EDPSY 582A —Methods Seminar: Ethnography of Human Development, Cognition and Learning Fall 2014 Wednesdays 1:30 to 3:50 Miller 112 INSTRUCTORS Philip Bell Megan Bang LIFE Center LIFE Center
[email protected] [email protected] Office Hours: By appt Office Hours: By appt COURSE OVERVIEW “The situated nature of learning, remembering, and understanding is a central fact. It may appear obvious that human minds develop in social situations, and that they use the tools and representational media that culture provides to support, extend, and reorganize mental functioning. But cognitive theories of knowledge representation and educational practice, in school and in the workplace, have not been sufficiently responsive to questions about these relationships.” — Roy Pea & John Seely Brown, 1991 “If ethnography produces cultural interpretations through intense field research experience, how is such unruly experience transformed into an authoritative written account? How, precisely, is a garrulous, overdetermined, cross-cultural encounter, shot through with power relations and personal cross purposes circumscribed as an adequate version of a more-or-less discrete ‘otherworld,’ composed by an individual author?” — James Clifford Learning and development are complex phenomena. The cultural and cognitive processes bound up in learning can be crucially contingent on the history of local community practices, the social and material conditions of specific situations, and they can span across social settings, activity systems, and cultural groupings and deeply relate to the local history. Learning processes and outcomes can play out across short to long time scales from milliseconds to decades. These complexities pose particular conceptual, methodological, and representational challenges. Studies of human development and learning have taken an ethnographic turn over the last twenty years.