A aprendizagem escolar e a formação de professores na perspectiva da psicologia histórico-cultural e da teoria da atividade

Este trabalho avalia possibilidades teóricas de renovação das práticas de formação inicial e continuada de professores com base na concepção histórico-cultural da aprendizagem escolar, compreendendo o trabalho de professor efetivamente como atividade teórica e prática. Após constatação das demandas formativas postas ao desenvolvimento teórico da didática em face das exigências educacionais contemporâneas, são apontados elementos teóricos da concepção histórico-cultural e suas vertentes, com destaque à atividade de aprendizagem escolar. No final, são apresentadas as possibilidades de aplicação dessa teoria à formação de professores, numa tentativa de buscar um paradigma teoricamente mais ampliado de orientação das práticas de formação profissional de professores

Young Children Learning Languages in a Multilingual Context

Luxembourg is a trilingual country where residents communicate in Luxembourgish, French and German concurrently. Children therefore study these languages at primary school. In this paper I explore how six eight-year-old Luxembourgish children use and learn German, French and English in formal and informal settings over a period of one year. Their eagerness to learn and use German and English contrasted with their cautious and formal approach to the learning of French. My findings demonstrate that second language learning in a multilingual country is not an 'automatic' or 'natural' process but, rather, children's language behaviour depends on their personal goals, interests, competence, confidence and understanding of what counts as appropriate language use. These factors are influenced by the formal approach to language learning at school

We came here to remember’: Using participatory sensory ethnography to explore memory as emplaced, embodied practice

Memory can be seen as an emplaced phenomenon rather than as an internal, psychological archive. Approaches relating to cognition and memory as practice, seeing cognition as an extended, distributed phenomenon, will be considered in theoretical and empirical contexts in this article. Theoretical approaches to emplaced, embodied memory will be explored in the context of my sensory ethnographic research on place perception. I curated a series of sensory ethnographic engagements to explore how three international students from Tunisia, Indonesia, and Germany used emplaced knowledge and memories of their city and of their previous homes. Using a participatory sensory ethnography, involving walking interviews, my collaborators devised unique memorial responses to evoke their new and previous places of residence. The collaborations presented here illustrate the embodied, emplaced nature of memory. The use of sensory ethnography has enabled me to construct memory as an emplaced, embodied, multisensory phenomenon, rather than an internal archive