Plenary Speakers

 Colette Daiute (Graduate Center, City University of New York, United States)

How context travels with displacement and development of children and youth

Abstract

Displacement and other consequences of violence and climate change disrupt life contexts. Research in interventions with children, youth, and communities forced to flee offers insights about how individuals and collectives engage physically and symbolically with relevant contexts – places, time, objects, and social worlds. Drawing on transnational studies in practices inspired by policies (across the Eurasia, the Americas, and globally via digital media), Daiute will draw on participation and analyses of a wide range of community interactions to consider how people use contexts to make sense of their plights. Findings show how young people, in particular, engage in environments – defining, deconstructing, and remaking contexts – in terms of their own needs and desires. The studies reveal several previously unexplored developmental mechanisms that advance theory. Daiute will invite discussion about how and why various dimensions of context matter.

Brief Biography

Colette Daiute Colette Daiute is Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was previously a professor at Harvard University. Her research and teaching focus on how young people and families living in situations of major sociopolitical disruption and change (such as migration, social exclusion, and regime change) use language, digital media, and community organizations to make sense of their situations, change their lives, and impact their societies. Recent book publications include Human Development and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press); International Perspectives on Youth Conflict and Development (Oxford University Press); and Narrative Inquiry: A Dynamic Approach (Sage Publications). Her articles related to this JPS conference theme appear in journals such as Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences; Human Development; Language and Culture; Qualitative Psychology; Cognitive Development, and Proceedings of the International Conference of Interactive Digital Narrative. Colette is a Member of the National Academy of Education honorific society and was appointed as Fulbright Specialist through 2026. For other publications, research, outreach, and keynote addresses, see http://colettedaiute.org.

Michèle Grossen (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)

A dialogical perspective on context and development

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Piagetian tradition, the notion of context has been a recurrent object of debate about its role in development and, more specifically, in the assessment of a child’s developmental level (or stage). First defined as an objective and external factor liable to be controlled, it gradually gave way to other definitions that have come to see it as inseparable from development and learning processes. This contribution aims at retracing the various conceptions of context that can be identified from the early post-Piagetian research to contemporary research based on a theoretical framework inspired both by sociocultural psychology and dialogism.

Brief Biography

Michèle Grossen  is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Drawing on sociocultural psychology and dialogism, her research focuses on social interactions and communication in various situations, more specifically in teaching-learning at school, but also in health education and psychotherapy. The notion of context with its various and evolving definitions links up her work on learning and development. She has worked internationally, in particular with P.Linell, I. Marková, A. Salazar Orvig

Kris D. Gutiérrez (University of California at Berkeley, United States)

Designing Developmental Ecologies: Mutual constitution and Learning as Movement

Abstract

This plenary address extends my previous work on designing developmental ecologies and how they have been sustained. Given the dramatic and dynamic sociopolitical, cultural, civic, and environmental shifts in the ecologies that currently constitute our daily lives, we need generative analytical frames that help us understand how developmental ecologies, their people and practices are created and sustained. Employing a utopian social design-based methodological approach, I present two cases of developmental ecologies— one educational and the other a community. I use the analytical frames of mutual constitution and “learning as movement” to illustrate how these transformative ecologies are designed and sustained. In this work ecologies are understood as unbounded, with interlocking linkages across human life mutually constituting their formation and resilience. In contrast to individual notions of resilience, ecological resilience in this work refers to the system’s ability to shape and adapt to change and transform while sustaining the social welfare, resources, and social futures of participants—i.e., sociocultural systems such as towns, communities, educational and other activity systems. The talk explores how analytic frame of mutual constitution helps us avoid the tendency to separate individuals and practices from one another and the activities in which they participate and help to co-construct. Further, the analytic frame of learning as movement brings attention to how learning occurs across multiple connected systems, to understand the role of collective learning and lived civics in the development of historical actors central to the develop sustainability of resilient ecologies. 

Brief Biography

Kris Gutierrez  is the Carol Liu Distinguished Professor at the Berkeley School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Faculty Assistant to the Vice Chancellor for Research, Berkeley.  Gutiérrez is a Learning Scientist and qualitative methodologist. Her research employs a social design-based utopian approach to examine learning in designed environments, with attention to culture, historicity, ecological resilience, and equity. She is Past President of the American Educational Research Association and in 2024 she received the AERA Distinguished contributions to Education Research, the premier AERA award. She also is a member of the National Academy of Education, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Fellow of the British Academy. Her research is published in journals such as Education Researcher, Journal of the Learning Sciences, Cognition & Instruction, Review of Research in Education, and Reading Research Quarterly. She also has published three edited volumes, including Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory (Cambridge University Press).

Roger Säljö (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)

The interdependence of learning, development, and context in different traditions

Abstract

Over the past decades, the relationship between learning and development has been conceptualized in very diverse ways. Depending on the way how learning and development are conceptualized by different theoretical traditions and their respective unit of analysis, the relationship between learning and development is defined on a continuum from two separate and essentially not related processes to the view on two interwoven processes that could not be studied independently. Increasing diversity of theoretical perspectives could lead to a fragmentation, but also it could provide grounds for an explicit discussion in a quest for a more integrated theoretical position. An overview of diverse manners in which learning and development are conceptualized in different traditions provides an opportunity for a reflection of different manifestation of learning in complex cultural, social, and institutional context and their implications in terms of development.

Brief Biography

Roger Säljö is Professor Emeritus at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, former President of EARLI (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction) with important contributions as chief editor or co-editor of scientific journals. He is a leading figure of European research on the discussed interdependencies between development and learning. His research, often in interdisciplinary settings, concerns learning, interaction, and human development from a sociocultural perspective. Much of his interdisciplinary work is related to issues of how people learn to use cultural tools and how they acquire competences and skills that are foundational to developing in a socially and technologically complex society.