John P. Spencer – författare

Human activity and thought is embedded within and richly structured by the space around us. We have detailed knowledge of the world that surrounds us - we remember where objects are, what they are, and how they are arranged relative to one another. We can navigate through spaces to locate and retrieve objects, or we can direct the actions of others through language. We can use maps to find out way from one city to the next, or we can navigate using a virtual map to locate a missing computer file. But where do these abilities come from? What is the developmental origin of the spatial mind?This book brings together leading scholars from the field of spatial cognitive development to examine how the spatial mind emerges from its humble origins in infancy to its mature, flexible, and skilled adult form. Each chapter presents cutting-edge research and theory that asks: 1. what changes in spatial cognition occur over development?, and 2. how do these changes come about? The authors provide conceptual as well as formal theoretical accounts of developmental process at multiple levels of analysis (e.g. genes, neurons, behaviours, social interactions), providing a contemporary overview of general mechanisms of cognitive change. In addition, commentators place these advances in our understanding of spatial cognitive development within the field of spatial cognition more generally.As humans, we are profoundly influenced by the space around us. This book sheds light on how our experiences thinking about and interacting in space through time foster and shape the emerging spatial mind.

From William James to Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to B.F. Skinner, scholars (and parents!) have wondered how children move from the blooming, buzzing confusion of infancy, through the tumult of childhood and adolescence, into adulthood. Does development occur continuously over time or in a series of dramatic stages? Is development driven by learning or by biological maturational processes? What is the nature of experience, and how does it generate change? The study of development has always been organized around these big questions. And answers to these questions have a profound influence on daily life, forming a framework for how parents think about their own children, and influencing both national policy and educational curricula. This book defines and refines two major theoretical approaches within developmental science that address the central issues of development-connectionism and dynamical systems theory. Spencer, Thomas, and McClelland have brought together chapters that provide an introduction, overview, and critical evaluation of each approach, including three sets of case studies that illustrate how both approaches have been used to study topics ranging from early motor development to the acquisition of grammar. They also present a collection of commentaries by leading scholars, which offer a critical view from both an "outsiders" and an "insiders" perspective. The book is unique in the range of its treatment-it begins to delineate how developmental science can incorporate advances within neuroscience and computational modeling, and brings the new ideas of connectionism and dynamic systems theory into sharper focus, clarifying their usefulness and explanatory power.

As media reports declare crisis after crisis in public education, Americans find themselves hotly debating educational inequalities that seem to violate their nation's ideals. Why does success in school track so closely with race and socioeconomic status? How to end these apparent achievement gaps? In the Crossfire brings historical perspective to these debates by tracing the life and work of Marcus Foster, an African American educator who struggled to reform urban schools in the 1960s and early 1970s.As a teacher, principal, and superintendent-first in his native Philadelphia and eventually in Oakland, California-Foster made success stories of urban schools and children whom others had dismissed as hopeless, only to be assassinated in 1973 by the previously unknown Symbionese Liberation Army in a bizarre protest against an allegedly racist school system. Foster's story encapsulates larger social changes in the decades after World War II: the great black migration from South to North, the civil rights movement, the decline of American cities, and the ever-increasing emphasis on education as a ticket to success. Well before the accountability agenda of the No Child Left Behind Act or the rise of charter schools, Americans came into sharp conflict over urban educational failure, with some blaming the schools and others pointing to conditions in homes and neighborhoods. By focusing on an educator who worked in the trenches and had a reputation for bridging divisions, In the Crossfire sheds new light on the continuing ideological debates over race, poverty, and achievement.Foster charted a course between the extremes of demanding too little and expecting too much of schools as agents of opportunity in America. He called for accountability not only from educators but also from families, taxpayers, and political and economic institutions. His effort to mobilize multiple constituencies was a key to his success-and a lesson for educators and policymakers who would take aim at achievement gaps without addressing the full range of school and nonschool factors that create them.