Editorial vol. 30 issue 1

We open this issue welcoming a new member to our Mind, Culture, and Activity editorial collective, Aydin Bal (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Aydin is Professor of Special Education, and recipient of the 2022 Early Career award of the AERA Cultural-Historical Research SIG. Aydin’s knowledge of cultural-historical theories, as well as his experience and background on the interplay between culture, learning, mental health, and social justice, are invaluable to the journal. Aydin further expands our team, contributing to a more diverse leadership in the editorial work we do.

The present issue includes five research articles and a book review. The first research article, by Dosun Ko, Aydin Bal, Aaron Bird Bear, Linda Orie, and Dian Mawene, continues a growing body of research drawing from decolonizing epistemologies (Smith, 2021), formative interventions (Engeström, 2016) and utopian methodologies (Rajala et al., 2022)) to redress issues of social justice through CHAT-informed research. Titled “Learning lab as a utopian methodology for future making: decolonizing knowledge production toward racial justice in school discipline,” the article discusses Learning Labs as a praxis-oriented systemic design intervention that facilitates a dialectical interplay between problem identification, that is, critical reflection on systemic contradictions, and problem-solving, that is, collective design actions. It elaborates the specific case of Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL), where local stakeholders’ engage in transformative future-making efforts to design a culturally decolonizing support system to address racial injustice at a rural high school. Using Levitas (2013) work on utopia as a method as their theoretical lens, the authors examine their critical design ethnography work at the high school. This work documented the school community’s “collective endeavor toward decolonizing the future.” The authors studied the ways in which Native American students, families, tribal community members, and non-Native school staff expanded their future sociopolitical imaginations to envision alternative ways of organizing education.

Writing from a different and yet closely related tradition of CHAT scholarship – French-speaking activity-oriented ergonomics – Lucie Cuvelier, in “Constructive activity and expansion of the object: cross-fertilization,” also discusses developmental, intervention-based methodologies, but with an emphasis on theory. Cuvelier’s is an empirically-grounded theoretical essay on the relationship between constructive activity and productive activity, two notions that scholars consider “central in activity-oriented approaches to ergonomics … focused on developmental issues.” Drawing on French activity theory¹ (Clot, 2009) and the Finnish tradition of Developmental Work Research initiated by Engeström (2016) and colleagues, Cuvelier hypothesizes that “constructive activity is characterized by the expansion of the object of activity within productive activity.” To test this hypothesis, she conducted an empirical study examining the activities of an anesthetist working in pediatric services at two French university hospitals. This work substantiates the conceptualization of constructive activity as a movement of expansion of the object.

A third research article deals with the challenging issue of emotion regulation in young orphan children. Taking a cultural-historical perspective on emotions, and focusing on play as developmental activity, the article, “A cultural-historical study of emotions in play: catharsis and perezhivanie in an institutional care setting,” by Xianyu Meng, Marilyn Fleer, Liang Li, and Marie Hammer, explores how coexperiencing dramatic interactions in playworlds supports a child’s resolution and regulation of emotions in an institutional care setting in China. Theoretically, the article draws on two notions that Vygotsky developed in different periods. First, is the notion of catharsis, developed in his Psychology of Art which argues that catharsis “opens up new possibilities for furthering our understanding of children’s emotional processes in play, where imagination and drama are inherent as they are in art.” The article connects the former with the notion of perezhivanie, allowing us to explore how “emotions are released and transformed through person-environment interactions in play.” Drawing on video recordings of play activities, the authors follow Feifei, a six-year-old child at an orphanage in China, as he engages in a playworld arranged for 10 weeks as an “educational experiment.” The analyses examine the cathartic process through which Feifei readjusts the ways he emotionally and intellectually interacts with the environment as the child shifts play roles and his play motive also changes. The authors discuss how “emotional regulation takes the form of a triadic relationship between emotions, imagination, and drama.”

In “Early Childhood Teacher Narratives on Constructivism,” Artin Göncü and Catherine Main examine the gap between a literature on constructivist scholarship and teachers’ actual practice. The authors analyze teachers’ narratives on their own practice and the extent to which these may reflect constructivist principles. The authors aim to initiate a much-needed dialogue to make otherwise academic constructivist discourse accessible and available for practitioners. Describing their work as an “emic examination,” they describe “how teachers who were prepared in a program established by the authors and grounded in social-constructivism conceptualize young children’s construction of knowledge in the classroom.” Mindful of sociocultural, critical-feminist, and anti-racist perspectives, the authors designed the degree program to be consistent with the ideas that “construction of knowledge occurs in relational, historical, and cultural as well as developmental contexts,” and that constructivism is “a process of appropriating cultural knowledge through diverse activities and communicative means.” In interviews, the authors reported that teachers described “the features of constructivism based on their own experiences and in the language of their practice.” Teachers conceptualized constructivist practice through identity narratives to understand classroom spaces, the students, and their own role as teachers. The authors note how the teachers’ reports largely “reflected the theoretical stance of the degree program that constitutes the core of the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky along with their teacher expansions in critical ways.” Accordingly, the authors conclude by emphasizing the value of engaging in dialogue with teachers about their beliefs and practice and propose supporting teacher autonomy in developing local theories of teaching, learning, and development.

The research article “Transforming teaching toward plurilingualism: Contributions from reflective practice and a sociocultural approach,” by Eva Tresserras Casals and Marco Antonio Pereira Querol, also addresses teaching practice, but this time in the context of plurilingualism. They too point toward a gap between advances in the theory and policy-making fields, and the actual teaching practices in schools. More specifically, the authors review literature that current teaching practices remain largely monolingual and emphasize the need to support teacher developmental processes of reconceptualization. Casals and Querol build upon a formative intervention approach that draws on both realistic learning and sociocultural approaches to reflective practice in teacher education. In their empirical study, they documented, through linguistic biographies, semi-structured questionnaires, and focus group conversations with 11 language teachers, the developmental aspects of a formative intervention. They examine the process by which the teachers first became aware of their beliefs on multilingualism through self-confrontation, and how they changed their actions through cross self-confrontation and the creation of an expansive concept. The authors identify three “cognitive moves” that the teachers developed to cope with contradictions related to teaching practice and plurilingualism: awareness, expansion, and transformation.

The issue closes with a book review of Michael Tomasello’s “Agency, activity, and biocybernetics. On the evolution of agency” (2022, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), by Maria Falikman. Although, as Falikman points out, Tomasello’s book does not directly refer to activity approaches based on the Marxist cultural-historical tradition, resonances between the book and these approaches are patent throughout. Nevermind Tomasello’s omissions, Falikman draws connections and disconnections between Tomasello’s theses on the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of agency across species, and Marxist cultural-historical approaches. In this regard, in addition to summarizing and critiquing Tomasello’s arguments – which Fsalikman considers “comprehensive but somewhat mosaic and mechanistic” – this book review provides additional perspectives and contrasts that we hope readers will find interesting.

As always, we encourage Mind, Culture, and Activity readers to follow additional publications at https://culturalpraxis.net, where the journal’s editors participate in supporting more interactive modes of scholarly dialogue and publishing. Readers may be especially interested in a new article by Anna Stetsenko, Reclaiming the Tools of the Past for Today’s Struggles: Radicalizing Vygotsky, via Marx, in Dialogue with Audre Lorde, available on Academia, as well as a recent award by MCA and Cultural Praxis Editorial Collective member, Arturo Cortez. Please also investigate the discussions and talks being offered at Cultural Praxis this coming year.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación.

Notes

1. For a recent overview of the diverse activity-oriented approaches, including French-speaking approaches, as they articulate their intervention methodologies, see (Rioux & Dionne, 2023).