Clotilde Pontecorvo - Böcker

Joining Society asks precise questions: To what are the young socialized? Which skills, modes of thinking or action are required from them and what are their developmental value? Socialization tends to be viewed within the confines of a particular geographical or cultural situation. The multi-national list of contributors brings an international perspective to the problem of socialization to work and to adult life, while at the same time emphasizing the common issues that face youth around the world. Some of the topics addressed are the rules and roles involved in socialization, attaining personal agency through collective activity, use of new technologies, and the role of intergenerational relationships. This book sheds new light on the processes through which society may hope to intervene in positive ways with today's youth.

Joining Society asks precise questions: To what are the young socialized? Which skills, modes of thinking or action are required from them and what are their developmental value? Socialization tends to be viewed within the confines of a particular geographical or cultural situation. The multi-national list of contributors brings an international perspective to the problem of socialization to work and to adult life, while at the same time emphasizing the common issues that face youth around the world. Some of the topics addressed are the rules and roles involved in socialization, attaining personal agency through collective activity, use of new technologies, and the role of intergenerational relationships. This book sheds new light on the processes through which society may hope to intervene in positive ways with today's youth.

For decades, research on children's literacy has been dominated by questions of how children learn to read. Especially among Anglophone scholars, cognitive and psycholinguistic research on reading has been the only approach to studying written language education. Echoing this, debates on methods of teaching children to read have long dominated the educational scene. This book presents an alternative view. In recent years, writing has emerged as a central aspect of becoming literate. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that writing is a highly complex activity involving a degree of planning unknown in everyday conversational uses of language. At the same time, developmental studies have revealed that when young children are asked to "write," they show a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the representational constraints of alphabetic writing systems. They show this understanding long before they can read conventional writing on their own. The rich structure of meanings involved in the word text provided the glue that brought together a group of scholars from several disciplines in an international workshop held in Rome. Reflecting the state of the field at the time, the majority of the workshop participants were scholars working in languages other than English, especially the romance languages. Their work mirrors a linguistic and psychological research tradition that Anglophone scholars knew little of until recently. This volume provides English-language readers with updated versions of the papers presented at the meeting. The topics discussed at the workshop are represented in the chapters as follows: * the relationship between acquisition of language and familiarity with written texts; * the reciprocal "permeability" between spoken and written language; * the initial phases of text construction by children; and * the educational conditions that facilitate written language acquisition and writing practice.

To reason is to talk. To think is to use tools. To learn is to join a community of practice. This book explores thought and reasoning as inherently social practices, as actions situated in specific environments of demand, opportunity, and accountability. Authors from diverse disciplines - psychology, sociology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology - examine how people think and learn in settings as diverse as a factory, a classroom or an airplane cockpit. The tools that people use in these varied settings are both physical technologies and cultural constructions: concepts, structures of reasoning, and forms of discourse. This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology is based on an international conference on situated cognition and learning technologies.