Development of Adult-Child Intersubjectivity in Informal Learning Settings
span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">This project is closely related to the work on microgenesis of culture because joint attention to objects and the ability to interpret what others are thinking and feeling appear to be at the heart of both cultural and intellectual development. In this work, which takes place in UCLinks sites we focus on the process by which adults and children develop a sufficient shared sense of the other's understanding of a given activity to be able to accomplish successful explanations and hence, enable learning. To understand this process requires that the participants communicate their experience to one another, providing access to the processes involved. Combining participant-observation and detailed video analysis of adult-child interactions as they seek to make a slow motion video illustrating the concepts of velocity and changes in velocity (for example), we focus on how these processes unfold through the emergence and coordination of multiple communicative modalities between the participants mediated by various objects and tools designed to promote success. Analyses draw on transcripts, video recordings of the interaction from multiple perspectives, and analysis of the products embodying participants’ changing understandings. This work is being done in collaboration with physics education groups at the University of Colorado, Boulder (Noah Finkelstein, Laurel Mayhew) and Tufts University (Brian Gravel, Chris Rogers,William Church) and LCHC (Michael Cole, Robert Lecusay). For a published example from a Fifth Dimension see Lecusay, R., Rossen, L., Cole, M.(2008).