Education is a main issue in all countries. Policy makers, educators, families, students and, in a more general way, societies expect schools to provide a high quality education. They also expect students to be able to achieve and to become active and critical citizens. As senior researchers in education, we address some of the most complex and demanding research questions: How does learning affect identity? How does participation to educational settings, scenarios and situations impact the way we are or became? Can changes in how we perceive our Selves be considered as part of the learning process? This book attempts to outline some answers to such broad questions using a very robust and updated theoretical frame: the dialogical approach. In these chapters very well-known international authors from different continents and countries analyze school and educational situations through new lens: by considering the teaching and learning processes as multi-voiced and socially complex and considering identity development as a true leverage for development. The focus on the dialogical nature of both learning and identities makes this book interesting not only for educators and educational researchers but also for anyone interested in human sciences, policy makers, students and their families. We also aimed at producing a book that can be useful for different cultures and educational systems. Thus, in this book there are researches and comments from different cultural perspectives, making it appealing for a very large target-public.

Deeper learning, dialogic learning, and critical thinking are essential capabilities in the 21st-century environments we now operate. Apart from being important in themselves, they are also crucial in enabling the acquisition of many other 21st-century skills/capabilities such as problem solving, collaborative learning, innovation, information and media literacy, and so on. However, the majority of teachers in schools and instructors in higher education are inadequately prepared for the task of promoting deeper learning, dialogic learning, and critical thinking in their students. This is despite the fact that there are educational researchers who are developing and evaluating strategies for such promotion. The problem is bridging the gap between the educational researchers’ work and what gets conveyed to teachers and instructors as evidence-based, usable strategies. This book addresses that gap: in it, leading scholars from around the world describe strategies they have developed for successfully cultivating students’ capabilities for deeper learning and transfer of what they learn, dialogic learning and effective communication, and critical thought. They explore connections in the promotion of these capabilities, and they provide, in accessible form, research evidence demonstrating the efficacy of the strategies. They also discuss answers to the questions of how and why the strategies work. A seminal resource, this book creates tangible links between innovative educational research and classroom teaching practices to address the all-important question of how we can realize our ideals for education in the 21st century. It is a must read for pre-service and in-service teachers, teacher educators and professional developers, and educational researchers who truly care that we deliver education that will prepare and serve students for life.

Trust has a constituent role in human societies. It has been treated as a scientific topic in many disciplines. Yet, despite the fact that trust and distrust come to life primarily in human communication and through language, it has seldom been analyzed from a communicative or linguistic perspective. This is the theme of this path-breaking volume. This volume contains 12 chapters, plus introduction and epilogue by the editors. They have been authored by leading specialists on trust in language and communication, coming from many disciplines and from different cultures and countries. Most of the authors share a conceptual basis in dialogical theories. This book is a follow-up volume to two previous volumes on trust within cultural psychology, Trust and Distrust (Marková & Gillespie, 2008) and Trust and Conflict (Marková & Gillespie, 2012). It will be of interest to anyone seriously interested in trust in societies, and in trust and distrust as displayed in communication and language.

This book represents the first extensive introduction to the emerging construct of Educational Self. The new concept describes a specific dimension of the Self, which is elaborated in the course of a person’s school life and is reactivated anytime the person is involved in an educational activity, whether as a student, teacher or parent. The Educational Self (ES) approach was created by the volume editors and is currently being developed at various universities in Europe and Latin America as a way of understanding and operating in educational contexts. The book presents the theoretical framework and the empirical developments of the construct, paving the way for further applications in education. The main locations of the empirical studies are Denmark, Italy, Brazil, Portugal and Colombia, but the research network is steadily expanding to other countries, so that the concept here can be generalized to different cultural contexts. The book addresses a range of contexts and moments in school life. The editors’ introduction presents the construct of ES, the opportunities for further theoretical and empirical developments of the concept, and its potential applications in educational practices. In the remainder of the volume, ES is explored for different age groups (from children to adolescents to higher education), different actors (peers, teachers, parents and their interactions), different contexts (formal education, special institutions, school-family relationships) and different phenomena (disruptive behavior, special needs, value orientation, school failure, etc.). All the studies share a qualitative idiographic approach, which is characteristic of the perspective of cultural psychology in which the ES construct was elaborated.

This book opens up a fruitful conversation by and between invited academics from Europe and Latin America on the features of online learning in higher education. The authors analyse online education from interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical reflections to reveal the existing tensions and turning this book into a valuable artifact on how learning is shaped when technology comes in-between diverse geographical and social contexts. Like any other human activity, e-learning can be seen as a context-dependent educational system with many objects in mutual interaction. Applying a cultural psychology perspective to this provides new answers to questions such as: How can cultural psychology shed new light on online learning? Why do students and academics still opt for classic classes? What inner boundaries are pushed when studying online? How can online learning be influenced by affect? How do teachers and students mold their identities when they move in and out of online environments? This book reveals the existing tensions, resistances and appropriation strategies that students and academics from diverse backgrounds and places go through when attending online learning courses in higher education and furthermore shows how these theoretical frameworks can be successfully applied to practice.

Cultural Psychology studies how persons and social-cultural worlds mutually constitute one another. It is premised on the idea that culture is within us—in every moment in which we live our human lives, in the meaningful worlds we have created ourselves. In this perspective, encounters with others fundamentally transform the way we understand ourselves. With the increase of globalization and multicultural exchanges, cultural psychology becomes the psychological science for the 21st century. No longer can we ignore questions about how our cultural traditions, practices, beliefs, artifacts and other people constitute how we approach, understand, imagine and remember the world. The Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in Cultural Psychology series aims to highlight and develop new ideas that advance our understanding of these issues. This second volume in the series features an address by Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie, which is followed by commentary chapters and their response to them. In their lecture, Zittoun and Gillespie propose a model of the relation between mind and society, specifically the way in which individuals develop and gain agency through society. They theorise and demonstrate a two-way interaction: bodies moving through society accumulate differentiated experiences, which become integrated at the level of mind, enabling psychological movement between experiences, which in turn mediates how people move through society. The model is illustrated with a longitudinal analysis of diaries written by a woman leading up to and through the Second World War. Commentators further elaborate on the issues of (1) context and history, (2) experience, time and movement, and (3) methodologies for cultural psychology.

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.