This book validates the prolific contribution of Dr. Vera John-Steiner to the social sciences and extends her scholarship, teaching, and mentoring to a new generation of thinkers. Compiled as a companion volume to her Selected Works, the text highlights this scholar's gifts to psychology, education, linguistics, and the arts through a collection of letters composed by students, colleagues, collaborators, and mentees. In keeping with Dr. John-Steiner's collaborative and innovative approach, the epistolary genre invites readers into a larger thought community through personal connections, biographical vignettes, and academic expansions of her work. In sharing her commitment to social justice, readers will find themselves compelled to join the collective initiatives established by this notable scholar during the past fifty years to achieve an equitable, enriched education for all.

This book validates the prolific contribution of Dr. Vera John-Steiner to the social sciences and extends her scholarship, teaching, and mentoring to a new generation of thinkers. Compiled as a companion volume to her Selected Works, the text highlights this scholar's gifts to psychology, education, linguistics, and the arts through a collection of letters composed by students, colleagues, collaborators, and mentees. In keeping with Dr. John-Steiner's collaborative and innovative approach, the epistolary genre invites readers into a larger thought community through personal connections, biographical vignettes, and academic expansions of her work. In sharing her commitment to social justice, readers will find themselves compelled to join the collective initiatives established by this notable scholar during the past fifty years to achieve an equitable, enriched education for all.

The second edition of Vygotsky and Creativity: A Cultural-historical Approach to Play, Meaning Making, and the Arts presents an enriched Vygotskian perspective on children's and adults' symbolic engagement with imagination, artistic expression, and multi-modal forms of expression. Artists, psychologists, and educators present their research and practice in different learning environments and analyze their findings with a reliance on cultural historical activity theory. The connections between creative expression, learning, teaching, and development are situated in a theoretical framework that emphasizes the social origins of individual development and the arts. The authors share a view of learning as an imaginative process rooted in our common need to communicate and transform individual experience through the cultural lifelines of the arts. Vygotsky and Creativity, Second Edition includes the additional work of internationally known Vygotskian scholars whose contributions enhance theoretical, expressive, and pedagogical views on creativity, play, and the social construction of meaning making.

How do young children learn to read, write, speak, and listen in two languages? How do emergent readers and writers make meaning within multilingual communities? This book examines the emergent biliteracy development of two kindergarteners growing up in a New Mexican neighborhood. Using ethnographic accounts, the book portrays the familial, communal, and academic contexts in which the children appropriated dual proficiencies in English and Spanish, and provides a window into the homes and lives of these working-class boys and the political, philosophical, and pedagogical world of their bilingual kindergarten. The complexity of emergent biliteracy as a sociocultural-semiotic process is elaborated through Vygotskian theory, the multiple voices of these children, and the action research of their teacher.