Affiliates
- Charles Crook
- Jan Derry
- Yrjo Engestrom
- John Hardcastle
- Mariane Hedegaard
- Martin Hughes
- Gunther Kress
- Jay Lemke
- David Middleton
- Neil Mercer
- Michael Young
Charles Crook
Email: C.K.Crook@lboro.ac.uk
Research Interests:
Charles Crook did doctoral research at Cambridge University and postdoctoral research at Brown and Strathclyde universities. Following a period of lecturing in psychology at Durham, he moved to his present post of Reader in Psychology at Loughborough. His main academic concern has been child development, in particular, cultural theories of cognitive development. This has led to a special interest in the mediational role of technology in settings of teaching and learning.
Research Projects:
Learning Sites: Networked Resources and the Learning Community
Jan Derry
Email: j.derry@ioe.ac.uk
Research Interests:
The philosophical presuppositions of the post-Vygotskian research field and their implications for theories of mind and activity. The inter-relation of pedagogy and knowledge. Professional knowledge and judgment. Concept development. Philosophy of technology mediated learning.
Research Projects:
Currently writing a book on Vygotsky and Philosophy.
Yrjo Engestrom
Email: yrjo.engestrom@helsinki.fi
Research Interests:
Interested in cultural-historical activity theory and developmental work research in general. Currently, he focuses especially on co-configuration as a new way of organizing work, and expansive learning in multi-activity settings.
He is Professor of Adult Education and Director of the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at University of Helsinki. He is also Professor of Communication at University of California, San Diego, where he served as Director of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition from 1990 to 1995. He is Honorary Professor in the School of Education at University of Birmingham, UK.
He works within the framework of cultural-historical activity theory. He is known for his theory of expansive learning. He studies transformations in work and organizations, combining micro level analysis of discourse and interaction with historical analysis and modeling of organizations as activity systems working through developmental contradictions.
His research groups use intervention tools such as the Change Laboratory, inspired by Vygotsky’s method of dual stimulation, to facilitate and analyze the redesign of activity systems by practitioners.
Research Projects:
His current research is focused on health care organizations, a bank, and a telecommunications company striving toward new forms of co-configuration and knotworking.
John Hardcastle
Email: j.harcastle@ioe.ac.uk
Research Interests:
John Hardcastle lectures in English. Previously, he taught in a London secondary school. He has written about urban classrooms, culture, and diversity as well as sociocultural theory. Vygotsky's picture of mind has been a particular focus. He is currently researching in the history of post-war English teaching in London.
Research Projects:
Social Change and English: a study of three English departments 1945-65. A major, Leverhulme Trust-funded project lasting three years.
Postgraduate research interests and projects include:
the co-construction of meaning in culturally complex literature classrooms (in Japan); the role of professional memory in constructing versions of English: an oral history of English teaching in the seventies; an investigation of the social mediation of literary texts in an inner city classroom; a study of self-directed adolescent readers; looking into teachers' attitudes to talk in classrooms; A history of the London Association of Teachers of English (LATE): a study of teacher-led professional development in the post-war period; a study of Polish Schools in London.
Mariane Hedegaard
Email: Mariane.Hedegaard@psy.ku.dk
Research Interests and Projects:
Several intervention research projects about refugee and immigrant children's school conditions have been realised. The aim with the projects has been to nuance the understanding of immigrant and refuge children's problems. Immigrant children's learning and development has to be conceptualised in their complexity in relation to differences in cultural traditions and practice in institutions (school and home), that involve both caregivers and children's activies and values about school life, family life and future in the ‘new' societal context.
The focus in the published work has been on formation of personality through school teaching, i.e. formation of concepts, identity and motives. The research has involved children from Middle East in Danish schools, and Puerto Rican children in an afterschool project in New York City.
The interest with this research has been to formulate a multidimensional theory about children's learning and development that both considers the institutional conditions, the cultural practices of children's everyday life, children's conceptions as well as the parents, teachers and key persons conceptions about school life and future. In future research the aim is to study children's everyday life activies across home and school.
Martin Hughes
Email: Martin.Hughes@bris.ac.uk
Research Interests:
The learning of Mathematics; the relationship between home and school; homework.
Martin is currently Professor of Education and from 2000-2003 was Head of the Graduate School of Education. Previously he was Professor of Education at the University of Exeter.
Martin has researched and written on many aspects of children’s learning, with a particular focus on children learning mathematics and the relationship between home and school. He has recently finished an ESRC funded project on homework and its contribution to learning, and is currently director of the Home School Knowledge Exchange Project, funded under the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme. The project’s website can be found at www.home-school-learning.org.uk
In April 2005 Martin started a 3-year ESRC Professorial Fellowship on out-of-school learning.
Research Centre:
Psychology and Learning in Context (CPLiC)
Gunther Kress
Email: G.Kress@ioe.ac.uk
Jay Lemke
Email: jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu
Research Interests:
Jay Lemke (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Professor in the School of Education, Department of Educational Studies, at the University of Michigan and Co-Editor of the journal Critical Discourse Studies. Before coming to Michigan, he was Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the City University of New York Graduate Center and co-editor of Linguistics and Education. His research interests include science education, new learning technologies, multimedia semiotics, discourse analysis, and applications of complex systems theory to the study of social, cultural, and institutional change.
Research Projects:
Investigating Interactive Immersive Worlds (NSF Proposal 2005)
What can interactive immersive gameworlds and users' experiences in them tell us about learning with multimedia, critical multimedia literacies, learning across multiple timescales, and the design of effective educational learning environments?
David Middleton
Email: D.J.Middleton@iboro.ac.uk
Research Interests:
Work based learning in multi-agency service provision for children and young people; social practices of remembering and forgetting in organizational settings; parent - professional communication in neonatal intensive care.
Neil Mercer
Email: nmm31@cam.ac.uk
Research Interests:
Neil Mercer is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, having previously been Professor of Language and Communications at the Open University where he was also Director of the Centre for Language and Communications and Director of the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology. A psychologist with a special interest in the role of language in the classroom and the development of children's thinking, he has worked closely with local authorities and teachers in schools. One of the main outcomes has been the teaching approach called Thinking Together, which has been shown to improve children's skills in communicating, learning and reasoning. His research has dealt with education at different levels, from primary school and secondary school to university education, distance education and work-based training. It has included studies of the use of educational technology, with some projects generating and testing new educational software.
Research Projects:
Funded by ESRC. With Prof. Christine Howe, Prof. Ken Ruthven & Dr Keith Taber. The epiSTEMe project is one of several ESRC funded projects
designed to address concerns about uptake of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) courses through improving aspects of science
and mathematics education at school level. The Cambridge based epiSTEMe project is designed to bring together a range of ideas and approaches
well-established in the research literature, and show how they can be adopted in designing effective science and mathematics lessons at lower
secondary school level that can engage and interest children in these subjects as well as lead to successful curriculum learning.
Michael Young
Email: m_young@ioe.ac.uk
Research Interests:
He was originally appointed to the Institute as a lecturer in sociology of education and this remains the disciplinary basis of his research. His work draws on the sociology of knowledge with a specific focus on curriculum issues and the role of qualifications in educational reform. He also has an interest in mobile learning and the curriculum role of digital technologies, user generated knowledge and debates about genericism and generic skills.
Research Projects:
He is about to co-direct a project for the International Labour Organisation on the globalisation of National Qualification Frameworks.