primary students in East Harlem, New York conducted in a radical-local perspective. This programme focussed on the history of the community and of Puerto Rican immigration, and the study describes how it helped students become both more positive and more critical about their backgrounds. By acquiring basic academic skills in a theoretical framework the children learn how to analyse their own local situation, addressing not only immediate issues (housing conditions, family life, community dynamics) but also historical issues. Unlike apparently similar culturally responsive approaches to teaching underprivileged children, radical-local teaching explicitly uses subject matter teaching to encourage children's development in relation to their social conditions. Hedegaard and Chaiklin detail how they developed concrete lesson plans in a radical-local perspective, and enumerate the accomplishments as well as the difficulties they encountered in implementing this approach.

The cultural-historical approach started in the 1930s by Lev Vygotsky, who held that learning and instruction are the means to development, is the foundation for the Radical-Local Theory of Teaching and Learning formulated by Mariane Hedegaard and Seth Chaiklin in the first part of the book. The central concern in this approach to education is how to integrate particular historical and cultural conditions that the children encounter into educational practices. The second half of the book is an extensive case study of an after-school programme for Puerto Rican primary students in East Harlem, New York conducted in a radical-local perspective. This programme focussed on the history of the community and of Puerto Rican immigration, and the study describes how it helped students become both more positive and more critical about their backgrounds. By acquiring basic academic skills in a theoretical framework the children learn how to analyse their own local situation, addressing not only immediate issues (housing conditions, family life, community dynamics) but also historical issues. Unlike apparently similar culturally responsive approaches to teaching underprivileged children, radical-local teaching explicitly uses subject matter teaching to encourage children's development in relation to their social conditions. Hedegaard and Chaiklin detail how they developed concrete lesson plans in a radical-local perspective, and enumerate the accomplishments as well as the difficulties they encountered in implementing this approach.

The World Yearbook of Education 2009: Childhood Studies and the Impact of Globalization: Policies and Practices at Global and Local Levels examines the concept of childhood and childhood development and learning from educational, sociological, and psychological perspectives. This contributed volume seeks to explicitly provide a series of windows into the construction of childhood around the world, as a means to conceptualizing and more sharply defining the emerging field of global and local childhood studies. At the global level there has been increasing discontent with how children have been reified and measured. Prevailing Eurocentric and North-American notions of childhood and development across the North-South boundaries show vast differences in how childhood is constructed and how development is theorized. The World Yearbook of Education 2009 volume provides comprehensive research from Asia-Pacific, the Americas, the African region and European communities and is presented with a special focus on education. It examines childhood from birth to twelve years of age, across institutional contexts and within both poor majority and rich minority countries. Cultural-historical theory has been used as the framework for investigating and providing insights into how childhood is theorized, politicized, enacted, and lived across these communities. A range of theoretical orientations informs this book, including cultural-historical theory, ecological theory, and cross-cultural research. The World Yearbook of Education 2009 volume is organized into 3 sections: Section 1: Examines the global construction of childhood development and learning Section 2: Discusses the local conditions and global imperatives that arise from a broadly based analysis of the studies presented within this section Section 3: Draws upon cultural-historical theory and ecological theory and brings together the themes explored throughout the preceding two sections. The World Yearbook of Education 2009 volume seeks to make visible the cultural-historical construction of childhood and development across the north-south regions and scrutinizes the policy imperatives that have maintained the global colonization of families.

This book is a contribution to the sociocultural approaches to Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education. It offers a new interpreting theoretical framework coming from the Cultural Historical Psychology. The authors highlight some serious elements of the sociocultural context that mediates learning on STEM or with STEM adds. The book brings together the work of researchers interested in developmental psychology and childhood, with a special focus on using Activity theory and Cultural-historical research approach to unite these two opposing approaches to the study of children. The authors reconsider our relationship and experiencing with technology. It moves the attention from the pure instrumental aspect of technology to a deep human and societal approach. Moreover, the book focuses on the issue of teachers' continuing education in both formal and informal settings is being seen under a sequential system of expansive cycles and the key role of contradictions in transformative educational settings. Overall, this book encourages the academic society to open dialogue with other societies and enhance interdisciplinary research in times of crisis.

This open access book examines the educational conditions that support cultures of exploration in kindergartens. It conceptualises cultures of exploration, whether those cultures are created through children’s own engagement or are demanded of them through undertaking specific tasks within different institutional settings. It shows how the conditions for children’s exploration form a web of activities in different settings with social relationships, local landscapes and artefacts. The book builds on the understanding of cultural traditions as deeply implicated in the developmental processes, meaning that local considerations must be reflected in education for sustainable futures. Therefore the book examines and conceptualises exploration and cultural formation through locally situated cases and navigates toward global educational concepts. The book provides different windows into how children may explore in everyday practice settings in kindergarten, and contributes to a loci-based, ecological, integral knowledge relevant for early childhood education.

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This collection of papers examines key ideas in cultural-historical approaches to children’s learning and development and the cultural and institutional conditions in which they occur. The collection is given coherence by a focus on the intellectual contributions made by Professor Mariane Hedegaard to understandings of children’s learning through the prism of the interplay of society, institution and person. She has significantly shaped the field through her scholarly consideration of foundational concepts and her creative attention to the fields of activity she studies. The book brings together examples of how these concepts have been employed and developed in a study of learning and development. The collection allows the contributing scholars to reveal their reactions to Hedegaard’s contributions in discussions of their own work in the field of children’s learning and the conditions in which it occurs.

In a world where the global engagement and international dialogue intensifies, some areas of cultivated knowledge suffer from this dialogue and this has consequences for people and communities. We propose education to be such a case. The global dialogue in education tends to be restricted to and mediated by standardized measurements. Such standards are meant to measure qualities of education and of student behavior and create the sought for condition for normative comparability and competition. The obvious drawback is that cultural variability – in local living as well as in education – is rendered irrelevant. Are there alternatives? The book insists on maintaining the discussion about education on a global level, but rather than moving towards homogenization and standardization of education, the attention is drawn towards the potential for learning from creative fits - and misfits - between concrete local cultures, institutional practices and global aims and standards of education. This work brings together a group of educational and developmental researchers and scholars grappling to find culturally informed and sensitive modes of educating people and communities. Case studies and examples from four geographical contexts are being discussed: China, Brazil, Australia and Europe. While being embedded in these local cultures, the authors share a conceptual grounding in cultural developmental theorizing and a vision for a culturally informed globalized perspective on education. As the theme of the book is learning from each other, the volume also includes commentaries from leading scholars in the field of cultural psychology and education.

Children and young people are active agents with motives and intentions who can contribute to their social worlds. Taking children seriously involves both accessing their perspectives as they make sense of the world and working relationally with them to guide their motive orientations. In this book, Hedegaard and Edwards draw upon their own and others' research on children from birth to school leaving age to advocate for relational support for learners and to emphasise the caring aspects of this support. The authors provide a scholarly account of the cultural-historical underpinnings of their caring relational approach, while bringing these ideas to life through examples of practices in families and in more formal settings. Written for those who work with children and young people in varied capacities, this book reveals the knowledge and skills required for the subtle and reciprocal work of supporting the learning and development of children and young people.