ABSTRACT This largely theoretical paper traces the continued influence that the work of Vygotsky has in studying teaching/learning in schools. The advent of the 21st century has led to a call for novel pedagogical models to enable children think in ways pertinent to our technologically based societies. Currently, the 4th Industrial revolution is playing out against the backdrop of climate change, a

(2021). Special Issue: “advancing funds of identity theory”. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 93-96.

ABSTRACT This paper illuminates the role of activity theory in addressing theoretical and practical challenges raised by the growing role of digital technology in human activity. We explore and review the role of activity theory in the study of crucial digital technologies such as social media, smartphones, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic decision-making, considering the unique

(2021). Our commitment at this time of continuing struggle against oppression and structural inequalities. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 1-3.

ABSTRACT Since the notion of funds of identity was first proposed, a large number of related works have followed, most of which have been reviewed recently by Hogg and Volman (2020). This special issue is a step forward both in the conceptualization of the construct, and in its educational applications. Three developments in particular are considered. The first deals with the directive and prospective

ABSTRACT A conceptual framework is presented to understand and study the role of students’ agency in their school (dis-)engagement from a Funds of Identity (FoI) perspective. The framework includes the notion of agency combined with Funds of Learner Identity (FoLI): learning preferences that can be considered part of people’s Funds of Identity. The framework holds that students manifest agency to negotiate

(2021). Utopia as method: the imaginary reconstitution of society. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 82-88.

ABSTRACT The apparent disconnect between the theoretical breadth of critical pedagogies and practice-based research creates challenges for educators wanting to implement critical pedagogy frameworks. I offer a case-study of a critical arts after school program, Hip-Hop Learners, to explore the ways design principles functioned as cultural artifacts, mediating the relationship between critical theory

(2021). Scholarship in the context of a historic socioeconomic and political turmoil: Reassessing and taking stock of CHAT. Commentary on Y. Engeström and A. Sannino “from mediated actions to heterogenous coalitions: four generations of activity-theoretical studies of work and learning”. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 32-43.

ABSTRACT In this article, we describe a personalized approach to meeting individual and community health needs that foregrounds relational learning. This article analyzes how relational approaches to learning expand participants’ objectives and result in more enduring learning. We report on mixed methods data from interviews, focus groups, surveys, and goal setting and monitoring. Analyses reveal that

ABSTRACT This paperargues for the development of the imagination experientially, pedagogically, and theoretically within the funds of identity approach. Our discussion is based on findings from a year-long ethnographic study of a Transnational Youth Radio project. The analysis centers on the case of 13-year old Muhammad in the context of his school-based Barcelona radio program. We present two examples

(2020). Closing a challenging year, strengthening relevant scholarship in cultural studies of mind and activity. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 321-324.

(2020). Hegel for social movements. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 376-380.

(2020). Hegel for social movements. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 385-389.

(2020). Hegel for social movements. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 390-394.

ABSTRACT In “From Mediated Actions To Heterogenous Coalitions: Four Generations of Activity-Theoretical Studies of Work and Learning,” Engeström and Sannino discuss the fourth generation of activity theory as involving heterogeneous coalitions that are involved in intertwined learning cycles. They offer Change Laboratory interventions as a way to properly address learning in such coalitions. Here,

ABSTRACT Funds of identity is a recent entrant to the field of identity theories. Located within sociocultural theory, the concept developed from the notion of funds of knowledge to consider all life experiences that collectively shape identity development. It draws attention to the relationships, settings, experiences, and cultural tools and symbols that are personally meaningful to people, and ways

ABSTRACT The use of digital technologies continues to increase in classrooms. For teachers, this involves an increased focus on the task design process for supporting student outcomes when using these technologies. Using the Activity Theory based Evaluation Version of the Activity Checklist as a theoretical framework, this paper explores an exemplary case of the use of the Activity Checklist through

(2020). Vygotsky’s theory in early childhood education and research. Russian and Western values. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 373-375.

(2020). Long-term and current concerns in CHAT scholarship, and a dedication to Gordon Wells. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 207-209.

ABSTRACT The article outlines four generations of theorizing and research on work and learning within the Finnish school of activity theory. The main focus of the paper is on the evolution of the unit of analysis through the four generations, from mediated action to a collective activity system, to multiple-interconnected activity systems, and most recently to heterogenous work coalitions aimed at

ABSTRACT Young people’s processes of forming identities, linked to the work of anticipating futures, involve significant labors of thought, feeling, ethics and imagination. These labors proceed across both life-worlds and school-worlds, often in tension, especially for those from marginalized positions in social-structural power relations. This paper explores such identity labors, drawing on rich ethnographic

ABSTRACT This paper looks at a concept central to Michael Halliday’s linguistics: realization. Ruqaiya Hasan always defined this concept in a Vygotskyan way, as semiotic mediation. In so doing, she made three important addenda to it and questioned the fit between systemic-functional concepts of language and Vygotsky’s. I will suggest that recently translated pedological texts offer a reply – a kind

ABSTRACT The complementary theories of Vygotsky, Halliday, and Bernstein are applicable in all fields of human activity. Our interest is in the education field, specifically pedagogy for marginalized students. In analyzing classroom interactions, we draw on all three theories. From these comes an understanding of the broadest goals of education, that is culture and social inclusion, and the central

(2020). Responding to LCHC’s polyphonic autobiography: Studying rocks in a landslide and the creation of new, more humane forms of LCHC’s own activity. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, The LCHC Polyphonic Autobiography: Extensions, Connections and Dialogue, pp. 99-105.

ABSTRACT This paper explores a potential avenue of dialogue between Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), namely genre. SFL's approach to modeling genre is briefly introduced, and key discourse analyses informing genre description are reviewed. Subsequently, the approach is illustrated with respect to analysis of a text from a tertiary law lecture, specifically

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) as a living, distributed bio-geography—that is, as the diversity of ways in which the lab exists today in and through research-practice work and experiences across multiple locations and generations of scholars. Taking a genetic perspective, we ground our discussion in two moments in the history of LCHC, embodied

ABSTRACT Meaningful participation (i.e., substantive involvement in socially vital activities) and educational dignity (i.e., the multifaceted sense of a person’s value generated via substantive intra- and inter-personal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one’s mind, humanity, and potential) are vital and interrelated social phenomena. Conceptually, the two are salient for research related

ABSTRACT This issue of MCA presents a set of articles developing a theoretical dialogue between the work of linguist Michael Halliday and psychologist Lev Vygotsky. The Introduction provides background on Halliday’s social linguistics, identifies some key themes for the dialogue with Vygotsky, and comments on the particular contributions of the included articles.

(2020). Hegel for social movements. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 381-384.

(2020). Self-esteem in time and place: how American families imagine, enact, and personalize a cultural ideal. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 313-316.

(2020). Rethinking cultural-historical theory: a dialectical perspective to Vygotsky. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 317-319.

(2020). Dialogical argumentation and reasoning in elementary science classrooms. Mind, Culture, and Activity. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Humanity’s leading activity: survival, of the humanity of our species. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, The LCHC Polyphonic Autobiography: Extensions, Connections and Dialogue, pp. 95-98.

ABSTRACT The school system is permeated by systems of social exclusion and discrimination in ways that are usually invisible. This neglected symbolic violence reproduced in our educational system reflects some weak points within the Catalan intercultural paradigm, which lead to the reproduction of systemic violence to many young racialized people. Educational regimes which prioritize the adult agenda

ABSTRACT This study addresses what it means to care for a person who has been catapulted into an unfamiliar new world and has lost a sense of being-in-the-world. I develop the relational ontological framework extending Heidegger’s ontological structure of care and Bakhtin’s dialogical interaction to focus on encountering the Other in asymmetrical power and knowledge distribution situations. Within

ABSTRACT This paper explores social memory as a dynamic, agentive and semiotically mediated process drawing on some key principles from Vygotsky’s and Halliday’s work. These authors’ basic principles are defined and later applied to the analysis of the transmission of contested memories of the recent past in Uruguay. The paper concludes by reflecting on how this dialectical, historical and semiotic

ABSTRACT During three months in 2015, in São Paulo, Brazil, public high school students carried out an unprecedentedly successful protest that forced the state governor to abandon plans to merge schools, which would have resulted in overcrowding and reducing their number. Working collectively via social media coordination without direct ties to institutions, students occupied hundreds of schools, reflecting

(2020). Genetic analyses in sociocultural research across disciplines and practices. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 1-3.

ABSTRACT This paper suggests that Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit (ethical life) provides an elementary way of understanding the relationship between individual development and the cultural and political environment. In contrast to many other concepts of context, it is able to integrate the moral, social, political, economic, and legal conditions of human development within one framework. Individual

(2020). Exploring Fanon’s psychopolitical project as a theory of learning. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, The LCHC Polyphonic Autobiography: Extensions, Connections and Dialogue, pp. 201-205.

ABSTRACT The Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) developed the Fifth Dimension (5D) prototype play/learning environment in 1982 in order to study the role of context in human cognition. The prototype, which blended play and learning with computers, children and college students acting as intergenerational teams, and university/community partnership, was first implemented in comparative

(2020). Commentary: on the originality of Vygotsky’s “Thought and Word”. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 86-91.

ABSTRACT In the ongoing project of publishing a shared autobiography of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC), it is mentioned the year of 1984 as the starting point for the internalization of Laboratory activities. The three authors of this paper visited LCHC between September of 1983 and June of 1987. This work examines how our contact with the LCHC at that time, impacted on our vital

ABSTRACT Cultural-historical research has had a relevant presence in Spain and, to a lesser extent, in Portugal, since the 1970s. A review of the state of the art of the cultural-historical approach in these two countries allows us to identify four general lines of research: 1) sociocultural activities, mental actions, and semiotic mediation; 2) education in schools; 3) education beyond schools, including

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years, our research group has developed a set of action research projects inspired by the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition’s Fifth Dimension. In this article, we analyze their historical trajectories by examining their sustainability from the perspective of the experiment by design, as developed by Michael Cole. Taking the motives and contradictions of all partners

ABSTRACT This essay consists of a series of short cultural-philosophical meditations on psychology and its proper unit of study, an issue of great concern to the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) throughout its decades of work. The Lab’s claim that experimental cognitive psychology is ecologically invalid is juxtaposed to other LCHC conceptual challenges to psychology and the negative

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I consider the importance of race in the 50-year history of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) as described in the LCHC Polyphonic Autobiography (LCHC PA). I point to the timeliness of the work of the LCHC and, in particular, to LCHC’s consistent and enduring concern with ecological validity and with the method of ethnographic

ABSTRACT This article offers a discussion of some advantages and disadvantages afforded by the format collaborators chose to create and launch the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) Polyphonic Autobiography. It is divided into three sections: first, I review research on alternative modes of publishing, peer production as a public good, and the pros and cons of tradeoffs and social filtering

(2020). The new mathematics and an old culture. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, The LCHC Polyphonic Autobiography: Extensions, Connections and Dialogue, pp. 113-116.

ABSTRACT Through a personal account of my experiences with the work of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC), I reflect on the contributions that cultural psychology has made to our understanding of the psychological consequences of schooling and literacy. Placing special attention on the contributions of Michael Cole, I argue that the impact of schooling and literacy on human development

(2019). Acknowledging changes and the challenges ahead. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 26, Young people, digital mediation, and transformative agency (part 2), pp. 283-285.

ABSTRACT We argue that the distinction between dialogue (after Bakhtin) and dialectics (after Hegel, Marx, Vygotsky), is of key importance to learning-teaching and to mathematics education. Some followers of Bakhtin have argued that these concepts are irreconcilable, or incompatible, since dialectics implies and dialogism implicitly denies the requirement of telos (i.e., a targeted endpoint). On the

(2019). Young people, digital mediation, and transformative agency, special issue (part 2) Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 26, Young people, digital mediation, and transformative agency (part 2), pp. 286-290.

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to explore how secondary school students’ agency evolves over time across offline and online spaces. We focus on five Facebook groups of teachers and students interacting online in various ways over a period of eighteen months. Combining a variety of innovative analytical techniques and procedures (descriptive statistics, network analysis and discursive analysis) we

(2020). Working relationally in and across practices: a cultural-historical approach to collaboration. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 92-94.

ABSTRACT The view of abstract ideation as the telos of sociocultural intellectual development is revisited following Wertsch’s (1996) call to consider development within the spectrum of concrete and abstract ideation. This article provides a transdisciplinary framework adopting Vygotsky’s concept of semiotic mediation and the systemic functional linguistic concept of grammatical metaphor (GM). The

(2019). Children’s transitions in everyday life and institutions. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 26, Young people, digital mediation, and transformative agency (part 2), pp. 387-389.

ABSTRACT The Odyssey is one of the highest products of human creation of all times. In the book Mythos and Voice, Charles Underwood presents an innovative perspective on this work of art, discussing the development of the main characters by the light of psychological and anthropological theories. Then, he discusses the dialogical theories of ontogenetic development using the characters of Odyssey as

ABSTRACT In the new learning ecology, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) promote the learning of children and young people in a variety of contexts and also shape their learning trajectories. However, empirical studies often ignore how learners construct narratives about their own learning trajectories and about what it means to learn with ICTs. Thus, we propose Subjective Learning Experiences