ARTICLE ANALYSIS

Article Analysis



Article Analysis

Part B

The classroom as a sociocultural context

As educator, I believe that research in education should be supported and promoted, particularly by certain approaches which can help teachers to understand children's different behaviors and to handle classroom practices more effectively. Pupils bring different kinds of sociocultural stimulus of their everyday lives outside of school into the classroom. Lev Vygotsky (1978) believes that parents, caregivers, peers and the culture at large are responsible for the development of higher order functions. So, we must take into consideration that any meanings that pupils adopt, come from interaction with others first.

These meanings derive firstly from their everyday lives outside school and the different situations according to their economic situation, their parent's education, and particularly the place where they live. Every child has its own experience, and this affects the stability of the classroom. For this reason, it is a big challenge for an educator to face students with different sociocultural background, and that is why it is very important to understand how the classroom can become a place for sociocultural reproduction, to help students develop their individual self with quality in collaboration with their classmates. This is a complex research question and is why researchers have to take into account many different factors to study the behavior of each pupil and to transform the classroom into a sociocultural source. The main issue that I have choosen for this assignment is based on implications of young people with learning disabilities.

Children in their daily life at school are exposed to different pedagogic methodologies, pedagogic cultures and other similar discussions (Gregory, Williams, Baker and Street, 2004), which is why there are differences in cognitive and learning styles. There is a need for genuine, rather than tokenistic, participation that allows children and young people to contribute to policy formation and decision-making processes. The danger is that participation forums simply become smokescreens that obscure real power-sharing and replace this with window dressing (Badham 2006), where the outcome is simply that children and young people participate in participation.

The psychological development of students is very important, particularly from the early age, so the educator has to help them to manage all the cultural, institutional, and historical contexts from the school, in combination with the knowledge and the stimulus that are constructed within their everyday lives outside of school. So, specialists have to work on the relationship between children's cultural resources and classroom pedagogic culture. Vygotsky (1986) mentions that, “Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological)”. For this reason, researchers have to work on different methodologies which arise from sociocultural theory, in order to help students to balance the quantity and the quality in their lives, because all these functions finally are reflected in their own psychology. Finally, researchers have to give attention not only to the ontological position of sociocultural theory, as ...