Culture Thought And Development

In this volume, the reader will find a host of fresh perspectives. Authors seek to reconceptualize problems, offering new frames for understanding relations between culture and human development. Contributors include scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, law, theology, anthropology, developmental psychology, neuro- and evolutionary psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and physics. To help organize the discussions, the volume is divided into three parts. Each part reflects an arena of current scholarly activity related to the analysis of culture, cognition, and development. The editors cast a wide but carefully crafted net in assembling contributions to this volume. Though the contributors span a wide range of disciplines, features common to the work include both clear departures from the polemics of nature-nurture debates and a clear focus on interacting systems in individuals' activities, leading to novel developmental processes. All accounts are efforts to mark new and productive paths for exploring intrinsic relations between culture and development.

In this volume, the reader will find a host of fresh perspectives. Authors seek to reconceptualize problems, offering new frames for understanding relations between culture and human development. Contributors include scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, law, theology, anthropology, developmental psychology, neuro- and evolutionary psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and physics. To help organize the discussions, the volume is divided into three parts. Each part reflects an arena of current scholarly activity related to the analysis of culture, cognition, and development. The editors cast a wide but carefully crafted net in assembling contributions to this volume. Though the contributors span a wide range of disciplines, features common to the work include both clear departures from the polemics of nature-nurture debates and a clear focus on interacting systems in individuals' activities, leading to novel developmental processes. All accounts are efforts to mark new and productive paths for exploring intrinsic relations between culture and development.

A Radical New Model for Unleashing Your Company’s Potential In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for—namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people’s impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company’s resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential. What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone—not just select “high potentials”—could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth? Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (and their collaborators) have found and studied such companies—Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means going beyond consigning “people development” to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations. An Everyone Culture dives deep into the worlds of three leading companies that embody this breakthrough approach. It reveals the design principles, concrete practices, and underlying science at the heart of DDOs—from their disciplined approach to giving feedback, to how they use meetings, to the distinctive way that managers and leaders define their roles. The authors then show readers how to build this developmental culture in their own organizations. This book demonstrates a whole new way of being at work. It suggests that the culture you create is your strategy—and that the key to success is developing everyone.

Drawing upon field studies conducted in 1978, 1980 and 2001 with the Oksapmin, a remote Papua New Guinea group, Geoffrey B. Saxe traces the emergence of new forms of numerical representations and ideas in the social history of the community. In traditional life, the Oksapmin used a counting system that makes use of twenty-seven parts of the body; there is no evidence that the group used arithmetic in prehistory. As practices of economic exchange and schooling have shifted, children and adults unwittingly reproduced and altered the system in order to solve new kinds of numerical and arithmetical problems, a process that has led to new forms of collective representations in the community. While Dr Saxe's focus is on the Oksapmin, the insights and general framework he provides are useful for understanding shifting representational forms and emerging cognitive functions in any human community.

In this deeply probing, intellectually challenging work, Dr. JaanValsiner lays the groundwork for a dynamic new cultural-historicalapproach to developmental psychology. He begins by deconstructingtraditional developmental theory, exposing the conceptual confusionand epistemological blind spots that he believes continue toundermine the scientific validity of its methodologies. Hedescribes the ways in which embedded cultural biases shapeinterventional goals and influence both the direction researchtakes and the ways in which research data are interpreted. And hesuggests ways in which researchers and clinicians can become moreaware of and transcend those biases. Dr. Valsiner then develops a hierarchical, systemic model thatportrays development as an open-ended, dialectical process. Centralto Valsiner's approach is the premise that, since each child isunique--as are his or her life conditions--deviations in functionor the rate of development from a prescribed norm are just aslikely to be constructive adaptations to changing environmentalpressures as symptoms of psychological disorder. Drawing uponsources as varied as linguistic philosophy, structuralanthropology, thermodynamics, and systems theory, as well as thework of many of the leading figures in twentieth-centurydevelopmental theory, Valsiner argues convincingly for an approachto developmental psychology mature enough to recognize thedifference between healthy variability and dysfunction. In later chapters the focus shifts from development in the abstractto the everyday challenges encountered by the developing child.Case histories illustrate the subtle interplay of cultural,physiological, and psychological factors in shaping childhoodbehavior. Called an "intellectual tour de force" by the Bulletin of theMenninger Clinic, Culture and the Development of Children's Actionis important reading for developmental psychologists, childpsychologists, and all child clinicians. "Of course, no science progresses in a linear fashion. It movesinterdependently with the society in which it is embedded, makinguse of the narrative forms in describing itself to its insiders andoutsiders. The rhetoric of scientists about their science istherefore necessarily inconsistent. Sciences are both socialinstitutions within a society and social organizations that attemptto build universal knowledge. It is a complicated task forpsychology to be both knowledge-constructing and self-reflexive atthe same time. Nevertheless, it is the latter kind of reflexivitythat guides the actual construction of knowledge." -- JaanValsiner "[This book] is a fascinating and important work that challengesmuch of contemporary developmental psychology. The Second Editionhas changed in a number of respects, and much new material has beenadded, but at root, Valsiner grapples with the question 'how shallwe understand development?' He continues to struggle also with whathe describes rather vividly as the 'epistemological windmills ofpsychology.' His challenge is summed up succinctly in two linesfrom a poem by T. S. Eliot: * Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? * Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" -- -- fromthe Foreword by Kevin Connolly

This book explores the role that arts and culture can play in supporting global international development. The book argues that arts and culture are fundamental to human development and can bring considerable positive results for helping to empower communities and provide new ways of looking at social transformation. Whilst most literature addresses culture in abstract terms, this book focuses on practice-based, collective, community-focused, sustainability-minded, and capacity-building examples of arts and development. The book draws on case studies from around the world, investigating the different ways practitioners are imagining or defining the role of arts and culture in Belize, Canada, China, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Kosovo, Malawi, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, the USA, and Western Sahara refugee camps in Algeria. The book highlights the importance of situated practice, asking what questions or concerns practitioners have and inviting a dialogic sharing of resources and possibilities across different contexts. Seeking to highlight practices and conversations outside normative frameworks of understanding, this book will be a breath of fresh air to practitioners, policy makers, students, and researchers from across the fields of global development, social work, art therapy, and visual and performing arts education.

Originally published: 1995. Paperback reissue, with a new preface by the author.

Discover why and how schools must become places where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted As educators, parents, and citizens, we must settle for nothing less than environments that bring out the best in people, take learning to the next level, allow for great discoveries, and propel both the individual and the group forward into a lifetime of learning. This is something all teachers want and all students deserve. In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author of Making Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture of thinking is more important to learning than any particular curriculum and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplish this by leveraging 8 cultural forces: expectations, language, time, modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, and environment. With the techniques and rich classroom vignettes throughout this book, Ritchhart shows that creating a culture of thinking is not about just adhering to a particular set of practices or a general expectation that people should be involved in thinking. A culture of thinking produces the feelings, energy, and even joy that can propel learning forward and motivate us to do what at times can be hard and challenging mental work.

Using recent research on development projects around the world, this book argues that culture has become an explicit tool and framework for development discourse and practice. Providing a theoretical and empirically informed critique, this informative book includes conceptual overviews and case studies on topics such as: development for indigenous people natural resource management social capital and global markets for Third World music post-apartheid South Africa cultural difference in the USA’s late capitalism. The editor concludes by evaluating the outcomes of development’s ‘cultural turn’, proposing a framework for future work in this field. By combining case studies from both ‘Third World’ and ‘First World’ countries, the book, ideal for those in the fields of geography, culture and development studies, raises innovative questions about the ‘transferability’ of notions of culture across the world, and the types of actors involved.