This article addresses a challenge faced by those who study cultural variation in approaches to learning: how to characterize regularities of individuals’ approaches according to their cultural background. We argue against the common approach of assuming that regularities are static, and that general traits of individuals are attributable categorically to ethnic group membership. We suggest that a cultural-historical approach can be used to help move beyond this assumption by focusing researchers’ and practitioners’ attention on variations in individuals’ and groups’ histories of engagement in cultural practices because the variations reside not as traits of individuals or collections of individuals, but as proclivities of people with certain histories of engagement with specific cultural activities. Thus, individuals’ and groups’ experience in activities—not their traits—becomes the focus. Also, we note that cultural-historical work needs to devote more attention to researching regularities in the variations among cultural communities in order to bring these ideas to fruition.

This essay argues for a paradigm shift in what counts as learning and literacy education for youth. Two related constructs are emphasized: collective Third Space and sociocritical literacy. The construct of a collective Third Space builds on an existing body of research and can be viewed as a particular kind of zone of proximal development. The perspective taken here challenges some current definitions of the zone of proximal development. A sociocritical literacy historicizes everyday and institutional literacy practices and texts and reframes them as powerful tools oriented toward critical social thought. The theoretical constructs described in this article derive from an empirical case study of the Migrant Student Leadership Institute (MSLI) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Within the learning ecology of the MSLI, a collective Third Space is interactionally constituted, in which traditional conceptions of academic literacy and instruction for students from nondominant communities are contested and replaced with forms of literacy that privilege and are contingent upon students' sociohistorical lives, both proximally and distally. Within the MSLI, hybrid language practices; the conscious use of social theory, play, and imagination; and historicizing literacy practices link the past, the present, and an imagined future. [Note: The author discusses the research presented in this article in a podcast presented by the “Voice of Literacy”: http://www.voiceofliteracy.org/posts/28304]. 本文认为有需要转换一个新的思维典模，去看清楚青年所学习的，与所接受的读写教育，什么是最重要。本文着重两个相关的建构: 集体性第三空间与会批判式的读写能力。集体性第三空间这个建构，是从文献记载的研究中建立而成，它可以视作为一种特殊的最近发展区。这观点质疑一些最近发展区的流行定义。社会批判式的读写能力这个建构，把日常与制度上的读写惯例与篇章历史化，并给予新的框架作为指导批判性社会思想的总方针。本文所描述的理论建构是从一个洛杉矶加州大学移民学生领导能力协会(MSLI)的经验个案推究得出的。在这个移民学生领导能力协会的学习生态里，一个集体性第三空间因互动而产生。在这个集体性第三空间里，对学术性读写能力的传统看法，以及为弱势社群学生所提供的教学，均受质疑。取而代之是多样读写能力的看法。这些多样读写能力是因学生不同的實際生活情況的需要而有有选择性的差异，而这些實際生活情況是与学生的远距离与近距离的社會歷史息息相关。在这个移民学生领导能力协会里，混合的语言惯例、社會理論的自覺运用、 玩耍、想像、以及把读写惯例历史化的做法等都与过去、现在、和想象的将来连接起来。 [Podcast: http://www.voiceofliteracy.org/posts/28304]. Cet essai fait état d'un changement de paradigme relatif à ce qui est important en termes d'apprentissage et d'enseignement pour les jeunes. L'accent est mis sur deux concepts liés l'un à l'autre: le Troisième Espace collectif et le lettrisme sociocritique. Le concept de Troisième Espace collectif repose sur un corpus de recherche existant et peut être considéré comme une sorte de zone de prochain développement. La perspective adoptée ici met en question certaines définitions habituelles de la zone de prochain développement. Un lettrisme sociocritique historicise le quotidien, les pratiques de lettrisme institutionnelles et les écrits, et les restructure en tant que puissants outils orientés vers une pensée sociale et critique. Les concepts théoriques présentés dans cet essai sont issus d'une étude de cas empirique de l'« Institut de Direction des Etudiants Immigrants » (Migrant Student Leadership Institute ‐ MSLI) de l'université de Californie à Los Angeles. Au sein de l'écologie de l'appre...

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In this article, Kris Gutierrez, Betsy Rymes, and Joanne Larson demonstrate how power is constructed between the teacher and students. The authors identify the teacher's monologic script, one that potentially stifles dialogue and interaction and that reflects dominant cultural values, and the students' counterscripts, formed by those who do not comply with the teacher's view of appropriate participation. The authors then offer the possibility of a "third space" — a place where the two scripts intersect, creating the potential for authentic interaction to occur. Using an analysis of a specific classroom discourse, the authors demonstrate how, when such potential arises, the teacher and students quickly retreat to more comfortable scripted places. The authors encourage the join construction of a new sociocultural terrain, creating space for shifts in what counts as knowledge and knowledge representation.

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This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments—cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children—are organized around expansive notions of learning and mediated praxis and provide new tools and practices for envisioning new pedagogical arrangements, especially for students from nondominant communities. The authors examine one long-standing social design experiment, the UCLA UC Links/ Las Redes partnership and the work of one exemplary novice teacher to illustrate the importance of mediated, reflective practices in helping apprentice teachers develop a coherent and orienting framework for teaching and learning that has both heuristic and explanatory power. The authors illustrate how cultural historical concepts of learning and development and situated practice become the means for university students to gain distance and reflect on the beliefs and practices that have informed their understandings of teaching and to “rise to the concrete” practices of learning jointly and resonantly.

When Congress passed and the president signed the Education Sciences Reform Act in 2002, it called for scientifically based research that would "apply rigorous, systematic, and objective methodology to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to education activities and programs" p. 116). That same year, the National Research Council (2002) produced a report and Educational Researcher published a related article, "Scientific Culture and Education Research" (Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002), written by several of the report's authors. There is much with which we agree in both of the publications. However, there was and still remains a concern from the field about the narrow set of criteria used to define rigor. Erickson and Gutiérrez (2002) questioned the publications' call for a "scientific culture" that prescribed and relied primarily on "gold standard" random assignment studies of program effects as the remedy for the failures of education research to offer credible guidance for policy and practice. As we (Erickson & Gutiérrez, 2002) argued then, rigor in studies that aim to draw causal inferences about policies, programs, and practices requires in-depth qualitative research. In particular, scientifically rigorous research on what works in education requires sustained, direct, and systematic documentation of what takes place inside programs to document not only "what happens" (cf. National Research Council, 2002) but also how students and teachers change and adapt interventions in interactions with each other in relation to their dynamic local contexts.Today, we see even greater need for the field to take up broader questions about what works to include questions about a study's relevance to transforming practice. Studies of "what works" should be concerned with the specific mechanisms by which outcomes for teachers and students are accomplished within specific structural and ecological circumstances. Rigorous research on "what works" also must take up seriously the questions, "Who does the design and why?" (Engeström, 2011, p. 3), "How can practice and research inform one another?" "What are the unintended consequences of change?" and, importantly, "Who benefits?" (Erickson & Gutiérrez, 2002;Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010;O'Connor & Penuel, 2010). For us, consequential research on meaningful and equitable educational change requires a focus on persistent problems of practice, examined in their context of development, with attention to ecological resources and constraints, including why, how, and under what conditions programs and policies work. New Programs at the Institute of Education SciencesRecently, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education created new promising programs of research that address important problems of practice and provide the time to build relevance into the design of research and development projects. 1 These and other IES studies have begun to incorporate more direct observation into research on policies and programs, in ways that have generated...

It seems to me that American researchers are constantly seeking to explain how the child came to be what he is; we in the USSR are striving to discover not how the child came to be what he is, but how he can become what he not yet is. -A. N. Leontiev (cited in Cole, 1979) In this paper, we advance an approach to design research that is organized around a commitment to transforming the educational and social circumstances of members of non-dominant communities as a means of promoting social equity and learning. We refer to this approach as "social design experimentation" (Gutiérrez, 2008). This methodology developed over three decades in response to systems of education and learning that were failing immigrant youth, dual language learners, and youth from under-resourced schools and communities (Gutiérrez, Hunter, & Arzubiaga, 2009).