The telling of stories in moral education has a long and universal tradition. In the study of moral development, however, the uses and power of narrative in both forming and conveying a moral sense have been largely ignored. Mark Tappan and Lyn Brown argue that narrative is central to the study as well as to the teaching of morality, and that acknowledgment of authorship of moral choices, actions, and feelings marks the endpoint of the development of moral sensibility. Children's storytelling, they believe, creates authorship when the audience is responsive and the story told represents real experience. By presenting thoughtful and challenging evidence for the role of storytelling, these authors represent a perspective much needed in the field of moral development.

The narrative approach to the study of moral development is based on central theoretical assumptions about self that are described in this article. Careful attention to narrative yields an approach in which language plays a much larger role in structuring moral life, generating moral experience, and shaping a far more social kind of self than assumed by the cognitive-developmental approach. The narrative approach entails a move away from a paradigm of cognitive representations and internally held principles, in which the self is regarded as a disembodied, transcendental, epistemic subject, toward a paradigm of social construction and intersubjectively possible forms of discourse, in which selves are assumed to be embodied, relational, and thus fundamentally dialogical.

La tecnología digital, un aspecto influyente en el comportamiento de los estudiantes de una comunidad de práctica frente a la convivencia escolar Alumno:

In this paper, I argue that it is quite useful, both theoretically and empirically, to adopt a sociocultural approach to the study of moral development. This entails viewing 'moral functioning' as a form of mediated action, and moral development as the process by which persons gradually appropriate a variety of 'moral mediational means'. Mediated action entails two central elements: an 'agent', the person who is doing the acting, on the one hand, and 'cultural tools' or 'mediational means', the tools, means, or 'instruments', appropriated from the culture, and used by the agent to accomplish a given action, on the other. I make this argument drawing on recent work in sociocultural psychology, specifically the work of James Wertsch (1998). I also consider the work of both Carol Gilligan (1982) and Lawrence Kohlberg (1981Kohlberg ( , 1984 as illustrative examples, to show how their respective insights about moral functioning and the process of moral development can be interpreted from, and enriched by, a mediated action/socio-cultural perspective.Karen, a White college student (aged 18) attending a private university in New England, when asked to describe a real-life moral conflict or dilemma she has recently faced, talks about an approaching situation in which she and two of her room mates will have to decide whether or not to tell their fourth room mate, with whom no one gets along, that they do not want to share a room with her next year:Karen: It's not for a while yet, but I don't know how it's going to be resolved, because on the one hand, we really should say, 'yes, you can be roommates with us, and that is fine', but on the other hand, we don't get along, we argue and we fight…it's not a good situation. It would be much better for everyone, much happier, if she could find another place to live, but I don't know how you could say that. I haven't looked at this from my Kantian point of view, and I should probably consider it [smiles], but …Interviewer: What are the conflicts in this for you?Karen: The conflict is that I don't want to hurt her, we don't want to hurt her, but it will probably be me because I am kind of caught between the two. The others really don't want her and they don't care whether or not she is hurt or not. But I am afraid if we said 'we don't really want you to room with us' she is going to

In this paper I present an approach to understanding the dialogical self that considers the role that social, cultural and institutional dynamics of domination and subordination, and structures of power of privilege, play in the development of identity. To accomplish this I expand Penuel and Wertsch’s (1995) ‘mediated action’ approach to identity development to include a dialogical process of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) calls ‘ideological becoming’. Using the Autobiography of Malcolm X as an illustrative example, I argue that the development of Malcolm’s identity, via the process of ideological becoming, is influenced in profound ways by his experience of subordination and oppression, and his lack of power and privilege, growing up as a black man in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Thus the ‘ politics of ideological becoming’ refers to the degree to which the process of identity formation is necessarily different for persons from different social locations, who stand in different relationship to structures and systems of power, privilege and authority.

This article presents a reinterpretation of “internalized oppression” and “internalized domination,” not as internal, psychological qualities or characteristics, but rather as sociocultural phenomena—that is, as forms of “mediated action.” Mediated action entails two central elements: (1) an agent, the person who is doing the acting, and (2) cultural tools (or “mediational means”), the tools, means, or instruments appropriated from the culture and used by the agent to accomplish a given action. Such a reframing leads to a new conception of appropriated oppression and appropriated domination/ privilege, both of which have significant implications for the practice of critical pedagogy in general, and what has come to be called antioppressive education in particular.

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This essay provide an overview of the "interpretive" or "hermeneutic " approach to psychological research. It draws primarily on the work of Wilhelm Dilthey I), a philosopher and literary historian who is generally recognized as the 'Ifather" of the modern hermeneutic enterprise in the social and human sciences. Dilthty argued that the human world was suficiently different from the natural world that special methods were required for its study. Hermeneutics, the deliberate and systematic methodology of interpretation, was the approach Dilthey proposed for studying and understanding the human world. This essay summarizes Dilthey S vision of hermeneutics and considers his conception of the so-called hermeneutic circle, which characterizes the complex dynamics involved in the process of interpretation. It then illustrates Dilthey 's approach by interpreting a brief interview narrative using a method based on his work. It concludes with an exploration of some of the ethical implications of adopting a hermeneutic approach topsychological research.