Lynda Stone

This video ethnography documented the interrelationship between agency and practical-moral knowledge in sixth-grade literacy learning activities. By utilizing an ecological unit of analysis, the relational habitus, and discourse analytic methodology, this study found that students’ engagement in representational agency was evidenced in the patterned ways they collaboratively constructed literacy knowledge.

Our paper offers a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of moods in academic settings. We begin by introducing the concept of classroom mood as a phenomena distributed across time and across people. Then we propose a method for studying classroom mood using the linguistic anthropological notion of stance. We demonstrate this method through an analysis of a year-long video ethnography of literacy teaching and learning in a first-grade classroom. In this analysis, we document how a collaborative-problem-solving mood, one form of emotional experience, emerges through stancetaking over time as a communicative, collaborative, and relational process. Our analysis describes how a teacher and her students coordinated affective and epistemic stances dialogically and opportunistically to build a collaborative problem-solving mood over time. This mood called forth (solicited) particular actions from students to participate competently in the learning activity, which included joint attention, effortful listening, and correct tool use (strategies/sound cards). Our analysis demonstrates how contextual moods influence engagement in learning.

Digital literacies have fast become indispensable for productive engagement, competency, and citizenship in a rapidly changing world. After-school programs represent an important venue where many young people can develop a mastery of digital literacies, encompassing both the creative and responsible use of a broad range of new media. This paper discusses relational habitus (the configuration of self, tools, tasks, and others in a specific activity) in the development of digital literacies among youth in a network of after-school programs called University-Community Links (UC Links). A collaborative effort among university and local community partners throughout California, UC Links provides informal learning activities that enable underserved K-12 youth to develop their digital literacies. After presenting UC Links' approach to informal learning after school, we offer a cognitive ethnography, describing how a distinctive relational habitus configures the links among self, tools, tasks, and others in informal digital activities at one UC Links site in Sacramento, CA. We suggest how this relational habitus informs collaborative activities among university and K-12 students to provide a cognitive platform for an agentive engagement with various new media tools.

In this article, we developed a theoretical frame to analyze how practical-moral knowledge structures the regulatory processes of learning to control and direct behavior during literacy lessons in two elementary classrooms. We describe how regulatory behaviors were congruent with the local social and moral order, constituents of practical-moral knowledge. Variance in the practical-moral knowledge of each classroom revealed two different patterns of regulation: (a) a toggle or shift from other-regulation to self-regulation, with an emphasis on other-regulation and (b) a dynamic pattern of fluid shifts between other-regulation, coregulation, and self-regulation, with an emphasis on coregulation. We argue that regulatory processes do not originate within the individual but rather in and through learning practices.

The relational habitus, an adaptation of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, is an ecological ensemble of relations including self, tools, tasks, and others that is intersubjectively constructed and sustained over time in formal and informal learning communities. The development of the relational habitus explains variances in the social organization of meaning making in local arenas of learning, referred to as dynamic fields. As a theoretical tool, the relational habitus encompasses two interrelated aspects of intersubjectivity: (a) an orientation to others in cultural contexts and (b) mutual perspective taking accomplished through communication. These two aspects of intersubjectivity explain how the meaning-making processes that promote learning and development involve both agential action and the situational structuring of these actions.

In this article, we study a local adaptation of the Fifth Dimension [Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] known as Las Redes (i.e., Networks of Collaboration in the Fifth Dimension) to examine how the multiple activity systems of Las Redes, e.g. the undergraduate course and the school and university communities—all organized around cultural-historical activity theories of learning and development—promote learning among undergraduate and elementary school children. In particular, the article focuses on a particular social situation of development in which the social organization of learning and forms of mediation available inspire new forms of participation and assistance. Activity Theory, as a present-to-future model of development, is used to examine how these developmental processes were structured through problem articulation (finding, identifying, and representing problems) during computer-mediated collaborative problem solving activities.