Drawing on Bakhtinian dialogism and interactional sociolinguistics, the author explored how young English language learners become writers over time. With a focus on the children's dialogic writing processes rather than their products, the author aimed to trace the children's journey in becoming writers and make evident the evolvement of their…

Teachers must seize the opportunity to grow great minds. Contextualizing the argument in the writing of renowned poets, noted educators, and distinguished moral heroes whose life's work was dedicated to the principles of democracy, this article reminds practicing teachers in this challenging moment that "You are braver than you believe,…

This commentary discusses the articles that comprise this special issue on attachment in middle childhood. Central to this discussion is the distinction between verbal, strategic, and conscious responses to questionnaires as compared to verbal and nonverbal, automatic and largely unconscious responses to interviews. Both methods have been…

Culture has an important impact on attachment. This commentary highlights three aspects about culture and attachment in middle childhood: (1) the need to have a more sophisticated consideration of the implication of cultural values, (2) the need to incorporate the role of societal or political ecological contexts, and (3) the need to solve the…

Attachment theory suggests that internal working models of self and significant others influence adjustment during development by controlling information processing and self-regulation. We provide a conceptual overview on possible mechanisms linking attachment and information processing and review the current literature in middle childhood.…

Human visual object recognition is multifaceted and comprised of several domains of expertise. Developmental relations between young children's letter recognition and their 3-dimensional object recognition abilities are implicated on several grounds but have received little research attention. Here, we ask how preschoolers' success in recognizing…

During social interaction, the behavior of interacting partners becomes coordinated. Although interpersonal coordination is well-studied in adults, relatively little is known about its development. In this project we explored how 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children spontaneously coordinated their drumming with a peer. Results showed that all children…

Background: Early childhood intervention (ECI) program outcomes remain relatively under-researched. The aim of this study was twofold: (1) to describe outcomes in children and families participating in an Australian ECI service; and (2) to explore child, family, and program characteristics as correlates of these outcomes. Method: Twenty-nine…

This paper aims to discuss the relevance that the concept of "perezhivanie" had for Soviet psychology and its implication for the development of topics that have been largely neglected both in Soviet psychology and in the Western Vygotskian tradition. According to the position defended in this paper, "perezhivanie" is not just…

Interpretations of Vygotsky's texts have generally focused on the intellectual aspects of children's development, including his theory of play. This article presents a reinterpretation of Vygotsky's theory of play and draws on this theory of art to include emotions as an important part of children's play. I will argue that in play, children's…

This article characterizes the changes that occurred and are occurring in the didactics of primary school as an effect of L.S. Vygotsky's psychological ideas. It underscores the characteristic features of the step-by-step convergence of psychology and pedagogy and discloses the reasons psychological knowledge is not used sufficiently to organize…

While developmental discourses have been heavily critiqued in relation to education systems, less attention has been paid to how these impact the data collection process in classroom research. This article utilises Foucault's concept of regime of truth to highlight the pervasiveness of developmental discourses when conducting research in primary…

Early childhood practitioners can play a vital role in the development of early self-determination in partnership with families. Self-determination has been generally considered to be about personal agency or control that can also relate to the quality of one's life. Young children with disabilities start to develop a range of critical skills such…

In this paper, we identify ways in which the learning of very young children can be supported by practitioners developing a schematic pedagogy which focuses on structures of children's thinking. First, we provide a critical overview of relevant literature on schemas and schematic approaches to pedagogy. We then outline an original study undertaken…

Play has an important role in various aspects of children's development. However, time for free play has declined substantially over the last decades. To date, few studies have focused on the relationship between opportunities for free play and children's social functioning. The aims of this study are to examine whether children´s free play is…