This Open Access Brief analyzes the dynamics in which children's selves emerge through their everyday activities of meaning construction, both in their relationships with family and within school education. It begins with a discussion of new psychological inquiries into children's selves and builds upon the innovative theoretical notion of the Presentational Self, developed by the author over the last decade. The book illustrates how the observation of children's meaning construction in their everyday lives becomes a starting point for theoretical and empirical inquiries into child development and gives a framework that promotes new inquiries in this area. The book describes the Presentational Self Theory as a sense of how the notion of the Self is being worked upon in everyday life encounters. Chapters feature in-depth analyses of exchanges between adults and children in the Japanese cultural context. Meaning-Making for Living will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in the fields of cognitive, social, developmental, educational, and cultural psychology.

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 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.