Mind the Gap?: Children's Domestic Writings and Their Implications for Educational Practice

This study, situated in the field of sociocultural research, investigates how the home supports the writing development of my multilingual daughter, Pia, between the ages of 3-9 years old. Using ethnographic methods, data is gathered at Pia's home, where approximately eight hundred unsolicited texts written in English, French and German are supplemented by fieldnotes, conversational and photographic data. Data is also collected at Pia's bilingual, French-German school in order to assess institutional contributions to Pia's writing development during reception class and Year One. As a final measure, data is also gathered on the domestic literacy practices of Pia's classmates and their families so that we may put the findings on a single child into perspective. The findings confirm that homes and schools place different emphasis on the physical, social and psychological features inherent in literacy-related interactions. The result is a gap between the messages homes and schools transmit about the purposes of writing. At home, literacy is used rather than explicitly taught. The implicit, holistic nature of family dynamics fosters Pia's experience of writing as socially embedded practice, driven by her very real need to communicate with family members and friends in her environment. At school, by contrast, the child is positioned as an apprentice, who experiences writing more as an abstract cognitive skill. Significantly, Pia's domestic writing is in advance of curricular expectations. This seems to suggest that implicit teaching strategies, coupled to a re-evaluation of the physical, social and psychological aspects of classroom literacy, may be useful in enhancing writing activities within schools. The implicit character of domestic literacy, however, taking place on the margins of awareness, not only largely accounts for why children may find it hard to talk about their domestic literacy practices, but also explains why such practices remain unseen, and, consequently, unacknowledged

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Furrows in the field, or down in the jungle: re-membering domestic literacy in the early years

Embracing qualitative methods in an approach situated at the interface between education, social science and philosophy, the author offers a phenomenologically-oriented account of early family literacy, as experienced by a five year-old girl in Alsace, France. The paper seeks to enliven a fresh look at what we believe we see/understand and how we choose to disseminate this, thus it interrogates orthodoxies with regard to academic discourses and research methodology. The author proposes that to learn is to be in media res in the interminable flux of possibility. It is a never-ending story, which can only be told at a particular cross-section of time and place. Much follows from this insight, foremost among which is to accept that to attempt to understand and learn from learning, and to write academic ‘readings’ of learning, entails abandoning measurables and product-driven orientations in favour of processual ones.    </jats:p

YIS:Yearbook of Idiographic Science 3

Psychology is a science of non-existing objects1. All our psychological processes— thinking, feeling, having “personality”, “motivation” or “self-esteem”—are themselves constructions of the human minds and products of the social history of these minds. They are useful fictions—tools that allow us to assume any conceptual position we desire to look at the phenomena of our interest. We started building a conceptual system of the science based on the analysis of singular events—idiographic science—in our introduction to the first volume of our Yearbook (Salvatore &amp; Valsiner, 2009), fol- lowing the lead of Gordon Allport (1962, 1966) and Peter Molenaar (2004). The task was—and is—formidable, since both the common language connotations of the term and the prevailing credo of inductive accumulation of evidence in the contemporary social sciences create confusions on the way of understanding a very simple claim— in the case of self-organizing open systems2 each individual system is unique, and such unique- ness is due to general laws that make it possible. Generality in uniqueness is not a contradiction in terms—but the basic operating principle in all nature, psyche, and society