Virginia Dazzani – författare

This book provides a “context” of discussion for researchers and educational experts in order to rethink the relationship between actors, practices and borders within the educational contexts. The research in educational psychology has often challenged the concept of “educational context”. According to the different theoretical frameworks, the construct of contexts, their borders and the dimensions to be taken into account have all been defined in different ways. The book offers a reflection that goes from theory to practice and backward from practice to theory. The main research questions the book addresses are how actors, i.e. teachers, parents and students, educators and professionals, with their own identity and social representations, build their educational practices or their shared cultural spaces where knowledge is generated, defining the borders of the educational contexts. The book proposes that a border is a type of membrane within and outside the educational setting bringing together different actors, groups and cultures. The book presents the perspectives of scholars and educational experts from various parts of the world, including Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. They shed light on what happens at the border in different cultural contexts and what the relationship is between the educational setting and the other life contexts or micro-cultures.

This book brings together a group of scholars from around the world who view psychology as the science of human ways of being. Being refers to the process of existing - through construction of the human world – here, rather than to an ontological state. This collection includes work that has the goal to establish the newly developed area of cultural psychology as the science of specifically human ways of existence. It comes as a next step after the “behaviorist turn” that has dominated psychology over most of the 20th century, and like its successor in the form of “cognitivism”, kept psychology away from addressing issues of specifically human ways of relating with their worlds. Such linking takes place through intentional human actions: through the creation of complex tools for living, entertainment, and work. Human beings construct tools to make other tools. Human beings invent religious systems, notions of economic rationality and legal systems; they enter into aesthetic enjoyment of various aspects of life in art, music, and literature; they have the capability of inventing national identities that can be summoned to legitimate one’s killing of one’s neighbors or being killed oneself.

The contributions to this volume focus on the central goal of demonstrating that psychology as a science needs to start from the phenomena of higher psychological functions and then look at how their lower counterparts are re-organized from above. That kind of investigation is inevitably interdisciplinary - it links psychology with anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history and developmental biology. Various contributions to this volume are based on the work of Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Henri Bergson and on traditions of Ganzheitspsychologie and Gestalt psychology.

Psychology as the Science of Human Being is a valuable resource to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, biologists and anthropologistsalike.​