Jaan Valsiner

Bio: Jaan Valsiner is an academic researcher from Aalborg University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Cultural psychology & Dialogical self. The author has an hindex of 55, co-authored 384 publications receiving 12659 citations. Previous affiliations of Jaan Valsiner include University of Luxembourg & University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Parents' knowledge of children's competence, perceptions of risk and causes of child accidents, and residential satisfaction

Abstract: Parents' knowledge of children's competence, perceptions of risk and causes of child accidents, and residential satisfaction

Contextualizing Learning: How Activity Theories Can Change Our Conventional Research Practices in the Study of Development

Abstract: This volume has a strong ‘Dutch accent’ as it represents the careful scholarship on crucial issues in science that historically have emerged from the ‘Low Lands’. The book provides its readers with a multivoiced yet integrated look at the learning processes that is refreshing in its intellectual foci and international representation. The latter – the authors of the 20 chapters in the book come from 8 countries (The Netherlands, USA, UK, Germany, Brazil, Spain, Denmark, and Mexico) – is not surprising; the book is a result of the 2002 congress of the International Society for Research in Activity Theory (now known as ISCAR) in Amsterdam. However, books based on materials from large conferences usually lack intellectual depth and conceptual integration. Contemporary academia is moving from being an epistemic market to that of a yard sale of endless images from fancy power point presentations thrown at large audiences for the shortest periods of time. Hence a book with a clear orientation to providing in-depth coverage of the issues, theoretically oriented (yet open to practical concerns in research and education) and internationally representative – such as The Transformation of Learning is – constitutes a refreshing reading for any serious scholar. The first editor, Bert van Oers, sets the stage in his introduction of the book – in terms of elaboration of various perspectives that have emerged from the work of Lev Vygotsky. Among those, a central place is given to the philosophy of human activity that Alexey N. Leontiev developed in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1970s and that became known by a series of Russian publications in the early 1970s. Leontiev’s activity theory is a hybrid of the cultural-historical thought of Lev Vygotsky

Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. The emergence of learning activity as a historical form of human learning 3. The zone of proximal development as the basic category of expansive research 4. The instruments of expansion 5. Toward an expansive methodology 6. Epilogue.

Remembering. A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge (University Press) 1964.

Abstract: Part I. Experimental Studies: 2. Experiment in psychology 3. Experiments on perceiving III Experiments on imaging 4-8. Experiments on remembering: (a) The method of description (b) The method of repeated reproduction (c) The method of picture writing (d) The method of serial reproduction (e) The method of serial reproduction picture material 9. Perceiving, recognizing, remembering 10. A theory of remembering 11. Images and their functions 12. Meaning Part II. Remembering as a Study in Social Psychology: 13. Social psychology 14. Social psychology and the matter of recall 15. Social psychology and the manner of recall 16. Conventionalism 17. The notion of a collective unconscious 18. The basis of social recall 19. A summary and some conclusions.

Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again

Abstract: From the Publisher: The old opposition of matter versus mind stubbornly persists in the way we study mind and brain. In treating cognition as problem solving, Andy Clark suggests, we may often abstract too far from the very body and world in which our brains evolved to guide us. Whereas the mental has been treated as a realm that is distinct from the body and the world, Clark forcefully attests that a key to understanding brains is to see them as controllers of embodied activity. From this paradigm shift he advances the construction of a cognitive science of the embodied mind.