In this article, the educative value of scientific biographies will be explored, especially for non-science major college students. During the "Scientist's life and thought" course, 66 college students read nine scientific biographies including five biologists, covering the canonical scientific achievements in Western scientific history.…

The social situation of development (SSD) specific to each age determines regularly the whole picture of the child's life. Therefore, we need to learn about the whole context surrounding children relevant to their development. The focus of the study is to understand parent's views on infant-toddler's science concept formation in the family…

Social-emotional health influences youth developmental trajectories and there is growing interest among educators to measure the social-emotional health of the students they serve. This study replicated the psychometric characteristics of the Social Emotional Health Survey (SEHS) with a diverse sample of high school students (Grades 9-12; N =…

Children's narrative skills have been widely studied in North America, but there is a paucity of African research. Within South Africa's diverse socio-cultural context, this study of mixed-race children explored the development of narrative production and the influence of home background variables. Using the Bear Story picture prompt, this…

Efforts to globalize higher education have resulted in study abroad climbing to an all-time high in the United States. Amidst this growth, emergent bodies of literature have uncovered problematic trends in study abroad that reproduce hierarchies of power and colonialism, perpetuate views of an exotic cultural "other," and privilege…

In this article, we share findings from a critical qualitative study aimed at better understanding the ways that language, history, and geography mediate our work and identities as educational researchers. As scholars whose particular sociocultural and political histories are often absent in scholarly discussions about language and education, we…

In this article I revisit the cultures-of-use conceptual framework--that technologies, as forms and processes comprising human culture, mediate and assume variable meanings, values, and conventionalized functions for different communities (Thorne, 2003). I trace the antecedent arc of investigation and serendipitous encounters that led to the 2003…

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a pedagogical intervention aimed at raising sociopragmatic awareness in the context of Spanish as a foreign language in Denmark. The intervention consists of a blended-learning environment where the three main components are synchronous telecollaboration via Skype, reflection sessions in groups…

Our paper aims to present students' interactions in a teletandem--that is, tandem through desktop videoconference [Telles, J., ed. 2009. "Teletandem. Um contexto virtual, autônomo, colaborativo para aprendizagem das linguas estrangeiras no século XXI". Campinas, SP: Pontes Editores]--telecollaborative project between third-year…

Sociocultural theory argues that an individual's mental, social, and material activity is mediated by cultural tools. One such tool is the language or discourse teachers use during whole class interaction in the second language classroom. The purpose of this study was to examine how a Colombian second language teacher mediated her ninth-grade…

This article presents findings from TechTales, a participatory design research (PDR) project where learning scientists, public library staff members, informal science educators, and staff members from Native-American-serving organizations collaborated to design a family-based robotics workshop that was grounded in storytelling. We approach this by…

Sociocultural perspectives on literacy include various theories focused on the myriad ways in which people use literacy in context, which include a strong emphasis on power relations. Yet, these theories also have important differences, and many in the field of literacy do not clearly differentiate among them. I provide a critical overview of…

This article offers a reflection on the role of material objects in the creative process and explores the potential links between creativity and the theory of affordances (Gibson, ), conceptualized from a sociocultural perspective. From this standpoint, creativity can be defined as a process of perceiving, exploiting, and "generating"…

Self-assessment practices have become widespread in second language (L2) education, and while its proponents have long argued that such reflection enhances learner awareness of their abilities and promotes independent learning (Alderson, 2005; Chen, 2008; Little, 2007), others have questioned its value vis-a-vis other indicators of performance…

Discussion of intergenerational relationships has perennially questioned how life experience can be transmitted effectively. This article revisits that debate, focusing on the intergenerational role of wisdom in the West of Ireland. Ethnographic reconstructions of wise interaction within families and communities, especially in regions of Irish…