Microgenesis of Culture and Cognition
The form of theory we use to guide our empirical work emphasizes the primacy of culturally mediated, social processes in human learning and development and the necessity of studying these processes at different time scales in relation to each other. For example, the study of 5thDimensions as historically developing socio-cultural formations over periods as long as decades is also a site for the study of the ontogenetic development of the children and undergraduates who participate in them. In addition, to gain access to the interpersonal dynamics that are the immediate environment for change, we seek to study the processes of microgenetic change that happen in the ongoing activities at the sites. Various publications of this work have appeared and our analyses of accumulating data are ongoing.
The projects described in this section sometimes take place in UClinks sites and sometimes in other settings. They share the feature that they are concerned with the dual dynamics of culture formation and conceptual/developmental change in individual participants. We see this work not as vital to our own work, but as an avenue for exploring the complementarity among CHAT and other social science approaches that see culture and cognition as co-constituted, approaches such as the distributed cognition approach in cognitive science