This book brings in the focus on the borders between different contexts that need to be crossed, in the process of education. Despite the considerable efforts of various groups of researchers all over the world, it does not seem that traditional educational psychology has succeeded in illuminating the complex issues involved in the school-family relationship. From a methodological perspective, there is no satisfactory explanation of the connection between representations and actual practice in educational contexts. Crossing Boundaries is an invitation to cultural psychology of educational processes to overcome the limits of existing educational psychology. Emphasising social locomotion and the dynamic processes, the book tries to capture the ambiguous richness of the transit from one context to another, of the symbolic perspective that accompanies the dialogue between family and school, of practices regulating the interstitial space between these different social systems. How do family and school fill, occupy, circulate, avoid or strategically use this space in between? What discourses and practices saturate this Border Zone and/or cross from one side to the other? Crossing Boundaries gathers contributions with the clear aim of documenting and analysing what happens at points of contact between family culture and scholastic/educational culture from the perspective of everyday life. This book is in itself an attempt to cross the border between the ""theorising on the borders"" (and how "the outside world" and "the others" are perceived from a certain point of view) and "the practices"" that characterises the school-home interaction.

This book explores the vibrant progress of research in the social development of thinking and learning. The notion of "the thinking space" has been proposed by Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont (2004) to designate the social and situated nature of thinking. This edited book gathers leading scholars in social and cultural approaches to learning and thinking who share such initial assumption, and have explored its implications in the fields of elementary and higher education, in science and literature, with a wide diversity of population, and also out of the classroom, in the psychologists' office or in adult's mutual teaching. This book offers a unique overview of a largely European tradition of scholarship retracing its roots in the post-piagetian and vygotskian heritage, it explores the many facets of this tradition and opens new horizons for future research. Doing so, it highlights the heuristic power of an approach that considers learning and thinking as an active, shared and situated endeavor.

This book brings in the focus on the borders between different contexts that need to be crossed, in the process of education. Despite the considerable efforts of various groups of researchers all over the world, it does not seem that traditional educational psychology has succeeded in illuminating the complex issues involved in the school-family relationship. From a methodological perspective, there is no satisfactory explanation of the connection between representations and actual practice in educational contexts. Crossing Boundaries is an invitation to cultural psychology of educational processes to overcome the limits of existing educational psychology. Emphasising social locomotion and the dynamic processes, the book tries to capture the ambiguous richness of the transit from one context to another, of the symbolic perspective that accompanies the dialogue between family and school, of practices regulating the interstitial space between these different social systems. How do family and school fill, occupy, circulate, avoid or strategically use this space in between? What discourses and practices saturate this Border Zone and/or cross from one side to the other? Crossing Boundaries gathers contributions with the clear aim of documenting and analysing what happens at points of contact between family culture and scholastic/educational culture from the perspective of everyday life. This book is in itself an attempt to cross the border between the ""theorising on the borders"" (and how "the outside world" and "the others" are perceived from a certain point of view) and "the practices"" that characterises the school-home interaction.