Sociocultural Worlds Research Articles

Vygotsky’s Analysis of Children’s Meaning Making Processes

Vygotsky’s work is extensive and covers many aspects of the development of children’s meaning-making processes in social and cultural contexts. However, his main focus is on the examination of the unification of speaking and thinking processes. His investigation centers on the analysis of the entity created by this unification - an internal speaking/thinking system with meaning at its center. Despite the fact that this speaking/thinking system is at the center of Vygotsky’s work, it remains little explored. This article relies on Vygotsky’s writings, particularlyThinking and Speech, to describe his examination of the speaking/thinking system. To analyze it he derives the unit -znachenie slova - “meaning through language.” InThinking and Speech Vygotsky describes the origins and development ofznachenie slova as a unit of the speaking/thinking system. He also details his genetic, functional, and structural analysis of the processes through which children internalize meaning in social interaction and organize it in an internal, psychological system. The foundation of this system is the child's ability to generalize by using symbolic representation in meaningful communication. Vygotsky’s analysis of the structure of generalization in the speaking/thinking system is central to his examination of how children make meaning of their sociocultural worlds.

Authored assemblages in a digital world: Illustrations of a child’s online social, critical and semiotic meaning-making

Drawing on case illustrations of a six-year-old child as he ‘assembles’ a digital world using Webkinz™, this paper proposes an approach that researchers and educators might use to understand, analyse and critique multimodality. This multidisciplinary theoretical framework integrates new literacies, social semiotics and critical literacy perspectives. Data were collected during a broader three-week case study via a side-shadowing interview technique (McClay and Mackey, 2009), where the first author sat next to the child, making detailed research notes, interviewing him and taking screenshots of his digital productions. The findings suggest that authorship is rarely linear as authors continually remix, layer, embed and inter-animate semiotic resources as they assemble their sociocultural worlds and critical positions within these worlds.

Building Literacy Instruction From Children’s Sociocultural Worlds

Abstract— This article demonstrates that children’s language and literacy development shares an inextricable relationship with their social and cultural worlds. Cultural factors always shape the ways different communities engage in reading and writing. Young English language learners bring culturally shaped beliefs and experiences regarding reading and writing to school, where they are taught important beginning literacy skills and practices that may not fit with their previous experiences. This article calls for carefully designed research that explores promising curricular modifications that may increase the early literacy abilities of children from cultural and linguistic backgrounds different from mainstream educational environments.

Bridging Borders, Brokering Divides: Confronting the Limits of Cultural Assimilation

The three essays in this forum examine the ways in which individuals have sought to reconcile sociocultural differences between those at the fringes of American society and those at the center. Two concepts embody this effort. One is the bridge concept—the idea that those with dual identities would serve as links between the two sociocultural worlds. The other concept, that of the cultural broker, refers to someone who actively seeks to mediate the differences between the two groups. The essays in this cluster use the two concepts to analyze the ways in which individuals in three disparate places—the American West (California), a U.S. colony across the Pacific (the Philippines), and the American Southwest (New Mexico)—served as bridges and brokers in their efforts to negotiate the imbalance of power between dominant and subordinate groups.

Picture Partners: A Co-creative Journey into Visual Literacy

This article describes an integrated art and early literacy project entitled, ‘Picture Partners’. The main purpose of the project was to explore how young children create and express meaning through art. Children’s responses, both written and spoken, were included because accompanying modes of expression expand the nature and content of their drawings and inform teachers about children’s intentions and processes of thinking. A secondary purpose was to investigate how children use illustrations from familiar picture books as models for their own creations and whether children’s responses to stories might be enhanced through their collaboration with peers. Partnerships were formed and participants worked in close proximity as they drew pictures in response to a teacher directed prompt. Using qualitative, interpretative analysis, a small subset of drawings produced by kindergarten and first grade children was examined. The results revealed that the process of drawing was influenced by illustrations in picturebooks, peer interactions, and the artwork of partners in close proximity. The shift in emphasis away from the interpretations of visual realism in children’s drawings towards their own purposes allowed readers to focus on the way drawings represent meaning within children’s socio-cultural worlds.

Managing relationships and identities through forms of address: What French–Portuguese bilinguals call their parents in each language

When bilinguals do not use pragmatically normative forms in one of their languages, it is often assumed that they do so because of insufficient exposure. This article shows that bilinguals may sometimes be familiar with pragmatic norms, but actively reject them and the sociocultural worlds they index. I discuss how the adult daughters of Portuguese migrants raised in France use second-person address forms with their parents in their two languages in ways that diverge from French and Portuguese monolingual usage. By examining participants’ metapragmatic discourse about French and Portuguese pragmatic paradigms of address and their different implications for relationship and identity, I argue that these bilinguals choose address forms out of their rejection or embrace of the sociocultural universe associated with different forms and norms. As such, I look at language “dominance” as partially mediated by speakers’ ideologically informed positioning and attitudes towards socially indexical forms in and across each language.

Literacies and Quechua oral language: Connecting sociocultural worlds and linguistic resources for biliteracy development

This article presents partial findings of an ethnographic study in a Quechua rural community in the Peruvian Andes. It discusses the uses of hegemonic Spanish literacy practices in the school. These were characterized by emphasis on formal issues over meaning; students’ lives, cultural, and linguistic resources were ignored. However, there were spontaneous uses of literacy by children that resisted the school’s dominant literacy practices. Local literacy practices in other social contexts included the use of oral Quechua in order to make meaning of written text. These are cultural resources that teachers may use in the classroom. The article offers a discussion of ‘hybrid literacy practices’ as possibilities for connecting sociocultural worlds and linguistic resources for biliteracy and academic development.

Race in Play: understanding the socio-cultural worlds of student athletes

Race in Play: understanding the socio-cultural worlds of student athletes

Where techno-science meets poverty: Medical research and the economy of blood in The Gambia, West Africa

This paper considers how internationally supported medical research is understood and interpreted by its actual and potential study subjects, exposing the limits to bioethical discourses amidst economic inequalities and contrasting socio-cultural worlds. It focuses on the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratories in The Gambia and particularly their Pneumococcal Vaccine Trial (PVT) that was conducted jointly with the Gambian government during 2001–2004. In many respects this was an exemplar of international best practice in trial communication and informed consent procedures. Yet ethnographic and survey research finds that Gambian parents’ perspectives on participation are shaped not by trial specificities, but by broader, historically shaped views and experiences of the MRC as an institution. There is a pervasive view that the MRC offers good, free medication to participants, but that it also ‘steals blood’. Widespread concerns with blood-stealing emerge from local frames of understanding in which blood is treated as a tradeable good, in which blood accumulation and depletion in bodily processes relates to its exchange in hospital and medical research practices, and in which transactions can be more or less (un)reasonable. Yet such thinking, rooted in an ‘economy of blood’, has been overlooked by medical research staff and indeed by historians and anthropologists of Africa whose analyses of blood-stealing have been overly transfixed on rumour and the occult. This paper argues that such cultural framings, which guide local critical commentary on trans-national research orders, require serious attention and need to inform open dialogues between scientists and the public if medical research in resource-poor settings is to continue to be sustainable and politically legitimate.

Embodied Practices: Ethnography and intercultural Drama in the Classroom

The goals of contemporary ethnography and intercultural performance are similar within an educational context; both encourage participants to build an embodied understanding of the lived experiences of others. By integrating intercultural performance practices into our drama curriculum we can encourage students to critically examine their own social and cultural attitudes and build dynamic and embodied understandings of other socio-cultural worlds. Contemporary ethnographic practices allow drama teachers and participatory researchers to engage with the experiences of students as they create and explore intercultural drama.