Introduction: The Construct of Educational Self

Abstract

For a great number of people the context of institutionalized educational contexts is a common experience. Whether it is in a kindergarten, in a school, in a madras, in a boy scout group, in a sport team, people growing up in contemporary societies experienced these contexts. This has enormous implications in the construction and elaboration of Self since the early age. The concept of Educational Self is an attempt to capture this process by stressing how the discourse taking place in the educational context is providing the child with a complex repertoire of symbolic resources of the definition of her own self. The book covers different aspects of the educational context in which the construct of Educational Self is applied to understand the developmental dynamics. As internalized polyphony of adult and peer voices in the course of educational experiences, the Educational Self is a personal synthesis of social interactions between those actors. The chapter provides the theoretical framework and the definition of the construct of Educational Self, as the authors have conceived it and elaborated in the course of the last decade. However, the construct seems to have inspired a number of potential uses that we have collected in this first organic volume.