Acknowledging changes and the challenges ahead

We live in challenging times. Ongoing problems of social and ecological injustice – exacerbated by the climate crisis, unabashed neoliberalist greed, and the rise of racism and nationalisms across the globe – comprise a historical context in which the role of scientific and educational institutions, and democracy itself, confront an existential crisis. We cannot ignore our responsibilities to acknowledge and address the significance of these growing problems with all their intersecting dimensions. While this context is different from the one in which CHAT emerged and advanced internationally, as a broad, critical framework, CHAT theories are uniquely positioned to expect and anticipate change over time: in natural, historical, social, and cultural worlds, as well as in the scholarly world of concepts, theories, and praxis.

Our context demands that all scholarship take seriously its role both as positioned and as distinctive. CHAT theories offer various lenses that enable researchers across fields: 1) to overcome “blind spots” created by human anatomy, social institutions, and corporate structures (Tong, 2019); 2) to anticipate change, as well as the progressive and retrogressive consequences (Cole, 1996) of micro-level individual human actions and macro-level governmental and non-governmental policies, discourses, and intentions, and; 3) to critically examine the disproportionate traces of these consequences on the lives of people both directly and indirectly involved as issues of social and environmental inequity (Senier, Brown, Sostak, & Hanna, 2017). Perhaps most important, the lenses offered by CHAT theories remain grounded in dialectical relations that include the consequences of human action, both individual and institutional, and the adaptive and innovative opportunities that humans create through agentic projects with each other and the natural world, rather than as against each other and the world.

In this context, there are numerous projects; those that must be articulated, others that may be joined, and all are opportunities for contribution and participation that have become more urgent over the past few decades. How we step into these projects changes over time, as lives change, as social issues come to the fore, and as the desire to use one’s “weight” against specific injustices changes the ways individuals work together.

After seven years, Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur, Professor in Human Development, Learning, and Culture at the University of British Columbia, is ending her tenure with Mind, Culture, and Activity. As Jen steps into related projects both in and outside of academia, we acknowledge her great contribution to the journal. Jen’s tact, wisdom, friendliness, willingness to help settle difficult problems, and tremendous work ethic have benefitted the entire CHAT community. Her years of service have been a tangible force in producing and reproducing the CHAT tradition, and we have been incredibly lucky that Jen, busy with a thousand and one important things, devoted so much energy, thoughtfulness, perspicacity, and grace to the task of managing and developing the journal.

In her first coauthored editorial (Cole, Göncü, & Vadeboncoeur, 2013), the following commitments were made: (a) bridging between disciplines and fields; (b) ensuring theoretical and methodological groundedness; (c) exploring the ethical impact of our research; and (d) continuing intergenerational engagement. Looking back, all four commitments continue to guide our work as we continue publishing much needed quality interdisciplinary research led by both senior and younger scholars, including established frameworks with novel approaches, addressing new contexts of activity and practice, and balancing conceptual fidelity with conceptual play. Mindful of the difficult times we live in, we continue to build on these commitments with a fifth commitment: (e) re-generating our scholarship – concepts, theories, and praxis – by reviving and restoring it as a critical, transformative force to better meet current global challenges.

Anticipating the coming year, we are considering the following questions: What is, could be, and ought to be the role of CHAT theories and complementary approaches in addressing various challenges? How well equipped are our theories and methodologies for understanding and responding to these challenges, and how can we elaborate and/or reform them in useful and responsive ways? During 2018–2019, the co-editors and editorial board supported the development of a scholarly community that inquires into these questions as one collective project. The scholarly community self-identifies as Re-generating CHAT (www.re-generatingchat.com). In the months ahead, we expect to publish scholarly work stemming from these re-generative efforts, at the same time as we continue to support other forms of dialogue and discussion through the Cultural Praxis digital platform http://culturalpraxis.net/.

Meanwhile, in the current issue, we are proud to publish Part 2 of the special issue on Young people, digital mediation, and transformative agency, a theme aligned with the commitments noted previously. Guest editors Anu Kajamaa and Kristiina Kumpulainen provide an introduction for Part 2 of the special issue in a guest editorial.

This issue also includes three fascinating book reviews. In the first, Roger Säljö examines Marianne Hedegaard and Marilyn Fleer’s edited volume Children’s transitions in everyday life and institutions (2019, Bloomsbury Academic). The book is concerned with children’s transitions, for example, between home and institutional settings, between different countries, and between pre-school and school. Vygotsky’s theory of child development and Hedegaard’s model of transitions between activity settings constitute the theoretical premises of the chapters. As Säljö notes, the book contributes an empirical understanding of the practices children encounter in contemporary societies, the ways in which educational systems deal with potential problems of transitions, as well as the impact of early childhood education on families’ and children’s lives. He argues that the edited volume offers useful theoretical tools for understanding how children learn to live their lives in complex contemporary societies.

The second book review, by Javier González-Patiño and Moisés Esteban-Guitart, is a discussion of Affinity online: How connection and shared interest fuel learning by Mizuko Ito, Crystle Martin, Rachel Cody Pfister, Matthew H. Rafalow, Katie Salen, and Amanda Wortman (2018, New York University Press). Connected learning concerns youth’s pursuit of personal interests and the linking of what they learn in these pursuits to educational opportunities and González-Patiño and Esteban-Guitart note that the book makes an important contribution to understanding the role of online networks and communities in connected learning. However, they caution against treating youth’s interests as the ultimate end of education and argue, instead, that interests can serve as a point of departure in education to address social goals and the common good. They suggest that the broad concept of “identity” may provide a more dynamic, distributed, and transactional foundation than “interest” for research on connected learning.

Our third book review is Luca Tateo’s review-essay of Charles Underwood’s Mythos and voice: Displacement, learning, and agency in Odysseus’ World (2018, Lexington Books). It also shares the theme of transitions and development, but in different settings than the other two books. While Underwood conducts an analysis of Homer’s Odyssey to interpret the displacements, learning, and agency of the main characters of the epic narrative, Tateo draws on insights from cultural psychology to enrich and critique Underwood’s analysis. Both authors, Tateo and Underwood, consider the 2600-year-old cultural product a legitimate object of psychological analysis; a position that challenges contemporary psychology as overly concerned with the production of data from the present. Further, Tateo argues that Underwood’s book contributes to advancing understanding of the dialogical construction of identity in contemporary societies.

To conclude, we acknowledge the role that Mind, Culture, and Activity plays as both a place for community building and as part of larger related projects with potentially shared and/or overlapping goals and commitments. The capacity of Mind, Culture, and Activity, and its members, to change in relation to our changing worlds is consistent with the dialectical roots at the origin of these ideas. To the New Year, and to the changes we will make together!