ESEPSY2309 WholeUniversityCatalogue 2022

© 2022, the Authors
The Ohio State University Libraries Knowledge Bank

Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
The 2022 Whole University Catalogue
Summary:
Each chapter is a co-generated tool, created by the students and instructor of
ESEPSY2309, using visual storyboarding and scholarly written perspectives. The papers
were collaboratively edited in a Study Hall activity in the last five weeks of class.
Index
Introduction....................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1: Vygotsky....................................................................................................27
Chapter 2: Piaget.........................................................................................................48
Chapter 3: Special Education.....................................................................................70
Chapter 4: Social and cultural factors.......................................................................88
Chapter 5: Personality and sense of self................................................................107
Conclusion................................................................................................................128
Cybernetic Explorations Tilak 1
Cybernetic explorations of educational theory and practice:

Conversation theory and the 2022 Whole University Catalogue
Shantanu Tilak
ABSTRACT
In this three-part research-oriented introduction to this book, I lay out how Gordon
Pask’s conversation theory was used by undergraduate students and their instructor
participating in an Educational Psychology (ESEPSY2309) seminar to iteratively amplify
collaboration and confidence in the understanding mechanisms of teaching and learning
as both learners and future teachers in a liminal Third Space or Zone of Proximal
Development. This reflexive process, where preservice teachers in their undergraduate
degree learnt to teach and explore the boundaries between being a student and a
practitioner, and engaged in participatory action research to model the classroom based
on their needs and preferences, led to the co-authoring of the 2022 Whole University
Catalogue by the 29 students and their instructor. The text, containing visual
storyboards and scholarly perspectives compiled from student assignments, is a tool
relying on evidence-based sources created by students in preservice teacher training.
The text may be used by other preservice and in service educators to develop a
situated understanding of learning and development and inform practices they may
implement in their own classrooms in the 21st century. The first part of this chapter
introduces a second-order cybernetic framework to curriculum design, influenced by the
ideas of Gordon Pask, and describes how conversation theory was utilized to amplify
collaborative agency in the technology-assisted ESEPSY2309 classroom. The second
part describes the syllabus for ESEPSY2309 and summarizes the chapters of the 2022
Whole University Catalogue that we collectively compiled. In the third part, I describe
the implications that our approach has for practices that may be used to educate
preservice teachers in educational theory and practice.
Keywords: cybernetics, curriculum design, Gordon Pask, whole earth catalogue, visual
storytelling
INTRODUCTION
The quandary of designing engaging curricula lies in whether a prescribed approach
designed based on concrete goals always meets the emergent needs of students. While
backward design involves creating such packets or curricula for students to learn from,
participatory design takes instructional materials designed using such an approach and
expands upon them based on the emerging needs of students (Tilak et al.,2022a;
2022b). When the classroom is treated as a system, the sole use of backward design
may constitute an approach involving curriculum creation, implementation and

evaluation in a more or less linear fashion (Figure 1). However, when backward design
is fused with a pragmatic approach, there is scope to use insights achieved from an
understanding of the iteratively emergent needs of students to (re)design syllabi, to
meet students where they are. Scott (2014) suggests that these two approaches, that
involve using a pattern recognition driven approach to curriculum design, and an
emergent, human-centered design framework reflect the ideas of first and second-order
cybernetics. When students in this equation are preservice teachers, using these
approaches in tandem as an instructor to create student-teacher partnerships to
modulate the quality and nature of a curriculum may help future teachers in training
understand how to navigate the dynamic currents that emerge when navigating the river
of instructional practices in diverse classroom environments. It may allow them to
envision how to create a cybernetically compliant classroom system that is highly
reactive to the diverse ongoing needs of groups of learners.
Cybernetics is a transdiscipline operating within and at the boundaries between fields,
that provides explanations about how complex systems (brains, organisms, societies,
and even machines) engage in goal-oriented behavior to adapt to their environment
(Wiener, 1961). While the purpose of first-order cybernetics was to observe systems in
a detached manner (much like curriculum designers who may choose to use backward
design to prescribe approaches for use), second-order cybernetics, which emerged in
its nascent form from the highly interdisciplinary discussions at the Macy Conferences
on Cybernetics, enabled an understanding of living and machine systems as they
reacted to the vicissitudes of social and cultural environments. Anthropologists such as
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson shared their work on the cultural nuances of
Balinese and Aztec languages, suggesting that following networked activity in an
ongoing manner could produce a nuanced understanding of goal-oriented human
development and evolution (Pias, 2016; Tilak et al., 2022).
British cyberneticians such as Gordon Pask and Stafford Beer extended the possibilities
of second-order cybernetics (Pickering, 2002) through their investigations of educational
and industrial technologies, and their applications to augment human learning and
decision making (Pickering, 2010). Initially experimenting on biological computers
(trying to understand whether pond ecosystems and mosquito larvae could create
prototypes that replicated neural activity) in the 1950s, these scholars realized that
creating machine systems for detached observation only presented ideas about a pre-
cognitive mind, rather than one that creates and constructs meaning through natural
language and metaphor. Pask’s interest in educational psychology and computing led
him to investigate the parameters to foster productive concept development through
human-human, human-machine, and machine-machine interaction. Pask’s first
theorem, which provides a systems-driven metaphor to operationalize Vygotsky’s
approach to collaborative learning, shows potential to reveal how to create student-
centered technology-assisted classrooms. In this first theorem, which formed the
groundwork for much of Conversation Theory, Pask suggested:
If a system is legitimately said to teach, then it must be able to learn from

its student who may reverse the roles to play at teacher.” (Pask, 1972,
p.243)
Electrical Engineer, physicist and epistemologist Heinz von Foerster used this theorem
to craft a course in heuristics, offered to students in the electrical engineering and
literature departments at the University of Illinois, along with musician Herbert Brün and
biologist Humberto Maturana (Scott, 2011). In von Foerster’s classroom system,
students not only learnt about theoretical concepts from instructors related to human
decision-making and cognitive schematization, but also became experts/researchers
engaging in deep project-based inquiry about topics they were interested in,
constructing free verse poetry (for an example, Pogofsky, 1969, p.19 in von Foerster’s
1969 Whole University Catalog, which is the first of four texts produced by the classes
von Foerster led. Others include the 1970 Ecological Source Book, Metagames in 1972,
and finally, Cybernetics of Cybernetics in 1974; Dubberly & Pangaro, 2015), art and
manuscripts/essays in collaboration with the instructors and peers that could be viewed
by others to better understand heuristics. The first section of the class, offered between
1968-1969 to 115 students became a physical manifestation of the parameters set out
by Pask for an effective student-centered classroom where moments of excellence
emerge through organic, non-hierarchical collaboration.
The ideas developed in the four sections of the class emerged on an iterative basis,
leading to the gradual construction of the objective to write a co-authored book as a
project-based outcome, that was stored in the University of Illinois Library at Urbana.
Such an approach lies within a participatory design framework (Scott, 2014), where the
ongoing needs and preferences of agents in the classroom are decoded through
conversational processes (Pangaro, 2008), and actively considered as a cue to
construct specific activities and pedagogical techniques from the ground up. Much like
conversation theory becomes an apt way to expose the cognitive mechanisms of the
use of computer systems or even human to human conversation, it also becomes a
framework that can be used to (re)design learning experiences mediated by educational
technologies through evolving conversations between designers and users, or teachers
and students. Students from both the Electrical Engineering and Literature departments
at Illinois-Urbana were able to understand how to engage in systems research driven by
both affect and logic (considered to be facilitative of higher order thinking within both
Paskian and Vygotskian models) within a common goal (von Foerster, 1969), across the
boundaries of their disciplines.
Here, we slightly adapt the structure of the syllabus offered by von Foerster in the age
of the Internet through a 14-week course in educational psychology undertaken by
preservice teachers specializing in varied developmental levels and subject domains,
designed using a conversation theory (Tilak et al., 2022; Tilak & Glassman, 2022)
framework. The syllabus offers an Information Age mirror to von Foerster’s initial
approach (Dubberly & Pangaro, 2015) using a mixture of social media tools (Reddit),
learning management systems (specifically Instructure), cloud-based technologies

(Google Slides and Jamboards, Microsoft Teams), and collaborative learning design.
We employed Reddit live-chats preceding lectures to discuss prompts related to daily
topics, semester-long group-based curriculum design activities, visual storyboarding
and paper assignments that culminated in collaborative co-authoring activities (on
Teams) leading to the production of the 2022 Whole University Catalogue, and a final
group-level teachback task involving recording a podcast conducted to interview a
teacher, or instructing the class in a topic chosen from assigned course readings. The
co-authoring activity culminating in the Catalogue was iteratively established as a
project-based goal of the class mid-semester, based on a collective evaluation and
compilation of assignment artefacts into five chapters focused on situated cognition
through the lens of Piaget and Vygotsky, and social/personal factors in learning and
development. Owing to the emergent, participatory nature of assignments and activities,
I situate the design framework within conversation theory (Pask, 1976; Manning, in
press) to expose the mechanisms via which the instructor and students modulated
classroom activities based on concrete student-teacher partnerships to understand the
best course of action (Pangaro, 2008) for the semester as classes progressed.
This introductory chapter to the 2022 Whole University Catalogue is divided into three
parts. I describe the methodology jointly used by the students and the instructor to
“construct” the class over 14 weeks, summarize the five articles in the book, and
describe the implications arising from our approach to curriculum design. In the first
part, I describe the Paskian (1976) cybernetic framework used to design our section of
ESEPSY2309, which expands the approach that von Foerster and colleagues used to
design the cross-disciplinary heuristics course at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign. In the second part, I describe the syllabus for our class, based on
educational theory and practice, augmented by an online community on Reddit, an
iteratively constructed co-authoring activity, multimodal assignments, group work, and
teach back tasks. In the third part, I describe the implications of our approach for
preservice teacher training, and how it may enable students who are teachers in training
to tread between both the sides of their identities as teachers and students, to capture
their own view of “The Whole Earth”.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
As I have described, the curricular model through which the 2022 Whole University
Catalogue emerged was loosely based on the design framework used by von Foerster
and his collaborators to teach their heuristics course, guided by the nascent postulates
of what later came to be known as conversation theory. In this section, I place our
curriculum within the principles of CT and describe how ESEPSY2309 adopted a similar
constructivist model of classroom activity. I tie together the theoretical framework in the
context of ESEPSY2309 by explaining how multimodal expression through scholarly
papers and storyboards enabled preservice teachers to develop understandings of
educational practice as scientific and everyday concepts (Gutierrez, 2008; Glassman et

al., 2022) through written and artistic expression. I believe this process enabled
preservice teachers to not only learn about teaching and learning, but also understand
how the practices they use and techniques they may develop as teachers in training
and future teachers may be reappropriated by other aspiring teachers. The 2022 Whole
University Catalogue was named as such owing to the significance of the Whole Earth
Catalogue (Danitz & Zelov, 1994), which was named by Stewart Brand and colleagues
as they pondered how the Earth looked from the other side of the moon, using it as a
metaphor for curiosity and the search for complete information. The purpose of the 2022
Whole University Catalogue is to make future practitioners in their undergraduate
degrees view the “other side of the world” in the context of their careers, and malleably
dart back and forth across the bridge between being a student and learner to gain this
“whole picture”.
Conversation theory
At the First National Conference on Self Referential Systems, Gordon Pask expanded
biologist Humberto Maturana’s ideas to incorporate an understanding of psychosocial
processes into his idea of biological cognition (Scott, 2004). Pask suggested that while
biological systems (brain-body processors or tools that had a tangible spatio-temporal
location called M-individuals) regulated their internal states by responding
autopoietically to the environment, psychological variables or P-individuals could self-
preserve or change iteratively, as observers of an unfolding external environment react
to it.
Conversation theory, which relies on the nomenclature of the P- and M-individual,
expands Pask’s (1972) first theorem, and suggests that students and teachers can
engage in learning aided by computers if the technology-assisted environment provides
opportunities for each agent to become both a novice and expert, and reappropriate
ideas learnt from content through the lens of varied experiences.
In a technology-assisted environment, the chunks of metal making up computers, and
the living agents (students) become M-individuals. The ideas and verbal/demonstrative
cues exchanged by them via the mediating tools used become P-individuals shared
between these agents. Per a distributed conception of the ZPD, which treats it as an
active state and process at the intersection of scientific and everyday concepts (see
Mason et al., 2022; Smagorinsky, 2018; Tilak & Glassman, 2022) such opportunities to
exchange ideas and create new approaches satisfy the conditions of Pask’s first
theorem.
Conversation theory provides a detailed overview of how groups of P- and M-individuals
reach shared understandings through deductive chains where they begin to perceive
one another’s ideas and actions at a deeper level (Pask, 1975; 1976). M-individuals can
engage in several psychosocial activities, or in one shared activity too.
Figure 1
M- and P- individuals (see Tilak & Glassman, 2022 for a detailed explanation).
Pask suggests that conversations can comprise demonstrative (L0) and conceptual (L1)
levels of cues. Each agent can either provide an explanation or operate upon a
hypothesis presented to them; this leads to the preservation or evolution of standpoints
in case of disagreement and agreement, respectively.
As agents in conversations begin to understand the analogies and standpoints of
others, and their possible actions, they develop stronger ties and possibilities for
cohesive collaboration (Tilak & Glassman, 2022). Exploring these ties by encouraging
collaboration in varied configurations and understanding student preferences through
teacher-student partnerships on an ongoing basis can enable a strengthening of ties
with time, and the pragmatic creation of moments of excellence based on an iterative
design process.
Figure 2
Exchanging conceptual (L1) and demonstrative (L0) cues.
The goal would be to explore the quality of all possible models of interaction between n
agents within a system to try and produce deeper shared understandings through the
exchange of conceptual and demonstrative cues. I use the notation S to indicate this
total value of possible ties that could be initiated for n agents.
S=n(n-3/2) + n
Here, the formula indicates the sum of the number of diagonals in a polygonal
configuration and the number of sides (see Figure 3). This idea of exploring all possible
interactions and their quality is the basis of Stafford Beer’s (1993) team syntegrity
model, which looks at the optimal network ties in group work and ways to create
moments of excellence from them. I suggest that Beer’s approach, which relies on
icosahedral structures visualizing information flows can be reappropriated for use in
social science research using technologies such as RStudio and packages such as
igraph at varying levels of complexity. Randomization of group ties (Rand et al., 2011;
Tilak et al., 2022a; Tilak et al., 2022b) to attempt to explore “all possible models”
(Ashby, 1956) of collaboration operationalizes these cross currents between Pask and
Beer’s theories to spur an ongoing understanding of how to design collaborative
learning.
Figure 3
Edges in networks of n agents.
In this equation, learning tools and technologies act as mediating tools with certain
affordances (Jeong & Hmelo-Silver, 2016) that can be modulated to suit the learning
environment. In the next section, I describe our constructivist technology-assisted model
designed in an attempt to amplify collaborative interaction and reflexive thinking about

the boundaries between being a preservice student teacher and stepping into one’s
future career.
A constructivist classroom model: Social media and collaborative projects
Gordon Pask (1976, p.19-20, p. 352-356) is known to have heavily relied on Vygotskian
approaches to learning as he crafted a formal model to understand the quality and
potential for concept development in evolving conversations. Action on the social world,
mediated by tools and technologies supporting collaboration and concept development
formed the smallest unit of analysis or observable aspect of learning processes in
Pask’s model (Tilak & Glassman, 2022). Physical bodies/computers become M-
individuals (mechanical), and their psychosocial interactions (affect, cognition,
behavioral cues) become P-individuals (psychological). Agents in conversation
exchange common ideas and can engage in concurrent psychosocial processes as
well. This means action/demonstration/elaboration and cognitive development are
cyclically linked, leading to evolution/self-preservation of ideas of individual.
In our classroom, we effected such collaboration, that sparks ongoing discourse and
practical work in the ESEPSY2309 classroom by playing a game of musical chairs in
the second week of class, to randomize the class into six groups of a maximum of five
members each that would sit together and do their class activities and final projects
together. Five groups of five, and one group of four was formed. As Tilak et al. (2022)
and Rand et al. (2011) suggest, humans in educational and simulated/gamified or
classroom environments respectively amplify their potential for stable collaboration
when all possible ties in the network are experimented with. Experimenting with these
possibilities for multiagent collaboration facilitates a journey towards higher order
thinking, at the crossroads of Beer’s Team syntegrity model which uses icosahedrons to
visualize collaboration, and Pask’s approach to cybernetics; investigating network ties
and the nature of conceptual and demonstrative output arising from interactions.
The model that explores all possible interactions between the instructor and 29 students
would be a fully chorded 30-sided polygon (with 435 possible interactions), or
tricontagon (Figure 4). I rely on the conventions of network analysis to showcase this
model owing to our reliance on a fusion of Beer’s and Pask’s approaches, rather than
using an icosahedral structure for the purpose of this paper. This is only the ideal model
I propose, and the nature of this book only serves as a physical proxy to show that the
outcomes of our attempt in achieving this model through the participatory design
approach culminated in a comprehensively edited co-authored compilation of
manuscripts, live-chatting and teachback activities. Data has not been used in this
participatory experiment since both the students and instructor become participant
observers of the same environment, acting as students, teachers, and researchers all at
the same time. However, the environment was designed and (re)designed to ensure
that a journey towards this ideal model was attempted in good faith.
Figure 4
Tricontagonal classroom network model for all 30 individuals.
Group randomization (Rand et al., 2011; Tilak et al., 2022a; Tilak et al., 2022b) at the
beginning of the semester allowed one such avenue for concept development to
emerge, as it allowed small pods of up to five students to develop bonds (with the
maximum being 10 connections between 5 agents, see Figure 5) over the semester
strong enough to trust each other to implement a teach back task or interview a teacher
and bring back pertinent insights. The live-chat, conducted within a private subreddit
created for the class (r/psychperspectives) formed one more modelling environment
(Pask, 1975) that amplified the variety of interactions between all 30 human agents in
the classroom, by offering a whole-group level space to exchange ideas and journey
towards a tricontagonal configuration in the first 15 minutes of the lecture, answering a
controversial prompt arguing about the topic of the week. Reddit was chosen as the
platform for discussions firstly owing to its capacity for private communities; our
discussions involved sharing sensitive information about past and present learning
experiences as students and preservice teachers, requiring confidentiality.
Secondly, Reddit’s live-chat feature enabled efficient implementation of an “ongoing
discussion” (Tilak et al., 2022a; 2022b) where students viewed a projected live-stream
in the physical classroom and respond to messages from others as they emerged, in
real-time, as opposed to posting to a static blog.
Figure 5
Within group ties for each of the five work pods.
Further opportunities for distributed interaction were entertained through group activities
based on designing lesson plans and pinpointing best teaching practices to account for
students’ racial/ethnic identities, gender/sexual identity, and their other individual
differences (Figure 6). These ideas were shared by the groups to the instructor via
cloud-based tools like Google Docs or Jamboard, and also discussed in the whole class
setting.
The instructor often invited students to engage in whole group discussions during
lectures, and also invited a guest speaker to participate in a live-chat about the use of
educational technologies, highlighting how varied opportunities for the formation of
collaborative ties between students were entertained both within and across groups.
Figure 6
Group activities and sharing out.
Later in the semester, the groups also engaged in two jigsaw activities (see Law, 2011
for an example of its use to teach elementary schoolers), wherein an expert (a different
student, each time) was chosen from each group creating application-based lesson
plans by viewing state-level educational standards to peruse through the ideas of the
other groups and discuss how techniques used by other groups could find application in
their own lessons. The experts then shared their findings with the whole class. This
further amplified the possible ties that could be engaged, with the agency of 12 of the 29
students being driven towards collaboration with the other groups.
Through this process, via which the 29 students collaborated in a whole group live
stream environment, interacted in pods of five with the instructor, and via which 12
experts internalized the ideas created by others to add to their own group’s thinking, the
potential to explore as many feasible ties within a fully chorded tricontagonal network
within 15 weeks were entertained. As these possibilities emerged, agents could show
higher potential to become more aware of the possible thoughts and actions of other
agents. Students could more deeply understand the practices that they and others
gravitate towards, reappropriate the concepts created by others to curate new

trajectories to explore the boundaries between being a student and a future teacher,
and develop resources for other teachers to use.
Shared awareness is an important part of the metacognitive aspects of conversation
theory, which suggest that systems (living or machine) may be considered “intelligent”
when they are able to communicate in metaphors and understand each other’s cultural
experiences that led to the development of certain standpoints (Pask, 1972). Group-
based work wherein agents deepened their understandings of the standpoints each and
every peer could take amplified the possibility for collaboration through varied
configurations of group activity in the classroom.
Students were able to use the insights collectively developed in the live-chats to further
discuss their ideas in the following lectures, and to add nuance to their application-
based group tasks conducted each session to build curricula or suggest practices to
account for individual/group differences. In-class activities related to curriculum design
were intentionally designed to model the final teach back task wherein students could
instruct the class in a topic of their choice from the textbook. Questions asked to
students to share their insights from group work modeled possible podcast interview
questions that groups could use while doing their finals if they chose to interview a
teacher. The final assignments (either a podcast or mock lesson) were designed as
teach back tasks based on the nature of Pask’s (1975) findings from his experiments
using learning technologies, which suggest that teaching back concepts to test
understanding through demonstratively and conceptually oriented tasks is more
effective than traditional recall/test-based tasks.
Two smaller assignments were also assigned to the class to generate multimodal
artefacts related topics from two units in the semester, presented as either scholarly
papers or illustrated storyboards. In the next section, I describe these two assignments,
and showcase how the Unit 1 assignment became the fuel for composing the 2022
Whole University Catalogue.
Visual storytelling & writing as multimodal tools to see the “Whole Earth”
Upon engaging in collaborative live-chats, reviewing topics through lectures, and
assigned reading, and engaging in application-based activities focused on lesson
planning, students deepened their knowledge of the 15 chapters in the textbook as the
semester passed. Two smaller unit wise assignments were assigned based on the first
two units in the textbook, due in Week 7 and Week 12. This was called a Unit 1 or 2
multimodal artefact assignment, as students were given the choice to express
themselves through a scholarly paper citing well sourced academic findings, or an
illustrated storyboard of at least ten frames.
These assignments would become ways for students in ESEPSY2309 to create
multimodal representations of how they view educational theory and practice, that can
be shared with other prospective practitioners to test in their own classrooms and
explore new scientifically vetted ways to engage their students. The creation of resource
pools that can guide the creation and implementation of best practices for varied
contexts is an avenue often taken up by digitally savvy principals and teachers too
(Miller et al., 2022; Sterett & Richardson, 2020). The preservice teachers creating these
artefacts were able to tread back and forth across a bridge lying between their identities
as in-service teachers (planning future lessons), and students learning the art of
teaching. Those writing papers expressed scientific concepts in their ideas, while those
choosing to produce illustrations reappropriated ideas learnt in class to produce
everyday representations of human activity and learning emblematic of classroom
concepts. Students thus reappropriated scientific and everyday concepts through the
lens of their own experiences; an important part of learning within Vygotsky’s
sociocultural framework, which deeply influenced the principles of conversation theory.
We cover the idea of learning through the navigation of the intersections between
scientific and everyday concepts more deeply in the first chapter of this book (Mason et
al., 2022).
In Week 7, hot on the heels of the deadline, the instructor and class discussed the
provision of feedback for the Unit 1 assignments. There was an even split of
storyboards and scholarly papers, with some requesting ongoing feedback for the
assignment. This led the instructor to institute a fluid deadline across three days
(Monday-Wednesday), in line with the principles of mastery-oriented feedback to help
students iteratively improve their understandings through partnerships with an instructor
(Urdan & Kaplan, 2020). Students sending their assignments within this period could
accrue feedback from the instructor to improve their work. This iterative process of
student-instructor partnerships to review assignments in an ongoing manner to help
students more deeply understand where their work could use improvement, enabled the
creation of nuanced textual arguments and visual illustrations depicting the applications
of educational theory to practice. Mastery-based learning (Ormrod et al., 2020) that
fosters deeper understanding and interest has been linked to higher levels of student
engagement.
Upon seeing the quality of the Unit 1 submissions, reading them over Weeks 8 and 9,
and realizing the potential to compile the storyboards and papers into five larger
manuscripts, the instructor proposed the idea of co-authoring a book to the class, much
like in von Foerster’s heuristics course that focused on the mechanisms guiding human
decision-making (Dubberly & Pangaro, 2015). The instructor suggested that the class
could gather in groups weekly to collectively compile the assignments into chapters,
thus engaging in another round of reappropriation of scientific and everyday concepts in
the papers and illustrations, to create cohesive scholarly output for both practitioners
and researchers to refer to. Prior to this conversation in class, which occurred around a
week after Unit 1 assignments were received, the class engaged in live-chats on Reddit
for the first 15-minutes on both the bi-weekly Monday and Wednesday sessions.
Entertaining the possibility to co-author the 2022 Whole University Catalogue led to a
collective, democratic, and anonymous vote using a ballot system to decide whether to
maintain the bi-weekly live-chat or replace it with a Study Hall session to edit the papers
and storyboards into scholarly manuscripts covering well-defined topics pertaining to
situated cognition and individual/group differences in learning. The class reached a
stalemate, with an even spread of votes for both modalities. This led one student to
exclaim “Let’s do both!” The class then unanimously agreed to conduct live-chats on
Monday’s and Study Hall on Wednesdays for the remaining 5 weeks of lectures, before
final presentation sessions came around in the last week of class.
A collective process of reworking assignments and providing feedback led to the
spontaneous emergence of the decision to author the Catalogue, falling within the
pragmatic, participatory nature of a conversation theory framework (Pask, 1976; Tilak &
Glassman, 2022), where evolving conversations lead to an understanding of the
parameters that may produce shared cultural understandings between agents engaging
in problem-solving.
METHOD
Our class used a radical participatory action research method (Glassman & Erdem,
2014; Tilak et al., 2022a; Tilak et al., 2022b) in the co-creation of this book, which was
carried out as the instructor and students explored fifteen chapters of assigned reading
spread over three units related to educational theory and practice, engaged in live-chats
and group-based lesson planning activities, and compiled papers relying on ideas from
the first five chapters. The 30 authors of this book are both researchers, and
participants in this design experiment. Twenty-nine students (co-authors of this
catalogue), who are navigating their preservice teaching careers with the instructor and
author of this paper, became both learners and researchers investigating how to apply
educational theory to practice, and creating scholarly multimodal projects of
understanding.
The group work, lively Reddit live-streams, and an iterative, feedback-driven evaluation
of assignments led to the consensus to co-author a book based on the assignments
received in Unit 1, which covered theories of situated cognition, and the role of
individual and group differences in designing learning environments. While the ideal
objective was to produce a chorded tricontagonal model of collaboration, the
participatory, design-based model of this paper only summarizes how a journey towards
this ideal model was explored through a mosaic of group activities guided by in-person
and computer-supported learning. The culminating text created by undergraduate
students and the instructor of ESEPSY2309 is a physical representation of this
participatory journey.
Setting & Tools

ESEPSY2309 is a preservice teacher education class offered to undergraduate
students at The Ohio State University. The class is an important part of the
requirements for Ohio’s teaching license. The standardized licensure test covers
concepts in educational psychology extensively (cognitive psychology, constructivism,
behaviorism, social cognitive theory, motivation), all of which were covered in the
textbook. 29 undergraduate students and one instructor participated in the class. The
classroom was suitable for the capacity of the section and was arranged in a group
format of six pods with a maximum of five members each. Classes were held twice
weekly, on Mondays and Wednesdays, between 2:20pm and 3:40pm, and 29 sessions
were held in total over 14 weeks.
All classes were held in the Enarson Classroom Building. While no strict dress code
was observed, the class collectively decided to dress up for Halloween (in jammies),
and on the day of the book photoshoot (in black sweaters and denims). The Reddit live-
chat was projected onto the classroom screen in the first 15 minutes of the lectures.
Slides were provided in Carmen for each session, along with optional scholarly reading.
Cloud based collaborative tools such as Google Slides were linked to the Instructure
learning management system (LMS) to support group activity. When the co-authoring
task commenced, a Microsoft Teams server was created to host collaborative editorial
activities for each chapter of the 2022 Whole University Catalogue.
Publication Agreement
The members of the class (29 students and the instructor) reached out to the Ohio State
University Libraries Knowledge Bank via email upon deciding to commence the co-
authoring task. A letter to inquire if a class magazine with scholarly output could be
stored as a unique object in the Knowledge Bank. Copyright agreements were signed
by all the 30 authors, who agreed to grant access to their work for a co-authored
publication as long as those using it would cite them and provide credit.
Syllabus & Participatory Design

The reading material used for ESEPSY2309 is Educational Psychology: Developing
Learners. The textbook (Ormrod et al., 2020) comprises fifteen chapters spread over
three units. These 15 chapters were covered over 29 sessions, of which the last two
were devoted to group presentations for the final. The initial syllabus involved 25 daily
live chats, two multimodal assignments over Units one and two (with the choice to
illustrate a storyboard or write a paper, as long as students picked both formats over the
two units), and a final teach-back task involving interviewing a teacher and recording a
podcast or teaching back a topic from the textbook to the class in a 20-minute session.
Weekly readings were assigned from the textbook focusing on chapters of the week. In
the first 7 weeks, each lecture began with a live-chat on Reddit for the first 15 minutes,
to discuss a controversial prompt related to the weekly topic.
Group activities were conducted to apply each of the weekly ideas to practice and
deepen students’ knowledge about the topics they would choose to write about in their
assignments. As the first assignments were submitted and evaluated for feedback
iteratively through Week 7, both the students and the instructor agreed that compiling
the storyboards and papers to further “remix” concepts and create new perspectives
was a good way forward.
Upon a democratic vote, the syllabus was altered post-Week 9, for the last five weeks of
class, to commence every alternate class with a live-chat about the topic of the week,
and every other with a Study Hall session. The copyright agreements were signed in
Week 9 and submitted to the Ohio State University Libraries Knowledge Bank.
Since 10 sessions remained, 5 were devoted to live-chats (starting Monday of Week 10,
every alternate class), and 5 to Study Hall (starting the Wednesday of Week 10, every
alternate class), to compile five chapters of the 2022 Whole University Catalogue. Unit 2
assignments were submitted in Week 12, and final assignments in Week 14. The co-
authoring task to compile Unit 1 assignments became a refresher for previous materials
as students prepared their Unit 2 assignments and teach back tasks, allowing them to
link concepts from chapters on situated cognition/context to cognitive psychology,
behaviorism, social cognition, and classroom practices.
Below in Figure 7, I provide an illustrated flow chart of the weekly topics, live-chat and
Study Hall schedule, and assignment due dates for class, and how these aspects of the
curriculum were iteratively evaluated and designed by both the students and the
instructor as the semester progressed and new potentials to work as a classroom
community emerged.
As seen in the two continuous illustrated flowcharts that have been provided on the next
page of this paper, the first 16 sessions were conducted in a uniform manner, following
the same weekly format. However, the class made a decision to change the nature of
the syllabus based on their joint experiences, and their thoughts about the best way to
go forward to learn about the theories and practices being investigated in class at a
deeper level.
As shown, till Session 17 (Week 10), we conducted live-chats bi-weekly as the

introductory class activity. However, in Session 13, after assignments were submitted,
the instructor began to realize that the storyboards and papers could be compiled and
edited into well-defined scholarly publications that use visual storytelling to explain the
applications of educational theory to practice. Starting Session 17, till Session 27, a total
of five Study Hall sessions were held to edit and finalize five chapters of the 2022 Whole
University Catalogue.
In Session 27, we held a debrief session to discuss each group’s final projects and gain
final feedback to improve them from every member of the classroom, and then used
Polaroid cameras to conduct a photoshoot for a collage created for the first pages of the
book, following the title page. In the next section, I describe each of the five chapters
that were compiled in lieu of completing the Catalogue.
THE 2022 WHOLE UNIVERSITY CATALOGUE: A SUMMARY

This paper, which serves as an introduction to the 2022 Whole University Catalogue,
not only describes the use of a Paskian (1976) cybernetic framework for curriculum
design in an educational psychology classroom (see Tilak et al. 2022a and Tilak et al.,
2022b for previous applications of such a methodology using network analysis data) but
describes the results of a co-authoring activity modeled around cybernetician Heinz von
Foerster’s 1968-1969 heuristics course in the creation of a short compilation of five
scholarly papers (Scott, 2011; von Foerster, 1969). In this section of the paper, I
summarize the ideas members of ESEPSY2309 compiled into the 2022 Whole
University Catalogue. I describe each of the five chapters in our book, that allowed the
30 of us to explore teaching and learning as students learning to teach, and as the
future teachers we envision being. These conceptual papers, all generated during
weekly Study Hall during the last five weeks of ESEPSY2309 through a collaborative
editorial process, discuss situated cognition and contextual factors in learning, and
practices to apply these theories and navigate individual/group differences in learning
environments using both scholarly findings and visual storyboards; thus, allowing ideas
to be reappropriated as scientific and everyday concepts within a Zone of Proximal
Development. The ZPD is an active state and process fueling the shared understanding
envisioned in conversation theory (Tilak & Glassman, 2022).
In Chapter 1, Mason et al. (2022) provide an apt start to the initial part of this book,
which mainly deals with situated cognition. We understand how Lev Vygotsky’s
sociocultural theory can be interpreted through the idea of narrow, bidirectional
structural dependency between novices and experts, or distributed processes leading to
organic renegotiation of scientific/everyday concepts and explore the creation of Zones
of Proximal Development or zo-peds (much like this class) that enable identity
development in safe, culturally sensitive classroom environments. We situate this
argument within an East Asian perspective.
In Chapter 2, MacQueeney et al. (2022) explore Piaget’s theory of development and

explain how to apply concepts related to assimilation/accommodation in the
development of cognitive schemes across the stages of development, and also describe
the role of social learning in the development of moral standpoints through cooperative
interactions. We describe how Piaget’s approach can find application at varied
developmental levels and illustrate specific examples that preservice teachers may use.
In Chapter 3, Negatu et al. (2022) describe the symptoms of autism spectrum disorders
and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder per the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM V), outline special education policy according to U.S. law, and
describe assistive technologies that may be used to foster inclusion for students on the
spectrum and those with ADHD. The paper also brings in an interdisciplinary South
Asian pediatric neurology perspective, to understand how home programs for children
on the spectrum or those with ADHD fostering the mindful use of technology could
increase verbalization; and also allow parents to better understand from pediatricians
how to adhere to the remediation practices that can help their children navigate their
social environments with greater confidence.
In Chapter 4, Gomez et al. (2022) place peer and familial interactions, moral
development and racial identity into Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems, outline
practices that may be used to account for these factors and help students feel a sense
of belongingness in the learning environment. We also illustrate the possible outcomes
of varied social experiences in the home, school, and arising from cultural beliefs. To
conclude, we provide the example of an inclusive, skills-based, comprehensive sexual
health education program that enabled middle school students from the LGBTQ+
community to feel that they had a voice and learn how to navigate their own sexual
health experiences.
In Chapter 5, McKeown et al. (2022) investigate the interplay between temperament
and social factors in the development of personality through the lifespan. We describe
the negative effects of bullying on sense of self and personality and understand how
teachers can foster in their children the capacity for assertive social interactions through
gradual exposure to collaborative learning that brings in the experiences of students
with different tendencies for communication and interaction.
The five chapters of the book were co-authored and thoroughly peer reviewed by the 30
members of class over a short period of five weeks. The instructor compiled the
chapters from existing student assignments, and then worked with students to refine the
manuscripts and intersperse the storyboards and papers into cohesive narratives. In
each paper, we not only grappled with scientific concepts and theories the way they
were presented in the textbook and academic articles, but also provided a
reappropriated, visual, and informal representation of these ideas as everyday concepts
for others to rely on and develop new perspectives about educational theory and
practice. I argue that this process of learning how to reappropriate ideas (as learnt
through the lens of being a student learning about teaching and learnt in terms of
practice as a prospective teacher) accrued in a learning environment constitutes

learning in a Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD); an active state and process that
both Gordon Pask and Lev Vygotsky (Tilak & Glassman, 2022) would deem as pivotal
to concept development in collaborative environments. I suggest that this liminal
juncture or third space between students’ identities as learners accruing new concepts,
and future teachers who will apply them in practice constitute a Third Space for
preservice teacher training.
IMPLICATIONS: THIRD SPACES FOR PRESERVICE TEACHER TRAINING

As I have described, the curricular model using which ESEPSY2309 was designed
adhered to a conversation theory framework to attempt a journey towards augmenting
collaboration and social interactions between each and every agent in the classroom
environment. The live-chat group activities, lesson planning tasks, and jigsaw tasks
enabled us to attempt manifesting interactions towards the 435 total ties in a fully
chorded tricontagon of 30 agents. The assignments (storyboards) involved idea
development through writing out scientific concepts learnt in class as scholarly papers,
or by expressing these ideas and theories as everyday concepts through storyboards.
Students thus not only learnt about ideas from the textbook as learners, but also
navigated how they could see themselves manifesting these new ideas in the classroom
as everyday concepts through illustration. In engaging with this process, students acted
within a Zone of Proximal Development (Glassman et al., 2022; Tilak & Glassman,
2022; Mason et al., 2022) to negotiate their own identities as learners and practitioners.
This ZPD served as a Third Space, or a cultural zone where students can exchange
perspectives to navigate the commonalities and differences between the varied
identities they adopt in the social world. This idea of the ZPD being a space for identity
development has been drawn from Chaiklin’s (2003) notion about the ZPD being the
boundary between learning concepts and applying them to one’s own experiences.
Griffin & Cole (1984), discussing the association of scaffolding with the ZPD, suggest
that this narrow conception can be expanded by regarding the ZPD as a zo-ped, or the
pedagogy of the shaman; through which scientific concepts are reappropriated as
everyday concepts through organic action in the social world. Participation in a rich set
of ecologically grounded practices can help students engage in challenging problem-
solving and navigate the varied aspects of their identities to create adaptive trajectories
of learning and development (Gutierrez, 2008). In the context of ESEPSY2309, students
learn about educational theory, do application-based activities to understand how to
operationalize these approaches, and further reappropriate their standpoints through
visual and written output. They also used Reddit to chat about weekly topics in an
emergent, agentic manner that led to the establishment and maintenance of an online
preservice teacher community throughout the semester.
Compiling their work as a collective enabled students to incorporate new ideas into their
lexicon of possible practices as future teachers, and also learn about ways to apply
educational theory in a concrete, observable manner. Learning within a zo-ped that
allows an interplay between students’ identities as learners and teachers, and a group
level exchange of perspectives for “mutual appropriation” (Brown et al., 1996) leads to a
transformation of each individual’s relation to their social environments, with each
student in the ESEPSY2309 class trying to act upon their environment to discover how
they can best manifest their aspirations to be in-service teachers.
CONCLUSION
Through a curiosity about the processes that sustain robust cyclical conversations and
the reappropriation of scientific and everyday concepts (Gutierrez, 2008), our class has
applied a cybernetic conversation theory model to create a Third Space; where each
student, and the instructor became a teacher, learner, and researcher, collaborating to
constantly change their perceptions about educational theory and practice. The 2022
Whole University Catalogue is the tangible outcome of this collaborative process,
forming a tool that enabled our classroom theory to grasp deeper understandings of
teaching and learning, and one that can be used by future educators and in-service
practitioners to gain similar understandings.
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Deconstructing Vygotsky Mason et al. 27
Deconstructing Vygotsky: Narrow structural dependency,

distributed learning, and identity development
Elise Mason, Haiqi Liu, Santino Canales, Logan Allomong, Kara Gossman,
Lingfeng Wu, Shantanu Tilak, Maria-Vittoria Zambelli
ABSTRACT
In this multimodal conceptual paper employing theoretical conjecture and visual

storyboarding, co-written and co-illustrated by undergraduate students and the
instructor participating in a seminar in Educational Psychology, we understand the
varied threads of the interpretation of Lev Vygotsky’s theory as subsets of a distributed
approach to learning. We also explore its application to classroom experiences and
navigating highly complex social environments that we inhabit in our everyday lives. The
first part of this paper understands how the scaffolding metaphor and distributed
interpretations of Vygotsky’s work may be used to design classroom settings, with the
former providing a more limited, adult-centered reappropriation of Vygotsky’s idea of
organic, distributed concept development. The second part shows how both
collaborative and top-down learning is driven by the interplay between scientific and
everyday concepts, through the example of a storyboard illustration that showcases the
examples of friends learning how to skateboard, learning new tricks through
improvisation, and incorporating their competence as a skater into their identity. The
third part suggests that the appropriation of scientific and everyday concepts within the
ZPD creates a third space where cultural differences between students of varied
backgrounds can be navigated. We provide an East Asian perspective to understand
how to create such third spaces, and display how such learning environments are
designed through a storyboard illustrating a student potluck activity to navigate diversity
in culinary practices and preferences.
Keywords: Vygotsky, concept development, identity, third space, critical theory,

cybernetics
INTRODUCTION
L.S. Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist who suggested that children learn through
interactions with their environment, with activity in the social world leading to cognitive
and emotional processes spurring concept development. To Vygotsky, a deeper
understanding of how to apply ideas learnt through formal processes to navigating
complex social realities is key to development and learning. While Vygotsky focuses on
general mechanisms of development in the lifespan, Piaget provides a schematic
progression through his stage theory (Piaget & Inhelder, 2013). In practice, both
theories may be used together to provide a robust overview of human development.
The role of schematic stage-wise progression/mental construction and organic,

emergent social interactions is isomorphic in practice. Neither can be prioritized de facto
without assurance that selective application of models produces certainty in sheep’s
clothing (Pask, 1976, Pask & de Zeeuw, 1992). This theoretical paper takes one of
these frames of reference about human development; specifically Vygotsky’s. We
discuss the role of distributed interactions (between peers and instructors acting in
complex social realities and within the boundaries of classrooms), highlighting how an
integrated process of cognitive, emotional and behavioral factors leads to the
development of thinking and conversations, culminating in the creation of distinct
cultural identities for individuals and groups. The authors of this paper (undergraduate
students and their instructor), in performing the act of co-generating this multimodal
narrative (comprising scholarly perspectives and visual storyboards), engage in non-
hierarchical reappropriation of scientific and everyday concepts. The writing of this
paper is an act emblematic of, and a commentary upon the very type of distributed
knowledge creation Vygotsky envisioned.
A central tenet of Vygotsky’s theory is that humans reappropriate knowledge through

the lens of their own experiences in an interconnected world. This direction that
Vygotsky’s theory took stems from his interest in Russian theater, which piqued his
interest in how actors collaboratively reappropriated scripts based on their own histories
while acting on stage (Glassman et al., 2022; Tilak & Glassman, 2022). The scripts that
actors read consist of scientific concepts; prescribed packets of information to rely on as
a guide. However, once these actors get on stage, or even participate in peer-mediated
rehearsals (Scholte, 2016), they recreate characters uniquely each time, for different
audiences. This space for activity, called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), that
lies at the intersection of scientific concepts and everyday concepts may allow
individuals to gain competence with tasks to independently apply ideas to their real
lives.
Per the 1962 translation of Vygotsky’s work (Thought and Language), scholars such as
Wood et al. (1976) reappropriated Vygotsky’s ideas, packaging his work into a narrow
adult-centered educational model. The scaffolding metaphor focuses on structural
dependency between a novice/neophyte and expert, privileging the role of the more
knowledgeable other (MKO) in learning. Per scaffolding, students gain competence
from the assistance of an adult (parent/teacher) or more experienced peer who aids in
learning a concept (Jaramillo, 1996). Wood et al. (1976) suggested teachers can use an
understanding of a learner’s current progress to teach students concepts “just above
their current skills and knowledge level” and provide them with contingent support when
they need assistance in problem-solving (van de Pol et al., 2019). These scholars
believed a student would be able to achieve more than they could without the aid of that
instructor with the provision of contingent support. Even the 1978 and 87 translations of
Mind and Society have been interpreted by Western readers as focusing on the role of
structurally guided imitation in learning. However, scholars such as Stetsenko suggest
that this idea of assistance today culminating in competence tomorrow is metaphorical
according to colloquialisms of Russian language, referring more to organic development

of conceptual repertoires with time and cultural-historical experience (Smagorinsky,
2018).
The scaffolding metaphor has often been tied to the ZPD by practitioners (van de Pol et
al., 2019), leading to a conception of the ZPD that is adult-centered, focusing on
imparting scientific information rather than affect-driven recreation of knowledge based
on organic collaboration between a company of peers/instructors. This narrow
interpretation suggests that scaffolding and high-level imitation will produce competence
(Smagorinsky, 2018). Reducing the ZPD to a structural dependency runs the risk of
oversimplifying Vygotsky’s nuanced approach to understanding the interconnected
nature of mind and society emerging from social interactions. Structurally dependent
learning experiences are only a subset of possible ways (what systems thinkers would
call “all possible models”, Ashby, 1957) to apply Vygotsky’s approach. This leaves open
the possibility to encompass the role of the instructor as a facilitator into the classroom
who observes and guides the collaborative reappropriation of classroom concepts
between individuals having varied experiences and competencies.
Chaiklin (2003), citing Vygotsky’s writing, suggested the ZPD can be looked at in a
more distributed manner, asserting that, “the circle of available imitation coincides with
the circle of the actual development possibilities of the animal” (Vygotsky, 1997, p.95).
This quote can be analogized to an actor balancing the imitation of a script, and
passionately improvising on stage to produce a nuanced performance each time. This
improvisation may be assisted by peer-mediated rehearsals that are strengthened by
bonds of emotional trust between actors (Scholte, 2017). Just like the actor creates a
new experience with each audience and deepens their shared languages with caste
members, each interlocutor in a conversation refracts incoming information based on
their emotional and cultural history. A student who has participated in food relief
initiatives may feel emotionally invested in suggesting such solutions in a social studies
classroom where students develop ways to combat food security issues (Tilak et al.,
2022), and even take their views to local forums/government bodies.
In developing this distinct, active cultural-historical state (perezhivanie) to act upon the
world much like actors performing to varying audiences, individuals must interact with
their environment actively; rather than restrict learning to classroom conversations with
experts (Tilak & Glassman, 2022). This forms a central aspect of Vygotsky’s theory,
which points towards the networked nature of mind and society. Vygotsky’s theory
would operationalize itself in allowing individuals to learn from both experts, and their
peers, and to learn from both formal (scientific concepts) and non-formal (everyday
concepts) experiences to “become a head taller” (Barrs, 2017), while expressing
standpoints and acting in their own sociocultural contexts based on ideas they have
learnt. Each of us acts as a prism in the sociocultural field, refracting our interpretations
of the words, ideas, and standpoints of others (Michell, 2016).
Language, technology and other appendages we use to navigate the world are known
as tools, that help create semiotic representations of information in the social world.
How we act upon tools depends on our cultural history, with these extensions of the
mind mediating these networked experiences (Penuel & Wertsch, 1995). An individual
who resonates with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and has experienced the
hardships of racial inequality may not only view tweets related to the movement online,
but also reappropriate these ideas to learn and participate in grassroots organization
(Thelwall & Thelwall, 2021); while those who are less emotionally invested may choose
to recreate the information they receive by just sharing it with others. Mediated learning
experiences in the social world lead individuals to develop distinct identities. Learning
the skills to engage in activism for social change is just one example.
The idea that learning can occur within the Zone of Proximal Development to spur a
reappropriation of concepts when emotional and cultural history are accounted for in
teaching and learning (Glassman et al., 2022) points towards the utility of project-based
collaborative learning in the classroom. Such techniques may allow students to build
concrete products using mediating tools that resonate with their cultural histories, in
both the classroom and their everyday life. A good example is the act of citizen’s
journalism engaged in by Latino adolescents with mobile devices in response to
instances of racism in their neighborhood (Gutierrez et al., 2019). The children
responded to the hostility they faced as a function of their emotional history and
standpoints related to systemic racism, and advocated for themselves, applying the
ideas about society they accrued through schooling to their own lives, to navigate highly
complex social environments. These examples show that the broader, distributed
interpretation of the ZPD is based on organic multiagent collaboration and perspective-
taking driven by both logic and emotion; by both formal learning and everyday
experiences (Eisenberg, 1979).
The first part of this paper explores how adult-centered scaffolding techniques
reappropriated from Vygotsky only form a narrow subset of possible applications of
sociocultural theory. We then describe the open-ended, distributed learning approaches
that have emerged from more contemporary reinterpretations and describe how they
can be operationalized in the classroom, to foster ongoing concept development,
collaborative problem-solving, and real-world application. We conclude that a broader,
non-hierarchical understanding of Vygotsky’s theory requires a deeper insight into
processes of concept development and the translation of formal scientific concepts into
everyday experiences by a company of actors (students and instructors) actively
observing a moving cultural field.
The second part of this paper explores scientific and everyday concepts through a
storyboard illustrating the example of friends teaching each other to skateboard and
learning new tricks through spontaneous, affect-driven improvisation. The final part of
the paper discusses the role of cultural experience and identity in applying the ideas of
Vygotsky through an East Asian perspective. We describe practices that can be
undertaken to employ culturally sensitive pedagogies in English Second Language
classrooms, and showcase a storyboard that describes how a potluck activity can be
used to educate students about the cultural significance of diverse foods and recipes in
each of their homes, and create tolerant environments where cultural pluralism and
mutual respect is encouraged.
The illustrated examples used in this paper were co-generated by undergraduate

students and an instructor as part of a seminar focused on training preservice teachers
in theories of psychology and ways to apply them. The co-authors of this paper thus,
learnt about varied theories of learning, and created semiotic tools to learn about their
applications, and treat the tools they made as a knowledge source for other prospective
teachers. We use the ideas developed as part of our community of learners as tools and
symbols in this paper, to guide practitioners in the art of locating and designing culturally
sensitive ZPDs.
STRUCTURAL DEPENDENCY & DISTRIBUTED LEARNING: APPLICATIONS
As we have described in the introduction, there are different interpretations and

metaphors arising from Vygotsky’s theory in terms of designing instructional strategies.
The first interpretation of Vygotsky that is often used in classroom practices is based on
the scaffolding metaphor that Wood et al. (1976) reappropriated from Vygotsky’s initial
ideas to create a narrow, adult-centered model of learning. The second relies on
Vygotsky’s ideas about the networked structure of mind and society to understand the
ZPD as an active state and process achieved by a reformulation of scientifically imitated
knowledge via spontaneous, open-ended collaborative activity. In this section, we
describe how both these ideas can be applied to classroom instruction and highlight
how a distributed view of learning provides the platform to understand the processes at
the root of concept development in complex social environments.
Narrow structural dependency: Scaffolding
The scaffolding metaphor provides a narrow way to apply Vygotsky’s approach within
an expert-driven reference frame; this is only a subset of the distributed learning
pathways that may emerge from Vygotsky’s ideas. Scaffolding is mainly limited to
information provision and high-level imitation. According to Shabani et al. (2010), who
studied the professional development of teachers and the role of sociocultural theory in
their pedagogy, scaffolding provides a metaphor for teachers to become modelers
guiding student learning towards independent performance. Collaboration between the
teacher and the learner constructs knowledge and skill. Scaffolds are pillars of skills that
help an individual to gain and internalize new knowledge (Van der Stuyf, 2002),
comparable to training wheels on a bicycle, that can gradually be removed as
information presented by an MKO leads the learner into individual competence, as the
learner gains the ability to use the knowledge. The direction that Bruner, Wood and
colleagues took emerged from their desire to understand how competence developed
through language and conversation was symbolically coded in the mind. Per their
approach, scaffolds allow students to reappropriate scientific concepts through
involvement of their everyday interests/ideas in the classroom. Ideally, scaffolds should
show clear evidence of how students’ competence can be augmented through

challenging goal-oriented behavior. An example of instructional scaffolds are illustrated
story books used during the Digital Civic Learning project’s economics curriculum, that
recounted the struggles of a local Ohio family with food security issues, and the creation
of community garden initiatives to solve this issue (Tilak et al., 2022). Students were not
only able to relate to the story owing to its local flavor and its focus on children’s
experiences, but also used it as a scaffold to reach higher order understandings of
community-driven initiatives that could mitigate food security issues. The teacher
presented the story to students, and then guided them to collaborate and critique the
perspectives presented in the text.
When integrating scaffolding into a classroom however, one must keep in mind that it
should be individualized to benefit every learner in the classroom (Van Der Stuyf, 2002).
If a student is struggling to share ideas with others during small group discussions, a
teacher can act as a facilitator and encourage a sharing of perspectives through
supportive, open-ended questioning, hovering between groups to understand their
progress. Without the proper time and personalization, the ability for a teacher to
properly scaffold a lesson for each student may be compromised and learning goals
may not be able to be met for the whole classroom.
This process, where the teacher understands where students or groups of students are
in their learning is known as contingent support. In a qualitative study understanding
students’ perceptions of the European Union’s role in their lives through collaborative
group discussions in social studies classrooms, van de Pol et al. (2019) found that
timely contingent support offered by the teacher allowed students to use their
knowledge and produce correct answers. Without proper teacher-training in contingent
support, students may not see the full effect of the assistance of the MKO. Scaffolding
methods must be prepared with the individual student’s funds of knowledge in mind,
and this should be integrated with enough knowledge and resources to do so.The
scaffolds should also be related to the course content being learnt; for example,
providing educational psychology students learning about classroom instruction with
lesson planning activities to prepare them for a teach back task where they deliver a
lecture to their classmates would gradually prepare competence in creating curricular
plans and implementing them. However, while scaffolds enable structuring instruction
and competence, peer interactions and collaboration also play a salient role in
classroom learning. The scaffolding metaphor is only a subset of ways to apply
Vygotsky’s theory. The idea of distributed interaction between agents having varied
cultural experience subsumes this structural dependency.
Distributed learning & its possibilities
When we consider the scaffolding metaphor as only a subset of all possible interactions
between peers and instructors, and everyday experiences beyond the classroom, it
creates a more distributed understanding of Vygotsky’s work, in line with his ideas on
the networked nature of mind and society. Agents in a classroom with different learning
and everyday experiences bounce ideas off each other, fostering deeper understanding
and concept development. This perspective can be applied by researchers, and

measured using both quantitative (surveys, network science) and qualitative
(observations, focus group interviews) measurement of collaborative interactions
between peers of varied competence. Doolittle (1997) describes cooperative learning as
a type of instructional practice wherein students work to exchange perspectives and
ideas to solve problems and learn about topics.
Looking at the Zone of Proximal Development as a space accessed through the

reappropriation of scientific and everyday concepts guided by each collaborating
agents’ perezhivanie provides a way to understand how students observe and react to
the evolving social environment of the classroom, and incorporate aspects of their
everyday lives into learning. The development of each individual’s ZPD’s are
codependent in a positive way.
Researchers such as Johnson and Johnson (2009) suggest there are five variables
guiding productive cooperation and knowledge sharing, namely 1) positive
interdependence in sharing learning resources, goals, roles in a group, and in
performing tasks, 2) individual accountability for roles and tasks taken up, 3) promotive
interaction to move towards goals, 4) social skills to set norms, develop trust, and
resolve conflict, and 5) group processing, where members understand which agents
were constructive collaborators, and what processes/norms need alteration.
Incorporating activities involving knowledge creation in the classroom enables the
consideration of the ZPD as a group level process and active state reached through
discourse and collaborative tinkering with artifacts and problem-solving tasks.
To implement cooperative learning, organizing a classroom into groups is the first step.
After groups work on problem-solving together, one can have groups share the
knowledge they create together with others. This is known as a jigsaw approach (Law,
2011) to learning. More or less experienced peers can be grouped in a mixed
configuration so that less experienced peers can learn from those with more
competence, express ideas through a new reference frame themselves, and so that
those with more competence can teach back concepts they know too. Everybody can
have opportunities to make gains in such distributed environments in terms of learning
and engagement.
Starting off such classes with whole group discussions can impart scientific concepts, to
model knowledge and understanding before perspectives are exchanged via discourse.
Whole group discussions should transition into a problem-solving activity, that may be
gamified using simulations or virtual worlds that treat students as groups of participant
observers or a company of actors functioning within the bounds of Vygotsky’s
framework. Scientific Making Environments (DiGiacomo & Gutierrez, 2015) that allow
children to work with circuits and other scientific tools are examples of such classrooms.
A pivotal example that highlights the possibilities of the mediating role of technology in
collaboration is Scardamalia and Bereiter’s (2004) Knowledge Forum tool, which
allowed students of varied ages to discuss ideas related to paleontology through
annotated illustrations made in an online learning community. Contemporary
technologies like discussion boards, Flipgrid video essays (Tilak et al., 2022), and
immersive simulations (see Lui & Slotta, 2014; Moher et al., 2015for examples of
immersive environments related to rainforest ecology and seismography respectively)
are other effective modeling facilities to use in both science and social
science/humanities classrooms at the K-12 and college level to organize collaboration
and perspective taking.
A simulation-based approach to cooperative learning at the college level was used by

Glassman and colleagues (Tilak et al., 2020; Glassman et al., 2021) focusing on
collaborative learning for preservice teachers studying adolescent development using a
mixture of virtual worlds (Second Life) and blogging activities. It was seen that the
experimental group, which learnt about adolescent development through activities
conducted as embodied avatars on a private island in Second Life displayed much
higher collaborative reflectivity in their blog posts compared to a control condition.
These scholars have also experimented with the use of Virtual Reality environments to
foster visuospatial skills in middle school STEM classrooms. Their study suggested that
the use of pairwise headset activities to solve mazes and puzzles heightened the
visuospatial self-efficacy of participants in the experimental condition (Kuznetcova et al.,
2022). An example at the K-12 level would be a study conducted with 764 elementary
schoolers by Zhang et al. (2016). The designed curriculum revolved around wolf
conservation efforts held in Yellowstone National Park, wherein students developed
nuanced solutions to save the wolf population based on its role in the larger ecology of
the national park.
The approaches taken by these authors allows students to take scientific concepts and
reappropriate them; understanding the importance of phenomena/ideologies such as
conservation, sustainability and moral perspective taking in one’s real life, as everyday
concepts. This interplay between scientific and everyday concepts is key to
understanding learning within the ZPD.
SCIENTIFIC & EVERYDAY CONCEPTS AS PATHWAYS FOR IDENTITY

DEVELOPMENT
Vygotsky suggested that the mind works in an integrated fashion, with social, cognitive,
and emotional factors interacting dynamically as individuals engage in conversations
and seek information from the environment. Much like a water molecule, which shows
distinct properties owing to covalent bonds between hydrogen and oxygen molecules,
processes in the mind act in an isomorphic manner, moving conversations and cultural
experiences forward in a cybernetically compliant fashion; changes in one part of the
mind/brain produce a networked ripple, affecting other facets/parts (Pask, 1958). In
producing and expanding conceptual repertoires, both formal and informal learning play
an important role in organizing schemas and representations in cyclical meshes.
The development of thinking emerges from activity in the social environment, producing
the active cultural historical state, or perezhivanie. The identity of the individual in the
given moment, reflected by the quality of their perezhivanie changes the ways in which
each agent learns and collaborates with others. The ways in which we navigate our
environment are a reflection of our identity, or “a self-constructed definition of who one
is , what things we find important, and what goals we want to accomplish in life”
(Ormrod et al., 2020). Through interactions with others, it is possible for us to become
competent at tasks through high-level imitation and the spontaneous application of
these ideas.
Quite often, being good at something induces an interest in it. A lot of children find
interests based on what they learn from their peers and trusted adults. This is a learning
process that is key to the development of maturity in children, as school and home
become frequent social systems that a child inhabits. School can be a good way to get
exposed to varied kinds of information; while overtly, most kids won’t admit they enjoy it,
schooling exposes them to ideas they can develop nuanced standpoints about by
interacting with their peers and teachers that contribute to their identities.
Identity development and learning can also come from something informal that you
learn from a friend. These ideas can be brought into the learning environment too. A
good example of this is a college student teaching their friend how to skateboard (see
Figure 1). The process of performing an ollie is imparted by the more experienced
skater as a scientific concept. The novice skater falls off their board several times, and
finally, through practice and collaboration with the experienced skater is able to master
the ollie without breaking a bone.
However, while on joyride by themselves, the novice skater is able to learn how to use
the ollie to maneuver sidewalks, jump across benches, and navigate campus faster, by
reappropriating their high-level imitation through the lens of their own experience, by
grappling with everyday concepts. Landing a perfect ollie in the nick of time to avoid
bumping into an innocent pedestrian and confidently zooming past is an apt example of
reappropriating scientific and everyday concepts on-the-fly. It may even help the
individual who managed this get to class faster! This means that the act of learning how
to ollie is further resemiotized by the individual as they navigate their environment and
learn how to use it to solve problems and get what they need through the act of riding
their skateboard.
Figure 1
Mastering the ollie (illustration by Shantanu Tilak & Maria-Vittoria Zambelli).

When we have social interactions with others, we retain some information that is salient
to us from these conversations, and then slowly understand whether we can apply
these ideas to our real lives. Moments of excellence arise from conversations that click;
where two or more agents develop a shared language (Pask, 1972), communicating in
metaphors that are informed by their cultural experiences. We talk to people about what
we know and want to be and hear their perspectives at school, and outside of it too.
While it is important to actively experience the things we talk about, conversations and
perspectives can inform how we use and reappropriate scientific and everyday concepts
(Pask, 1976). Individuals have distinct identities; because they think about information
they receive as observers, sometimes acting on it. Socializing and gaining new
perspectives is a great way to learn new information that you can think about for
yourself.
Incorporating the reflexivity and the socially embedded nature of identity into the
classroom may be conducted through curricula that use language and technology as
mediating tools to grapple with scientific and everyday concepts. The Zone of Proximal
Development can become a third space, or a culturally sensitive environment where the
commonalities and differences between different identities and backgrounds are
negotiated. In the last part of this paper, we describe the creation of such third spaces
through an East Asian perspective.
ZPDS AS THIRD SPACES: AN EAST ASIAN PERSPECTIVE
The ZPD has been conceptualized as a third space based on Chaiklin’s (2003) and
Griffin & Cole’s (1984) idea that structural dependency in adult centered scaffolding is a
Western concept that deviates from Vygotsky’s idea of a highly networked society.
Cole’s terminology for the ZPD, or zo-ped, refers to the pedagogy of the wise man,
accrued through dealing with scientific concepts presented at school, and
reappropriating them with peers and others through ecologically grounded practices
relevant to one’s sociohistorical experience. A study by Gutierrez (2008) was conducted
at the University of California Los Angeles’ Migrant Student Leadership Institute, where
students wrote syncretic testimonios or autobiographical texts that recounted
experiences of immigration, migration and schooling in the United States. This allowed
them to not only reflexively understand ideas about migration and diversity presented at
the workshops, but also navigate their own identities and create a support system with
their peers, leading “people, ideas, and practices of different communities meet, collide,
and merge” (Engeström, 2005, p.46).
Since cultural values and beliefs (a salient example is individualistic and collectivistic
patterns of behavior) differ across contexts, educational practices perpetuated across
cultural contexts may differ as well. It may be salient to see how pedagogies can be
renegotiated using diverse elements from varied contexts. An example investigated in
this paper is the Chinese education system. The University of Colorado Denver’s Office
of International Affairs (Liu, 2014), in an article outlining the differences between the
Chinese and American systems, suggests that the Chinese education system is largely
based on accumulated knowledge rather than iterative testing, and on the
understanding of knowledge systems of structures can be used after learning in school.
However, the American system is more focused on reappropriating ideas and applying
them to lived experiences in an on-the-fly manner. Splitting the difference between two
or more cultural systems may enable the creation of the best of both worlds and an
awareness of the nuances of navigating cultural differences and commonalities. This
navigation of cultural contexts can be facilitated within Third Spaces that act as ZPDs.
We outline three steps to creating such ZPDs, that may be conceptualized as Culturally
Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP) and explore such pedagogies in the context of English
Second Language Learning, and navigating culinary diversity.
Creating CSPs: Navigating Linguistic and Culinary Diversity
The appropriation of concepts in a safe space is the first step that teachers should use
in setting up and maintaining culturally responsive classrooms. Appropriation involves
adapting and internalizing ideas from a particular culture for one’s own use; pedagogies
and forms of learning can also be appropriated across varied cultural contexts.
However, this must be done in a culturally sensitive manner. Allowing elementary
students to critique the appropriation of garbs and costumes related to religious festivals
such as Dia De Los Muertos and delineating these practices from Halloween are just
one example of imparting skills to students to navigate cultural diversity with a critical
eye. School workshops in the United States that help international students share their
experiences about learning English as a second language learner may allow them to
appropriate ideas from their peers for use in their own lives in a new country. Such
approaches that help students to create new conceptual repertoires use group
discussions to navigate issues such as cultural mismatch.
The competence of teachers is the second piece to the puzzle of creating a Third
Space that orients itself into a ZPD. Teachers should be aware of the backgrounds and
linguistic capacities of international students when governing their classrooms as
facilitators of cultural navigation in foreign contexts. Penalizing native speech in the ESL
classroom is often a practice carried out to ensure full immersion into learning new
linguistic and cultural competencies. Sometimes, international students may form
cliques and working groups in such classrooms that are navigated by a bilingual
sensibility. Sustaining the capacity for unity that fostered by openly discussing diversity
is the final piece of the puzzle to create a zo-ped.
Allowing students to freely exercise their cultural identities and speak their Native
tongues in the language class to aid in learning a new language may constitute as a
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) that “seeks to perpetuate and foster—to
sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of
schooling. In the face of current policies and practices that have the explicit goal of
creating a monocultural and monolingual society, research and practice need equally
explicit resistances that embrace cultural pluralism and cultural equality” (Paris 2012, ).
A study by Wilson & Rodkin (2011) conducted on elementary and middle school
students showed that culturally sustaining pedagogies led to decreases in peer
harassment, isolation, and greater self-worth among students. Apart from linguistic
difference, diversity may also produce pathways to explore the negotiation of varied
culinary habits; or a codified set of nutritional practices differing across cultural groups.
In this paper, we use the example of a student potluck activity, illustrated through a
storyboard created by one of the authors as a model for a CSP that can be used to
create a Third Space that navigates culinary diversity. The story we narrate in Figure 2
outlines the experiences of Sarah, who eats the free lunch at school, and Sean, a
minority student who brings wet food (e.g. curry, soup) from his home to the school
cafeteria. One of the students, pictured sitting in the center in the first frame, makes fun
of them both, leading Sarah to go to her teacher and speak to her about it.
The teacher here acts as an ally who brings these cultural differences and issues to the
classroom and asks the students to help her develop ideas and ways to showcase the
culinary aspects of their cultures in the classroom. They all decide to have a potluck,
where they learn about the foods from each of their cultures, and the significance
behind cooking them.
Figure 2
A storyboard outlining the creation of a third space through a potluck (illustration by

Kara Gossman).
The teacher provides the students with resources that outline the struggles of students
with food security (some examples include graphs and statistics that display nationwide
metrics related to food security, resources about community initiatives, and sources
discussing the importance of demand and supply that relate to the emergence of
hardships) (Tilak et al., 2022), and the significance of foods coming from different
cultures. The environment of the potcluck becomes a strong resource to educate
students about their cultures and those of others through a community sharing
experience that involves informal interactions. These interactions are augmented by the
resources or scientific concepts the teacher shares. Students begin to learn about each
other’s backgrounds, and become more tolerant of one another, showing emotional
affinity to learn about each other’s experiences in the cafeteria. This storyboard
expands arguments made by Nukaga (2008) about the use of food as a symbolic
resource to navigate group boundaries in the context through its focus on racial and
socioeconomic difference. Nukaga’s ethnographic data on students’ food exchange
during lunchtime in a primarily Korean American elementary school showed that
students exchanged dry (mass consumed) and wet (homemade) food through sharing
giving and trading, exposing their peers to diverse culinary experiences. We suggest
that practitioners can spur the creation of such gift economies and cultural bonds by
inviting students to share their cultural experiences with each other in a safe space.
Such examples highlight how one can incorporate the cultural backgrounds of students
into the classroom through collaborative, student-centered pedagogical approaches.
The creation of Third Spaces that double as ZPDs enables concept development that
enables cultural experiences to unite and create new solutions and perspectives about
problems sometimes faced at a global scale, such as food security.
CONCLUSION
In this metaconceptual paper, we have outlined both the adult centered and distributed
conceptions of Vygotsky’s ZPD and outlined the importance of the
reappropriation/resemiotization of scientific concepts through the lens of cultural
experiences in learning. The ZPD is a space where individuals can take formally learnt
information and reappropriate it for their own use in their real lives. Students learn ideas
and master them when they are able to apply them to highly spontaneous, on-the-fly
situations to adapt to their environments. When this is applied to the student-centered
classroom, practitioners can use Vygotsky’s approach to create problem-solving
environments that not only facilitate productive individual and collaborative learning, but
also help students understand how concepts they learn may be valuable to the
development of their identities. Since cultural background is an important aspect of
identity, the ZPD can also be used as a Third Space operationalized through culturally
sustained practices (CSP) to navigate cultural/linguistic differences in the classroom
and turn the learning environment into a support system where cultural plurality is
celebrated.
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Stage development and social learning MacQueeney et al. 48
Applying Piaget to classroom teaching: Stage development and social

learning theory
Patrick MacQueeney, Ellie Lewis, Gray Fulton, Charlotte Surber, Kylie Newland,
Emma Hochstetler, Shantanu Tilak
ABSTRACT
In this three-part paper co-authored by undergraduate students and their instructor

participating in an Educational Psychology seminar, we outline Piaget’s theory of child
development and its applications to teaching and learning using scholarly perspectives
and illustrated storyboards that express the nature of our mental representations of
Piaget’s theory, learnt through social interactions and collaborative classroom dialogue.
The three parts of our narrative emphasize the interplay between cognitive, behavioral
and affective factors in child development, and how these may be guided towards
adaptive learning. The first part of the paper explores the concepts of assimilation and
accommodation, and explains how an interplay between them produces equilibration, to
expand existing conceptual knowledge to incorporate novelties without a loss of
continuity through the example of a child seeing an albino squirrel for the first time. The
second part focuses on the four stages of Piaget’s theory of child development and
uses illustrations to explore how classroom teachers at varied levels can foster
transitions through teaching activities. The third part outlines Piaget’s social learning
theory, and uses the example of the Socratic seminar, and an illustrated children’s story
about inclusivity and identity as learnt through collaboration to illustrate how productive
conflict may foster higher order thinking.
Keywords: Piaget, psychology, education, cybernetics, development, teaching
INTRODUCTION
Jean Piaget was a Swiss biologist who is known for developing theories focusing on the
processes of the construction of representations of knowledge through interactions with
the social environment. Piaget was a child prodigy. At age 11, he wrote and published
his first short note on the sighting of an alpine sparrow, hoping that a university librarian
would stop treating him like a child and access the repositories and books he needed.
Earning his doctorate in evolutionary biology, Piaget laid the groundwork to help
understand the processes of evolution and adaptation that helped living organisms
develop. Working with Theodore Simon and Alfred Binet to study child psychology after
World War I, Piaget began to see patterns in the answers that French children (even
more specifically, Parisian children) gave on true-false intelligence tests (Papert, 1999).
He suggested that the way children respond to the world is a result of their development
and socialization, that leads to changes in mental models. Children, and individuals in
general, construct schemes of phenomena that they observe in their environment, to

help organize the information relevant to them.
Piaget began to understand the machinations of children’s development and the ways in
which they construct schemes from incoming information through conversational
methods. Piaget’s techniques relied heavily upon the role of the interaction between the
experimenter and the research participant, or the teacher and student (Pask, 1976;
Tilak & Glassman, 2022). In Piaget’s experiments, children focused their conversational
cues and responses on observable situations. Watching young children play with
concrete objects, Piaget tried to find why they think phenomena in the world work in a
certain way. Seymour Papert (1999), a student of Piaget’s, quotes a conversation
between Piaget and a five-year old, Julia to illustrate the nature of Piaget’s experiments:
“Piaget: What makes the wind?

Julia: The trees.
Piaget: How do you know?
Julia: I saw them waving their arms.
Piaget: How does that make the wind?
Julia: Like this (waving her hand in front of Piaget’s face). Only they are bigger. And
there are lots of trees.
Piaget: What makes the wind on the ocean?
Julia: it blows there from the land. No, it’s the waves.”
The explanations provided by the child fall within the lexicon of schemes and
representations the child has constructed of their world. Attributing a true or false
criterion to these statements shows a lack of understanding of the developmental level
of the child. Often, Piaget used physical objects to constrain participant activity to
concrete responses; in order to understand activities and operations that could be
mapped on to the varied developmental levels that a child passes through in the
lifespan. He believed that children needed to concretize their operations on the world,
develop abstract ideas about form and function. The presence of an intermediate tool (a
physical object) made it easier for participants in Piaget’s experiments to map abstract
thinking onto actual action in the social world.
Per Piaget’s theory, individuals construct representations of the world through social
interactions and operations on the environment. We assimilate new information from the
environment as phenomena unfold around us. Accommodation of information into one’s
network of schemes is dictated by the level of congruence between existing schemes
and new information. Social interactions in collaborative settings also lead to such an
interplay between accommodation and assimilation, through social learning. Over the
lifespan, cognitive development occurs through an interplay of biological and social

factors in schematic stages per Piaget; however, there can be a horizontal decalage
between stages owing to the varied experiences that children and adolescents undergo
through the lifespan that dictate the occurrence of developmental transitions across the
four stages (Kuhn & Angelev, 1976). While Piaget focuses on social learning and
mental constructions through stage-wise development, Vygotsky, who studied human
development around the same time, suggests that integrated processes of social,
emotional, and cognitive lead to the development of thinking over the lifespan through
the individual development of the organism, the biological development of the organism,
and its cultural-historical experiences. In practice, both theories can be applied in an
isomorphic manner; with Piaget’s theory providing scope to examine the differences
across varied age groups in a more or less demarcated manner.
In this conceptual paper co-authored by undergraduate students and their instructor

participating in a seminar on educational psychology, we describe the basic tenets of
Piaget’s theory, and understand how it may be applied to teaching and learning in the
classroom using scholarly perspectives and visual storyboards. The narratives we use
were co-constructed by students to depict their representations of the applications of
Piaget’s theory and provide guidelines to future practitioners to apply the postulates of
stage development, assimilation and accommodation, and social learning to classroom
teaching.
The first part of this paper covers the basic concepts of assimilation and
accommodation. We understand how Piaget’s approach involves the construction of
mental representations through a constant interplay between these processes, resulting
in an alternation between equilibration and disequilibration through an illustrated
example describing a child coming across an albino squirrel for the first time ever. The
second part of this paper outlines the utility of Piaget’s stage theory in designing
classroom instruction for students at varied grade levels, and outlines possible
applications through short, illustrated storyboards outlining how these activities can be
operationalized. The third part of this paper examines how Piaget’s theory may also be
used to understand learning through social interactions, highlighting how socio-cognitive
conflict can be fostered in the classroom in a Socratic seminar setting, to incorporate
the diverse representations of the world students may develop into learning.
ASSIMILATION, ACCOMODATION, AND EQUILIBRATION
Piaget suggests that an interplay between assimilation and accommodation leads to the
modification of schemes in the mind that organize information internalized from the
social environment (Piaget, 1970). Assimilation involves the integration of incoming
information into mental schemes. For example, a child who sees an albino squirrel for
the first time incorporates the scheme for the albino coloration of the animal into their
existing scheme. However, since this scheme conflicts with the usual brown/hazel
coloration of the squirrel the child possesses, it must be renegotiated and explained.
Figure 1
Assimilation and accommodation through the example of the albino squirrel

(illustrated by Shantanu Tilak).
Talking to an adult and hearing about albinism in animals might support this
accommodation process with valid information. Both assimilation and accommodation
act like two pieces of a puzzle, in constant interplay with one another. Each of these
phenomena can take primacy at different points in time through the course of our social
experiences. Assimilation is largely parametrized by the characteristics of objects, and
accommodation is subsumed further to understand how new information can be
organized within assimilated information. When assimilation outweighs accommodation,
or when the characteristics of a new phenomenon or object are not taken into
consideration, then it makes the individual look at the world in a more egocentric
manner. If the child observing the squirrel does not take the color of the squirrel into
account as a source of difference and assimilates the knowledge as is, then it limits the
expansion of schemes to incorporate an elementary understanding of albinism.
However, when accommodation takes precedence in the equilibration process, then
one always compares the existing schemes to new information in terms of
characteristics (Block, 1982). This knowledge may be developed through imitation of
what others do as well to navigate new ideas. If the child looking at the squirrel, for
example, has an adult around, they may be prompted to accelerate the accommodation
process for the child immediately, leading the child to adopt the standpoint of a
caregiver
When we consider these two facets of mental models as isolated phenomena,

assimilation and accommodation seem to work in opposite ways. Assimilation depends
on the idea of form and function intrinsic to an object, while accommodation involves
bending existing repertoires to explain the rationale behind a new typology of
information. Without assimilation, there would be no continuity in how we organize
knowledge into schemes. Without accommodation, one would not be able to navigate
new information in the context of existing information, deductively. This means that
without one or the other, a child cannot develop. The interplay between assimilation and
accommodation occurs in a manner that reflects the neurological wiring of an organism
to reach stability.
Each new piece of information we encounter (a squirrel with a shorter tail, for example)
requires us to look at previous information and perform self-regulatory functions that
reorganize information so we can make sense of the world. This is known as Piaget’s
(1977) theory of equilibration and has two postulates. The idea that equilibrium and its
achievement by the organism is a dynamic process coincides with the ideas of systems
science and cybernetics (Tilak et al., 2022). Heinz von Foerster, an electrical engineer,
epistemologist and cybernetician who collaborated closely with Piaget, suggested that
adaptation/evolutionary processes lead to changes in behavior/thinking in a recursive
fashion (Cope & Kalantzis, 2022); much like an eigen function that reformulates itself
with time.
The first of these postulates states that any scheme of assimilation tends to feed itself
readily with criterion and parameters similar to existing ones. Novel information needs to
be accommodated for. The second postulate deals with accommodation suggesting
that this process leads to the complete alteration of existing assimilated knowledge.
However, such accommodation or change does not lead to a loss of continuity in the
assimilated information. Equilibration necessitates accommodation, and the
conservation of assimilated schemes after they are iteratively altered to add new
information. Applying this to the example presented in this section of coming across an
albino squirrel, a child alters their scheme of a squirrel to incorporate the possibility of
lighter fur coloration, while still conserving the existing scheme. Piaget suggests that the
interplay between assimilation and accommodation occurs throughout the lifespan as
individuals develop increasingly complex understandings of ways to navigate their
social world.
STAGE DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATIONS TO PRACTICE
Piaget’s theory suggests that children develop through the construction of mental
representations, and through social interactions in a schematic, stage-wise manner. As
children develop, they accrue higher cognitive ability to perceive and categorize
knowledge into new schemes. This progression of schemes and processes of
equilibration form the crux of Piaget’s stage theory (Piaget & Inhelder, 2013). Stage
development involves the maturation of the brain, a development of the curiosity of the
child to organize new information they gain through experiences in a networked world.
In this section, we outline the four stages postulated by Piaget’s approach, and provide
a description of how teachers at varied grade levels may apply such an approach to
instructional practices accompanied by illustrated storyboards. While the role of stage
development or the nature of organic experience in the social environment can never be
prioritized de facto (Pask, 1976), Piaget and Vygotsky’s work point toward a constant
interplay between the biological and the cultural makeup of each organism in the social
world.
Here, we specifically adopt the Piagetian frame of reference and try to understand
varied classroom practices that may be utilized to operationalize this specific frame of
reference. Piaget’s approach, by understanding stage development and the iterative
development of the mind’s capacity to deal with increasingly complex problems in
efficient ways, provides a blueprint to trace the development of intelligence, cognition,
and behavior with time (Piaget, 1956). Below, we describe the four stages into which
stage development is organized per Piaget’s theory and outline how teachers at varied
grade levels (from kindergarten to college) may apply their ideas to teaching and
learning through illustrated storyboards that narrate concrete activities that practitioners
may utilize.
Sensorimotor Stage
The first stage in Piaget’s theory is called the sensorimotor stage, which spans between
zero and two years. During this stage, children largely learn to coordinate their
perceptual and motor functions to operate on objects in the social world and create new
schemata to understand how objects beyond their perceptual field do not “disappear”.
This is known as object permanence. At the sensorimotor stage, children slowly develop
the ability to use representations of physical objects that can be used as mental
symbols. A good example would be the example highlighted by Piaget of his daughter
(a year and three months old) pretending to go to sleep by lying down, using a
tablecloth as a symbolic representation of a pillow (Piaget & Cook, 1952).
Early childhood educators and parents can look at the sensorimotor stage and examine
how one can teach the child in a way that will help to progress the child to the next
cognitive stage; helping them understand form and function, and how to create mental
representations of objects. While this is not technically “classroom” learning and may be
conducted in a play-to-learn setting, it is still critical to the cognitive development of a
child. A parent with a child in this stage can begin to enforce basic cognitive functions
such as object permanence through means such as “peek-a-boo”. Parents can also
begin to connect symbols to certain tasks and objects so the child can begin to
rationalize how certain symbols relate to physical entities. Using concrete objects in the
classroom is also another way to heighten children’s sensorimotor skills. An example is
threading a sturdy corded rope through a Wiffle Ball (Parks, 2014), and allowing young
children in a childcare classroom or in the home to perform tracking, grabbing and
swatting exercises to understand the form and function of the object.
Figure 2
Swiffer ball activity (illustrated by Shantanu Tilak).
Another way to heighten sensorimotor skills in early childhood is to expose children to

surfaces and materials having different textures. Teachers can use folders swatched
with textured fabrics, or sensory tables and invite children to conduct tactile activity with
these tools. Descriptive explanations of these textures and tactile experiences offered
by teachers can help children develop symbolic representations of physical objects
through words.
Figure 3
Texture activity (illustrated by Shantanu Tilak).
Such techniques may help children understand the qualities of physical objects, how
they can be manipulated to exercise their form and function, and what inherent purpose
this form, and function symbolically serve.
Preoperational Stage
As symbolic behaviors and representations start to become apparent in the child’s

mental models, the child may be considered developed enough to enter the
Preoperational Stage or the representational stage. In this stage which spans from ages
two to six or seven, the child further heightens competence with symbolic interpretations
of the world. However, the child often uses a motivation or cause-effect model to explain
how the world worlds. The conversation between Piaget and a five-year-old recounted
in the introduction to this paper highlights how the attributions made by children to
cause and effect are often based on their own representation of how the world works.
Julia’s perception that the trees create the wind by waving their branches is just one
example. Piaget showcases the example of a child at this level who suggests that the
Sun moves because “God pushes it” and that the stars, much like himself, must go to
bed when the sun sets (Piaget & Inhelder, 2013). Children thus make intuitive
observations and often find it hard to separate cause-and-effect processes in the social
world from their own experiences and goals.
Some examples of behavior and thinking in the preoperational stage are when children
engage in pretend play or when they talk about events that have happened in the past
or with people who are not currently present with them. During this stage, children begin
to understand identities more as well. Categorization also becomes important in this
stage. Children are able to start classifying objects based on similarities or differences,
as well as quantity. They begin to say things like “more” or “bigger”. As evidenced by
exercises such as the balance scale experiment, children often expect the weighing
instrument to stay in place even as they adjust the input weights by hand. In addition,
they also develop a better understanding of symmetry, with some correctly unloading
weights from an overloaded balance and believing that a higher quantity or volume
equates to a higher weight.
Figure 4
Piaget’s balance scale experiment.
The preoperational stage can be examined through the lens of a preschool teacher. For
example, in the classroom a preschool teacher can use tools such as stories, songs and
games to teach basic vocabulary or even ways in which we interact with each other as
humans. These tools become an effective teaching method at this stage because kids
develop a deeper understanding of the abstract, symbolic nature of language and its
use to provide cues to navigate the social environment. This sets the stage for problem-
solving to emerge in educational settings at the concrete operations stage.
Concrete Operations Stage
The third stage of cognitive development is the Concrete Operational Stage. At this
stage, which spans between seven and 11 years of age, the child increases the inability
to deal with the properties of the world in a coherent manner. Children are able to solve
more problems, including mathematical operations, understand form and function, and
quantity at a deeper level. Their spatial abilities also improve. They become better at
understanding time and distance. During this stage, children are able to learn
classification and can-perform reverse operations. Numerical competence in
mathematics is important during this time, often warranting teaching multiplication
division and other computational operations. Qualitative studies have suggested that a
student’s analytical ability increases with age, and there are significant differences in the
analytical processing ability of a young adolescent compared to an older adolescent
(Klaczynski, 2001).
At the concrete operations stage, a second-grade teacher will use a different teaching
method from that of a preschool teacher to educate their students. A second-grade
teacher will employ methods such as small group projects to teach a concept such as
conservation (using two different shaped glasses of water to explain the concept of
volume), or have students write short stories to encourage creativity and begin
expanding their knowledge of the structure and use grammatical knowledge to express
ideas in writing and even speak to others.
Figure 5
Conservation activity (illustrated by Shantanu TilaK).
The last two stages of Piaget’s theory differ in that they are based on action, or
operation upon the world. The first of these, the concrete operations stage, allows a
deeper familiarity with the utility of knowledge and how to manipulate it. It lays down the
framework for formal logic and abstraction to take on a nuanced form in navigating the
social world.
Formal Operations Stage
In the formal operations stage, or the last stage in Piaget’s stage theory, which spans
between 12—15 years and extends into adulthood, is marked by an increased
competence with abstraction and problem-solving based on critical thinking. In this
stage, children are able to interrelate varied problems and ideas and examine the
possible relationships between them to solve a problem. Piaget suggests it involves the
logic of all possible combinatory, isomorphic solutions tested in an experimental or
deductive manner. Children let go of their need to have physical representations to
develop ideologies and conceptual repertoires about phenomena they have previously
observed in their environments, or things they have learned (Piaget & Inhelder, 2013).
They are able to use existent possibilities and outcomes to reappropriate new
possibilities beyond the realm of existing knowledge (Levesque, 2014). The idea of
formal operations, and stagewise progression into formal operation has often been
criticized by scholars such as Kuhn & Angelev (1976), who suggest that a schematic
stagewise progression is only a rough outline to understand the progression of
development, with a horizontal decalage leading to the displacement of the
demarcations of each stage depending on the nature of social experience. While
individuals develop the capacity for such formal operations differentially, this can be tied
to the idea that each individual is embedded in a highly complex social world,
developing varied dispositions and preferences with the passage of time.
An example of a teaching practice employing formal operations is a paper construction

activity used to teach Piaget’s theory in a preservice teacher classroom of
undergraduate students. This activity was employed in the class co-governed by the
authors of this paper. The instructor divided the classroom into groups of five students,
with two serving as a learner and instructors, and three others taking notes of the
interactions between them. The teachers were presented with a set of shapes and a
solution to a puzzle involving an arrangement of said shapes in a particular orientation.
The teachers would provide instructions to the learners, who sat with their backs to the
teachers and used the mental representation they developed of the teacher’s words to
faithfully recreate the provided puzzle. Recorders create abstract interpretations of the
activity, reporting what they see, and relating it back to Piaget’s theory. The instructor
then discusses these relationships to Piaget’s theory highlighted by the activity with the
whole class and works with the students to understand how the processes of
assimilation and accommodation can be applied to varied subject classrooms.
Figure 6
Construction activity (illustrated by Shantanu Tilak).
This activity is an example of formal operations as it allows students to perform a well-

defined, goal-oriented activity implicitly applying Piaget’s work, and then explaining
these links through abstract arguments and connections in the context of specific
classroom applications that teachers can engage in along similar lines.
PIAGET’S SOCIAL THEORY
In most understandings of Piaget, it is often assumed that his theory concerns itself
largely with individual development. However, Piaget’s theory can also be looked at in
relation to social, affective, and personality-related factors to understand how to design
developmentally appropriate cooperative learning. Just as individuals construct
knowledge of the object world, they also develop abstract socio-moral and cognitive
repertoires that they exercise throughout their lifespan, iteratively. Sophistication is
added to one’s standpoints by observing others and through relationships with both
peers and adults (DeVries, 1997). Heinz von Foerster (1972) highlighted the
possibilities of social learning during his heuristics course at the University of Illinois,
which led to the co-creation of art and scholarly perspectives by undergraduate students
and instructors, much like the class via which this paper was written (Segal, 1986).
Showing a lithograph of a seated student with a funnel attached to their head, von
Foerster explained to his students that a knowledge banking model of education may
prevent students from accruing the skills and social capital to navigate a highly
networked world.
As children develop, they interact with peers and adults and develop both
heteronomous and autonomous moralities, either by submitting obediently to the ideas
of others or exercising their own perspectives based on how they feel and think
(DeVries, 1997). This means every individual constructs knowledge iteratively based on
their affective and cognitive repertoires of schematized data from the environment.
Moral development may occur based on the standpoints that individuals take up from
others via heteronomous relationships. However, it also occurs through autonomous
morality, which involves the opportunity for self-reflection on whether something is
agreeable based on one’s own lexicon of ideas and schemes. A non-hierarchical,
distributed version of this morality may also be adopted, wherein both the expert and
child act as equals and collaborate to navigate the social world. Both the perspectives
that one accumulates over the lifespan and those learned from others play a role in the
development of thinking. Peer relations become a powerful sandbox to equip students
with the skills to understand their own perspectives and those of others.
In interacting with others, one may either agree or disagree with their standpoints, but
equilibration occurs when one is able to successfully navigate and integrate varied
perspectives. Piaget’s ideas about social learning and sociocognitive conflict suggest
that both comfortable and uncomfortable interactions with peers help kids develop new
perspectives and see the world from a different point of view than their own. These
ideas can be used to create healthy classroom discussion and group dynamics in
classrooms with young students. A study by Johnson & Johnson (2009a) emphasized
the importance of facilitating conflict in a classroom. Many teachers are initially
apprehensive to encourage debate in their classrooms because it may rile up the class
or make certain students uncomfortable; however, the authors of this article would
argue that conflict is incredibly constructive and a great tool to use in the classroom.
Conflict not only can draw in students’ interest in a topic, but also encourages them to
research more about the information they are debating and makes them care more
about the material. Holding debates or controlled arguments in classes has shown to
increase the amount of information students retain and helps strengthen peer
relationships by promoting conversation and allowing a safe environment to share
opinions. This relates back to Piaget’s idea that even unpleasant interactions are
necessary for development because through debate, students are able to open their
eyes to many new perspectives on a topic that they may not have considered before.
They can rely on one another to have productive, healthy interactions and create new
knowledge (Johnson & Johnson, 2009b). Moderated debates and small group
discussions driven by norms enable students to discuss existing knowledge, and also
accommodate new standpoints through civil discourse.
Sociocognitive conflict provides an effective way for kids at the elementary, middle and
high school level to reconsider their beliefs and open their minds to new perspectives.
While debates are helpful in opening children's points of view, Piaget also theorized that
pleasant interactions with peers are helpful with development. Having normal
conversations with friends and frequently being able to share ideas is another way to
help children open up their perspectives of the world (Ormrod et al., 2020). In the
classroom, such social interactions can be facilitated in a well-governed manner to help
students create new knowledge through a cooperative process.
Socratic Seminars: Operationalizing social learning
According to Piaget’s theory, children develop a very basic sense of self and
understanding of their own capabilities while they are young and begin to create a more
complex understanding as they grow and evolve; this is where the tie to the interaction
between biologically guided temperament interacts with the environment to develop
distinct personality profiles. While Piaget’s theory conforms children to a series of
developmental processes within a certain age frame, it can be used to understand the
complexities of identity of students at varied age levels. A student’s identity, across
factors ranging from personality to social, racial, and gender identities, can affect the
way they learn and help provide cues and modifications for teaching within the
classroom.
We provide a storyboard narrating a short story to show how peers can help construct
adaptive mental representations and standpoints related to one’s own feeling of
belongingness in the classroom, irrespective of appearance and cultural background.
This tool may be used for young children with basic reading capability to understand
ideas related to belongingness and how it is socially constructed. It also becomes a
semiotic tool for teachers to learn about Piaget’s theory here. The flower that blossoms
in the illustration is red, whereas all the surrounding flowers (peers) are purple. This
color difference causes the red flower to begin to doubt their identity compared to the
rest of their peers and focus on the aspects of themselves that don’t fit with peers'
expectations. . As you can see in the illustration, the other flowers begin to look at the
red flower differently since it is the only red flower. However, over the course of the day,
the sun and birds help the flower embrace its differences which helps to re-instill its
confidence and allow it to accommodate the idea of an inclusive safe space into its
present action and thinking, through a social process. This shows how healthy,
cooperative interactions lead to adaptive outcomes in moral development
Figure 7
A storyboard depicting social learning (illustrated by Gray Fulton).

While a child is young, their personality begins to develop according to both nature and
nurture, meaning that both internal factors, such as heritage, and external factors, such
as a child’s lived experience at school and in public spaces, help to develop their
temperament and outlook on the world around them. In this section, we understand how
to develop capacities for abstract argumentation in late adolescence, when the capacity
for abstract reasoning heightens through Socratic seminars. At the high school level, a
student’s personality is often well developed, which may create discourse due primarily
to the fact the student has also developed critical thinking and argumentative skills that
allow them to defend their own position. This is not necessarily negative discourse
however, and a teacher can harbor this argumentative ability and help to guide it in a
productive manner within the classroom, through the use of techniques such as open
discussions and Socratic seminars. The latter has provided benefits to students of all
different ranges of personality, catering to both vocal and quiet students while allowing
for a fully “student-led” discussion (Tredway, 1995).
A high school aged student has the ability to discuss complex concepts according to
their belief systems with students who may have alternative points of view, and even
qualify their own argument to some degree, whereas a child just entering the secondary
level is unlikely to concede. A teacher can allow these students to discuss high level or
controversial subjects in Socratic seminars where each can add to the conversation with
their own experience and research. In order to address differences in temperament and
personality, an educator can include a group of students to serve as observers who take
down and analyze arguments made during the seminar, which allows vocal and
confrontational students to lead the conversation while more reclusive students are able
to participate and contribute in accordance with their capabilities. Discussion based
learning can also be facilitated at the transition to the formal operations stage during
elementary school. Such argumentation was seen in the Digital Civic Learning Project’s
collaborative social reasoning activity during the food security curriculum. Students were
able to record ideas in collaborative journals constructed on Google slides while
discussing prompts in their small groups. More vocal students tended to enjoy the small
group discussions, while those wishing to gradually express their thoughts would do so
through a blog post or Flipgrid (Tilak et al., 2022).
CONCLUSION
Per the arguments in this paper, it can be seen that while Piaget’s theory does explain
how individuals construct mental representations of the world, it also delves into how
these symbolic representations arise from social experience and interactions.
Understanding the interplay between assimilation and accommodation, and how it
progressively expands cognitive repertoires and action over time, and how such
processes relate to the development of sociomoral standpoints through social
interactions is key to a multidimensional and faithful understanding of Piagetian theory.
In this paper, we use storyboards to help future practitioners and researchers to
construct their own mental representations of the applications of Piagetian theory from
our co-generated work. The result is a narrative that allows other practitioners insights
into using physical objects, and facilitating productive conflict to induce deeper
abstraction in their classrooms across varied developmental levels, through practices
expanding learners’ cognitive complexities, and their capacity for productive
collaboration and standpoint taking
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Social and cultural factors in learning Gomez et al. 89
Social and cultural factors in learning and development: Morality,

race, and the variety of learning experiences
John Gomez, Kendra Schrock, Kristen Ashbrook, Jordyn Penrod, Keller Walls,
Briana Patton, Shantanu Tilak
ABSTRACT
This paper, co-authored by undergraduate students and their instructor part of a
seminar in educational psychology, lies at the crossroads of motivation theory and
bioecological approaches to psychology, and investigates the role of and incorporation
of identity and social factors in learning and development through scholarly perspectives
and visual storytelling. The first part of this paper places parent-child relationships, peer
interactions, moral and prosocial development, and the cultural connotations of race
within a bioecological framework and showcases how to navigate differences in
motivation and learning emerging from sociocultural experiences in the environment
that guide identity formation. The second part explore the creation of identity safe
classrooms through the example of an inclusive sexual health curriculum that
incorporates content related to LGBTQ+ inclusion.
Keywords: inclusion, motivation, race, cybernetics, bioecological systems
INTRODUCTION
As scholars studying development such as Piaget (MacQueeney et al., 2022) and
Vygotsky (Mason et al., 2022; Tilak & Glassman, 2022) suggest development occurs
through an interaction between the biological, individual and cultural historical factors
guiding our experiences. While both these approaches adopt a slightly different
reference frame, both can be applied in tandem to understand the nature of
development and the integrated processes that lead to the advancement of action and
thinking in a highly interconnected social world (Pask, 1976). In this equation, students’
socialization plays an important role, as it influences the way they construct knowledge
as observers of cultural practices and patterns in their social environment. We are born
into environments that have distinct cultural, linguistic and even culinary practices. The
varied types of wet and dry food that children bring to school and share to inform others
about their identities through gift economies (Mason et al., 2022; Nukaga, 2008) are just
one example of the pluralism of cultural experiences existent within learning
environments; and how students develop distinct cultural identities owing to these
experiences.
The culture one is born into may inform the attributions and intentions that we have and
for respectively throughout the lifespan, as we undertake formal learning, and engage in
collaborative, distributed interactions in our daily lives. For example, those from highly
collectivistic cultures may desire to outperform others to preserve the culture of honor of
their family (Anderman et al., 2022); suggesting that the type of goal motivation is more
avoidant owing to the beliefs and standards one establishes for learning owing to their
background. This higher likelihood for the adoption of performance avoidance goal
structures is just one example that suggests that students’ background alters the way
they learn and react to unfolding events in the classroom.
The backgrounds of students encapsulate many attributes including gender, social
class, race, sexuality, heritage, and much more. The way these background factors
define experiences also depends on one’s social interactions with peers/adults, and the
types of moral standpoints one develops owing to exchanging standpoints with others
(DeVries, 1997). Piaget suggested mutually respectful cooperative interactions could
facilitate reflection about morality, and one’s own role in a larger social context. When
students bring their diverse experiences into these cooperative interactions, it helps
educators and researchers understand how students’ background knowledge, the
accessibility they have to educational materials, and the beliefs and practices in their
households affect learning experiences. Bronfenbrenner (1979) discussed the truncated
nature of the social systems that an individual inhabits throughout their lifespan; the
household is a nascent system a child inhabits in its earliest years. Promotive
interactions across systems (home, school, the internet, community organizations) may
foster the creation of adaptive learning and socioemotional development. Parenting,
race, peer groups, and moral standpoints all interact to define the nature of emergent
experiences, suggesting that factors one is born into, and the knowledge one constructs
in the lifespan are in constant cybernetic interplay.
Public schools are “more diverse than ever before (Fisher et al. 2012, p. 22)” requiring
educators and administrators to better govern educational environments. Professional
learning networks for principals to share and learn about new best practices from
colleagues governing other schools (Miller et al., 2022), and teacher-teaming efforts to
strategize best practices become ways to tackle the needs of a diverse pool of students,
and learn ways to create collaborative support systems where students have a voice
(Birnie, 2016). These experiences and differences create potential learning gaps in
classrooms. Students may bring different intentions, motivation, and perceived needs
to the contexts they inhabit, and these perceptions, that have behavioral antecedents,
facilitate the journey an individual takes to match the requisite variety offered by the
environment.
Differences extend past attributes and background knowledge brought from the home
environment as, “both personal and social identities are critical components of our self-
concept.” Deaux et al. (1995) note that ‘membership in social groups or collectives
provides an important basis for self- definition. Students' backgrounds impact their role
in a classroom socially and how comfortable they feel around their peers. Research has
found that women , students of color, and students of LGBTQ+ identity had experiences
that were markedly different from those with dominant social identities. These students
experienced implicit and explicit threats to identity in socialization processes, and they
developed strategies (e.g., passing or being defiant) for resisting those threats (Ostrove
et al., 2011). In this paper, we tap into the power of these differences through an asset-
based perspective to show how to create supportive, distributed educational systems
that foster belongingness and productive peer-to-peer and peer-to-teacher interactions
that embrace cultural pluralism through examples of interventions and approaches that
have been used to help bring such diversity to the forefront in educational initiatives.
This paper was co-written by undergraduate students and their instructor participating in
an Educational Psychology seminar, using visual storyboards and scholarly sources to
inform other prospective and in-service practitioners about concrete ways to create
inclusive learning environments that embrace the varied sociocultural experiences of
students, or as Vygotsky would say, their perezhivanie (Glassman et al., 2022; Mason
et al., 2022; Tilak & Glassman, 2022). Our narrative is divided into two parts. In the first
part, we explore the varied factors that contribute to students’ identities that may form
part of the varied ecological systems a child inhabits, including experiences with
caregivers (microsystem), sexuality (individual), peer-to-peer interactions
(microsystem), and moral/prosocial development, and the cultural beliefs that come with
one’s racial/ethnic background (macrosystem). We explain how through the standpoints
students develop, they can affect environments where they may not directly be present
at all times (the Internet, social causes and struggles related to cultural differences).
In the second part, we outline an approach that can be used to establish identity safe
collaborative support systems that enable adaptive socioemotional learning,
belongingness, and a reinforcement of the importance of cultural pluralism. We
specifically focus on gender and sexual identity, and showcase the example of an
evidence based sexual health curriculum (Allsop et al., 2023) in an online format to
educate middle schoolers about sexual identity, protective practices, and provide them
with medically accurate information to navigate their own sexual health
experiences.
THE VARIED FACTORS DEFINING BACKGROUND AND EXPERIENCE

Bronfenbrenner (1979), in his theory of bioecological systems, suggests that every
individual adopts several truncated social environments throughout their lifespan (Figure
1). The most immediate environment, encompassing home, school, and the community
are a child’s microsystem. Interactions between these (parent teacher conferences for
example) constitute the mesosystem. Beyond the mesosystem lies the exosystem,
which constitutes spaces that influence a child, despite them not being directly and
physically present. An example would be events at a parent’s workplace that adversely
affect the home environment. The outermost social system is the macrosystem, which
encompasses the cultural beliefs of the context inhabited by the child. Chronosystem, or
the passage of time, leads to the evolution of interactions between and within systems.
In this section, we use bioecological theory to outline the social factors part of the varied
systems a child inhabits that affect learning and development.
Figure 1
The bioecological model.
We begin with the micro and meso-systems, covering parenting, peer interactions and
moral development. We then move on to understand race and cultural beliefs belonging
to the microsystem may affect a child’s perceptions and intentions in the classroom.
Parenting Styles (microsystem & mesosystem)

The home is the first system that individuals inhabit during their lifespan, accompanied
by caregivers, guardians or parents. Bronfenbrenner would call the home a pivotal
microsystem in the child’s development, supporting most of a child’s immediate
interactions. Parents and family members show support for their child and ensure its
physical and psychological development. These early relationships enable children to
develop new perspectives about the world and develop trust with others in their social
environment. The type of bond formed with a parent is known as attachment.
Bronfenbrenner observed that attachment and care could show downstream effects on
a child’s physical and social development. Infants who are given nourishment and care,
and resources to learn and develop become self-confident adults who can adjust better
to the challenges presented by social environments, per Bronfenbrenner’s work. We
outline the role of parenting styles that caregivers may adopt in raising their children,
and how these may affect learning in the storyboard provided in Figure 2. These
parenting styles have been categorized into four types:
1. Authoritative parenting: Combines affection with reasonable restrictions

on behavior, while still holding high standards for achievement/performance.
Authoritative parents communicate clearly about why or why not behaviors
are acceptable, and also provide choice to their children, showing potential to
help their children learn from their mistakes through critical reasoning
(Duineveld et al., 2017). While it is regarded that children of authoritative
parents are the most well-balanced and sociable, it isn’t universally the best
parenting style. Such parenting styles are more strongly correlated to
achievement in non-Hispanic white families than in Asian minority households
(Pinquart & Kauser, 2018).
2. Authoritarian parenting: Expects immediate obedience and compliance,

without negotiation, usually in the context of strong and supportive parent
child relationships. The ideas elaborated earlier about performance avoidance
in collectivistic cultures (Asian American and Hispanic families for examples)
owing to aspirations to uphold familial reputation (Chen & Wang, 2010) and
honor highlight this link between parenting, motivation, and learning.
3. Permissive parenting: Involves giving a lot of autonomy to the point of

ignoring the consequences of behavior, and letting children get away with
impulsive, aggressive choices (Joussemet et al., 2008).
4. Neglectful parenting: When parents do not respond to the basic needs of

children for education, clothing, food, and shelter.
In the storyboard, the outcomes that Jake, Brian, Jess and Emily face in their test-taking
task are guided by their experiences at home, as much as they are by experiences in
school. Our narrative elaborates how Jess, who lives in a home where authoritative
parenting is practice, is able to complete her work and go to the football game owing to
the reward system created by her mother and do well on the test. This lies in contrast to
Brian, who “wings the test” because his permissive parents let him.
While our storyboard provides an overview of the possible outcomes of parenting in a

test-taking task, cultural differences in the effectiveness of parenting styles must be
taken into consideration.
Figure 2
Parenting and test-taking (illustrated by Allyson Armstrong).
The home is arguably the most nascent social system that a child inhabits in their
lifespan. However, this is only one possible microsystem. As the child begins going to
preschool, peer interactions and influences also start to play a role in learning and
development.
Peer interactions (microsystem and mesosystem)

In our lifetimes, our friends have a significant impact on our thinking and behavior.
When in the adolescent stages of life, we spend a lot of time with friends, either inside
or outside of school. As Vygotsky suggests, everyday experiences and informal
interactions too, have an effect on the ways in which we learn. Learning in a culture of
emotional support and adaptive mindsets may improve the adaptive gains that may be
made from educational experiences. Brooks (2007) suggests that keeping up with
conceptualisms of ‘pure relationship’, a lot of students (young men and young women)
highlight the importance to them during their time at university of emotional support
provided by friends. Socialization is another skill one builds which is influenced by
friends . In order to make new friends, you have to be able to communicate with people
in your school, community, or neighborhood. The experiences and intentions that one’s
friends show may influence one’s own decisions. Ryan, in her article about these
influences, states, “Controlling for their initial levels of achievement (i.e., grades and test
scores), students with high-achieving friends showed greater increases in achievement
over time compared to students with lower achieving friends” (Ryan, 2000, p. 104).
A study by Ching et al. (2022) conducted on 605 ninth graders expands Ryan’s ideas
into the specific domain of sexual health education. The study suggested that students
with the lowest expectancies (answering the question, can I do this?) (Eccles &
Wigfield, 2020) for success at a sexual health curriculum focused on inclusion and
protective practices benefitted most from having peers with adaptive values about
wanting to have sex, and condom use. Goodenow & Grady (1993) investigated 191
urban adolescents (grades seven to nine) and aimed at finding whether school
belonging and the expectancies and values they perceived their peers had for school
success positively affected their own expectancies and values. There were differences
seen in terms of race, with Hispanic students showing a stronger correlation between
belonging/ friends’ values and one’s own values, compared to African American
students. This may owe to the collectivistic nature of Latinx cultures. When perceptions
of friends’ motivations were removed from the model, the relationships between school
belonging and individuals’ own motivation were weakened.
Here, we write about the example of camping in the woods. Someone who does not like
the idea of being in the woods in the dark and feels they can easily get lost can become
overwhelmed by such a task, and have a low expectancy for success at it. But when
this person’s friends, who are comfortable in the outdoors, stick together with those who
are apprehensive, it may heighten their expectancy to thrive outdoors and know that
they aren’t in harm’s way. In the classroom, such collective, promotive, peer driven
effects can be encouraged through group work. Trousdale et al. (2010) suggest
communal small group work contributes to an atmosphere of friendship in which
students found a sense of freedom and safety in expressing their feelings. Such
research suggests that peer effects have a strong influence on the way students learn.
Sociomoral development (microsystem, mesosystem, and exosystem)

As Piaget suggested, social interactions alter the representations of the social world we
create, and the emotional standpoints we develop about the phenomena occurring
around us. Cooperative peer interactions and even learning experiences that are non-
hierarchical may produce autonomous morality and reflect on the ramifications of the
standpoints that one has. The constant reappropriation of these standpoints through
peer interactions creates trajectories of moral development; an important social factor in
how we learn. Moral development is described as reasoning moments for the individual
when they must choose between their own wants or needs to those of others while
disregarding punishments, authorities, or other external forces (Deković & Janssens,
1997). The emergence of moral development is around two or three years old, when the
feelings of guilt and shame are shown within the child. Guilt is characterized as when
we know that we have caused harm or distress upon another individual, while shame is
characterized as when we do not meet either our own or other’s standards. The
negative feelings associated with behavior are then likely to deter us from repeating
behaviors and also relating to other people when they voice similar feelings, also known
as empathy (Ormrod et al., 2020). Emotion and logic begin to show interplay as the
child advances through elementary school.
Empathy can easily lead to children feeling sympathy, where they not only relate to the
misfortunate person’s feelings, but also worry for the well-being of that individual
(Ormrod et al., 2020). Sympathy can in turn lead to prosocial development in children,
otherwise stated, children are more likely to do something for another person even if it
comes as a cost for the child because they know the pain that the individual is going
through (Deković & Janssens, 1997). All of these feelings impact the way that students
interact with one another or the teacher as well as the information that they encounter.
Moral and prosocial development begins from the day the child is born as they are
raised within different communities. Through exposure from their parents, family
members, neighbors, teachers, classmates, etc.; children are being taught what is
socially acceptable or not in different situations and how they should act accordingly.
In a study conducted by Janssens and Deković, with 125 students and their parents, the
authors found that there was a correlation between the moral and prosocial
development of a child and the environment in which they are raised. The study
concluded that no matter the sex of the child, “a supportive, authoritative, and less
restrictive child-rearing style was associated with a higher level of reasoning about
prosocial moral dilemmas and with more prosocial behavior, whether assessed by
teachers or classmates” (Deković & Janssens, 1997). The authors found that children
were more likely to help those who were in distress if they come from a background
where their parents encourage thoughtful behavior and do not react harshly to what the
child has done “wrong” in their eyes. If parents are more restrictive in how the child
behaves, the study found that the child will be more focused on what will happen to
themselves rather than the victim which in turn may promote a more egotistical attitude
rather than a more altruistic attitude.
Research studies such as the Digital Civic Learning Project focus on the development
of students’ abstract reasoning through norm-driven interactions and small group
discussions. The DCL aims to create prosocial behaviors in the classroom through
group discussions, norm setting, and discussions of diversity, U.S. policy, Native
American history, and food security issues. Each class in the DCL curriculum begins
with a whole class sit-down, before the discussions occur, to decide what a discussion
looked like or what type of behavior the class should expect from everyone in a
discussion (Lu et al., 2023). Having the students think about what behaviors they are
expecting from others also allows them to think about how they have been behaving
and how that might come across to others; it also allows them to more efficiently learn
and navigate academic tasks (Cress et al., 2021; Zemel & Koschmann, 2013). It also
allows the students to think about what is important to them either morally or
behaviorally in a prosocial manner. Third culture students in the DCL curriculum whose
parents immigrated to the U.S. after their birth often shared their experiences about how
they navigated their own diverse identity as an American citizen, and adopted nuanced
moral standpoints about helping others in need from countries facing hardship (Lu et al.,
2023).
Teachers can even begin the new school year by having the class set expectations for
how they should behave throughout the year and address or change them as needed
(e.g., who gets to record data on the computer, whose turn it is to speak). Having the
students know what kind of behaviors are expected of them will help them to be better
prepared for what they should expect every time they come through the classroom door.
Giving students the autonomy to express themselves using varied modalities (speaking,
writing, videos or vlogs) as the DCL does can allow varied personalities and identities to
find ways to learn and express emotions and thoughts they prefer (synchronously, or
quietly and asynchronously). Technology can become a modelling facility in this
equation (Tilak et al., 2022a), to support ideological exchange and the reappropriation
of concepts to develop complex moral standpoints. Such sociomoral standpoint taking
not only affects the immediate classroom environment, but also behaviors and critical
reflection. Agents developing these standpoints may also be motivated to display
behaviors affecting social change in. For example, some children learning through the
food security unit were able to not only affect immediate classroom interactions through
their views, but also took the agency to write letters to community organizations to ask
about processes guiding donation and the creation of food relief initiatives (Tilak et al.,
2022b).
Race and ethnic identity

Culture encompasses the behaviors and belief systems that characterize a long-
standing social group (Ormrod et al., 2020). America as a country is made up of plenty
of different cultures but this does not mean that all of these cultures are celebrated or
accepted. For example, research has shown that Black youth are often stigmatized in
school settings, leading to adverse effects on perceptions of school belonging (Gray et
al., 2018). Another example is stated by Padilla (2006) in their study of Latino
adolescents, "At home with my parents and grandparents the only acceptable language
was Spanish; actually that’s all they really understood. Everything was really Mexican,
but at the same time they wanted me to speak good English. . . . But at school, I felt
really different because everyone was American, including me. Then I would go home in
the afternoon and be Mexican again. (p.475)" This is an example of the disconnect
students feel from their home environment to their school environment. As educators we
need to do better, I believe we need to work harder to make classrooms more inclusive
spaces for all students and maybe even teach students about different cultures and
ethnicities they may not understand. Motivation research has moved towards creating
race focused variables that understands students intentions through the lens of their
cultural differences and experiences. A study by. Moses et al. (2020) exemplifies such
an interplay between cultural studies and motivation research, suggesting that Black
students with higher perceived ethnic identity was associated with greater
belongingness and affirmation in the school environment. It was also seen that the
negative relationship between adverse childhood experiences and belongingness were
mitigated by a strong ethnic identity.
This means that engaging in efforts to create safe spaces that invite students to share
about their cultures may help create belongingness, inclusion, and subsequently,
agency and motivation in learning environments. Hansen et al. (2015) studied 8,200
adolescents to understand the role of cultural activities in students’ perceived well-being
and health, and found that life satisfaction and self-esteem were positively affected by
cultural activity participation. However, no direct relationships were seen to anxiety and
depression.
From these lines of research, the first insight gleaned would be that when the chance is
presented, it is important for teachers to actively try and include cultures, perspectives
and heritages into the curriculum in a civil manner that enables students to express
freely without coercion or tokenization. In doing this, you are providing not only the other
children opportunities to learn about new and different cultures but providing a safe
place for these students to discuss themselves. When given a chance to talk and
educate fellow classmates, that could make these children feel more included, which
could change their attitude for school. A change in attitude could possibly in turn
increase their academic success with that wanting to be there. Another possibility of
inclusion in the classroom could be accommodations for religious beliefs or practices,
by celebrating varied festivals in the classroom and learning about their cultural
significance together. A good example would be the open call from The Ohio State
University’s office of diversity and inclusion (Muhammad, 2021) suggesting that
instructors make accommodations for Muslim students and Ramadan fasting practices
coincide with test schedules.
IDENTITY SAFE CLASSROOMS & INCLUSIVE SEXUAL HEALTH CURRICULA

Dorothy Steele and Becki Cohn-Vargas, in their book, Identity Safe Classrooms: Places
to Belong and Learn, stated that identity-safe classrooms validate students’
experiences, backgrounds, and identities to promote academic and social success for
all students. Creating an identity-safe classroom is essential for students to feel
welcome and valued; that they have the autonomy to express themselves and share a
culture of relatedness with others. Allowing students to pick essay topics, projects,
group configurations for collective work, are forms of autonomy that just scratch the tip
of the iceberg. Per Steele & Cohn-Vargas, many “traditional western classrooms” focus
on individual achievement and recognize that achievement, whereas in Eastern cultures
there is a focus on group success. Competition (Figure 3) can cause some students to
feel like they cannot be successful if they are not the best; our examples related to
performance avoidance among students from collectivistic cultures in such competitive
environments highlight the concerning possibilities that may emerge.
Figure 3
Top-down teaching.
Students in cooperation-focused classrooms (Figure 4) are more likely to want to work

together for the benefit of everyone rather than just themselves; such an environment
can also foster a stronger sense of autonomy, as groups may work to achieve their own
objectives while still forming strong social bonds and enhancing their skills at the task at
hand. Rogat & Linnenbrink-Garcia (2019), through their study of science middle school
classrooms suggest that between group competition, and mastery or passion within
group to deeply understand ideas produces the most adaptive outcomes in terms of
cognitive engagement. Creating activities that satisfy students’ needs may bring out the
best of both competition, and deeper higher order understandings of classroom
content. Jigsaw activities, and group quizzes form good examples of such activities.
Such approaches that fuse individual and collaborative learning can be applied to
teaching and learning processes related to controversial social issues like sexuality,
gender, and sociopolitical phenomena through civil discourse.
Figure 4
Cooperative learning.
Here, we specifically understand how the idea of an identity-safe classroom was

operationalized through a skills-based comprehensive sexual health curriculum
delivered to 856 middle school students (Allsop et al., 2023) that encouraged
collaborative discussions about sexual and gender identity. The “Get Real” Program
involved medically accurate information (Saxbe et al., 2021), ideas about
protection/sexually transmitted infections, as well as extensive modules on sexual and

gender identity. Students from LGBTQ+ backgrounds face social hardship in school
environments owing to their differences, but larger issues such as the “Don’t Say Gay
Bill” in Florida highlight the need for comprehensive, medically accurate information to
be provided to students to navigate their own identities and understand the ramifications
of their choices.
The students suggested that in discussions LGBTQ+ topics, the “Get Real” Program
enabled a deeper understanding of how to be an ally for other students from the
LGBTQ+ community, learn about sexual and gender identity, and even learn about
protection methods in same-sex relationships. The authors qualitatively analyzed 54
responses related to lessons learnt by students related to gender and sexual identity.
Students whose identity resonated with the curriculum’s mission plan felt it offered
strong attainment value and also utility value for their future experiences. However, the
fact that students suggested some improvements can be made to the curriculum to
make ideas about LGBTQ+ issues more comprehensive suggests that educators should
keep up with moving societal phenomena as they design curricula to educate students
about navigating their own complex social realities.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have described the varied factors that change and modulate the social
environment that a child may experience throughout the lifespan, placing our arguments
within Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological framework. While peers, family, and social
interactions in the social environments one directly occupies does directly affect
experience, the standpoints that children develop through interactions may also affect
systems that children may not directly inhabit, creating rippled social change and
transformation. The cultural beliefs that children are born into and construct with time
form a background for these individual and group differences. These truncated
systemic effects that change learning and development depend on promotive,
cooperative activity at each level. Our suggestions to incorporate these varied factors
into the design processes followed to create inclusive curricula may advance efforts to
teach the whole child.
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Personality development McKeown et al. 107
Personality development: Navigating students’ sense of self and

relationship development
Josiah McKeown, Michaela Widmer, Allison Lust, Myranda Smith, Camryn Elser, Jayna
Svoboda, Shantanu Tilak
ABSTRACT
In this two-part paper, co-authored by undergraduate students and their instructor in
Educational Psychology seminar, we discuss the frameworks and processes that guide
personality development in complex social environments, and showcase practices that
rooted in improving students’ sense of self and peer relationships to help incorporate
differences in personality development into learning. We use a combination of scholarly
perspectives and visual storyboards to highlight how personality development and the
sense of self that students visualize are guided by both inner perceptions and social
interactions. We showcase the example of two scenarios related to school bullying that
highlight the importance of creating support systems to discuss interpersonal conflict
and highlight how collaborative learning may be used by teachers to design learning
environments that account for the diversity of student personalities and tendencies.
Keywords: cybernetics, personality development, big five, collaboration, sense of self
INTRODUCTION
As discussed in the previous chapter of this book, human development and learning is
guided by a cybernetic interplay between neurobiological and social processes (Negatu
et al., 2022). Individual differences emerging from experience act upon the basic
biological make up of every living system, producing outcomes that define both thinking
and behavior in networked social systems. Each individual, as we have outlined, is
shown a trajectory for identity development in the social world, and this journey is
defined by the ways in which they react, emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally, to
phenomena they encounter in the social world. Personality psychology becomes an apt
framework to categorize and explain the types of outcomes that may emerge in social
settings based on agents’ personalities. While temperament is key to development, it is
often considered biologically inherent to the child. Temperament has been seen as an
important precursor to the emergence of distinct personalities and the
behaviors/thoughts arising from exercising these traits in one’s environment (Rothbart et
al., 1994). Temperament is the earliest expression of individual differences, and these
differences are further diversified by cultural-historical experience.
Daily activities and interactions of children and adolescents will be affected by their
temperament and can end up influencing other aspects of their personal and social
development. For example, a child who gets distracted easily may get in trouble often
for getting off task; or a quiet, shy adolescent may not make the best relationships with
others. This can also be evident in the classroom and can affect the academics of the
child or adolescent. If a student is persistent, they will achieve at higher levels versus a
student who gets distracted easily and may not achieve the same level. Personality
development thus has many different layers, starting from birth with temperament and
moving through different environmental influences, personality traits, gaining a sense of

self, and learning social relationships.
As discussed in Gomez et al. (2022) individual differences in parenting, peer

interactions and moral development, and cultural background may impact personality
and identity development. The way a child is raised by parents and other close family
members impacts the future relationships of said child. Starting as early as infants,
becoming attached to parents or other caregivers (depending on parenting styles)
boosts the chances a child will develop into a self-confident, sociable, and independent
adolescent who adjusts easily to new environments and build meaningful relationships
with others.
Culture has a direct influence on the personal and social development of a child through
socialization. Socialization is when members of a cultural group strive to have children
adopt the beliefs and behaviors the group values (Ormrod et al., 2020). These are
typically learned early on from parents /guardians and close family members, who teach
basic principles. In addition, research has shown that there are other cultural differences
in socialization practices. European and American families tend to encourage their
children to express themselves and hold their own thoughts and beliefs, while many
other areas of the globe prefer obedience, restraint, and deference to elders. European
and American children are also encouraged to be outgoing and expressive with
emotions, while in many Asian cultures they are pushed to be more respectful and
reserved. In Japan, seniority (older age) is highly respected and establishes the
importance of discipline. In Western culture; individualism, competition, and material
wealth are of high value, whereas they are not as important in Hispanic culture (Carlson
et al. 2004). Different cultures will influence how one acts as one grows older and gains
a more developed personality.
Despite these cultural differences, personality psychologists have tried to

dimensionalize personality through frameworks comprising specific traits. Personality
traits are big markers of development in a child, and several frameworks of such traits
have been developed to understand individual’s trait level characteristics and how they
affect social and decision-making processes in the social world. In this two-part paper,
that was co-authored by undergraduate students and their instructor in an Educational
Psychology seminar, we first specifically focus on the Big Five Model, and understand
both the advantages and critique associated with it. We highlight how the Big Five
framework is a useful tool to study personality empirically, rather than a be all and end
all guide for practitioners. Secondly, we explain the role of personality in relationship
development through an enhancement of one’s perceived sense of self and provide the
example of two storyboards related to navigating peer bullying.
THE BIG FIVE: A TOOL FOR DIMENSIONALIZING PERSONALITY
A fundamental question in personality research is trying to understand how man

constructs or dimensions are needed to understand the individual differences in
personality development in a nuanced manner. Hierarchical modeling, in the past, has
produced frameworks such as Cattell’s 16 factor model, Eysenck’s Big Three

(psychoticism, neuroticism, extraversion), and the Big Six (Ashton & Lee, 2007), which
adds the notion of honesty-humility to the Big Five framework. A well-known juggernaut
of a framework that has been commonly used in recent times is the Big five model
(McCrae, 2002), which comprises openness to experience, conscientiousness,
extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. In Table 1, we present the dimensions of
the Big Five, along with a brief description of each in terms of traits for high and low
manifestations of these traits within individuals.
Table 1
Further dimensionalizing the Big Five on a scale in terms of traits (adapted from Poropat
et al., 2009).
Big 5 Low score qualities High score qualities
openness Practical, conventional, Curious, wide range of
prefers routine interests, independent
conscientiousness Impulsive, careless, Hardworking, dependable,

disorganized organized
extraversion Quiet, reserved, withdrawn Outgoing, warm, seeks

adventure
agreeableness Critical, uncooperative, Helpful, trusting,

suspicious empathetic
neuroticism Calm, even-tempered, Anxious, unhappy, prone

secure to negative emotions
There have been several theoretical and methodological arguments guiding the
adaptation of existing frameworks. For example, DeYoung et al. (2002) added stability
and plasticity as meta factors to the Big Five, suggesting that stability subsumes
conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability (opposite of neuroticism), and
plasticity subsumes neuroticism, openness to experience and extraversion. Such re-
dimensionalization of personality frameworks suggests that there may be potential to
investigate the existence of a General Factor of personality (Musek et al., 2007). Van
der Linden et al. (2010) supported the claim of the GFP at the highest hierarchical level
of measuring personality traits and suggested that evidence may point to the validity of
the stability and plasticity constructs.
Based on these findings which display that individuals may answer personality
measures in ways that organize the patterns of their behavior in many ways, it is
important to note that the five factor model is only a convenient tool that may be used to
categorize personality for convenient insights (Ozer & Reise, 1994) to be developed to
enable every individual in a social environment to thrive, have a voice, and feel a sense
of belonging. The interplay between temperamental/biological and social factors was
displayed in a study conducted by Graziano et al. (1998) on 69 kids (aged three to six
years) and their teachers revealed that differences in temperament, and motor activity,
along with behaviors that guided or inhibited socialization predicted teacher’s
projections of what a child’s personality would be in the down the line.
This notion shows that agents such as teachers in a social environment may perceive
salient, distinct behavioral and thought patterns in their students, forming expectations
and projections about how they may navigate their future social environments. Such
navigation of social environments is guided by the development of a strong sense of
self, and meaningful social relationships.
THE SELF & RELATIONSHIPS: NAVIGATING LEARNING SETTINGS
As described in this paper's introduction, personality development is guided by an

interplay of latent and social factors. These latent factors are rooted in both biology, and
cognition, and constantly influenced by the nature of social interactions and
relationships we form as a byproduct of daily experiences. In this section, we
specifically focus on the interplay between one’s sense of self, or one’s perception of
the collection of traits or characteristics that define them (Ormrod et al., 2020), and the
development of relationships in complex social environments like schools.
Sense of Self
A child’s sense of self starts to develop in early childhood and gets more intricate as
said child goes into adolescents and further into adulthood. There are three main factors
that go into the development of a sense of self. Children often learn about themselves in
a certain area from their own experiences, both successes and failures. Through these
experiences, one starts to develop a sense of self-efficacy (perceived capacity to
perform a task( about how well one can succeed in certain tasks. This can be beneficial
to self-esteem but often also produces negative self-esteem. A poor sense of self that
leads to poor self-esteem often produces unproductive behaviors and fewer successes,
leading to an even lower sense of self. From the previous arguments made in this book
about belonging, related to studies in motivation psychology of race and ethnic identity
and belonging in school (Moses et al., 2020), it can be understood that the
belongingness one feels to a social environment often shows interplay with this sense of
self. This means it is key to develop learning environments that allow assertive
communications and productive conflict resolution between peers having varied
personalities and backgrounds. In the storyboard provided below (Figure 1) we present
the example of a child who is bullied for being visually impaired and display the self-
perception the child develops because of these experiences.
Figure 1
How maladaptive interactions affect sense of self (illustrated by Jayna Svoboda).
Peers often make comments about others’ performance levels, whether it be desiring to
interact more with them, or making fun of them for poor performance (Ormrod et al.,
2020). These phenomena affect the way that individuals think about themselves. In the
storyboard, a friend’s support enables Bobby to feel better about himself, but the name-
calling affects his self-perception. From this illustration we can see that social
interactions may produce adaptive or maladaptive outcomes related to one’s sense of

self. Designing learning environments to support cooperative, and mutually respectful
interactions at the formal and informal level may help combat such issues that students
develop with their perceived sense of self.
Relationship development
The maladaptive self-perceptions that students may develop because of bullying can do
much harm to their self-efficacy to learn and thrive at school. Bullying is often a
byproduct of the formation of cliques and subgroups that define social hierarchies in
learning environments. The cycle of bullying often perpetuates due to a lack of
bystander involvement. Such issues can be mediated when school and classrooms
become support spaces to discuss interpersonal conflict and form attitudes that support
allyship and civility in the school environment. In our second storyboard (Figure 2), we
show how peers can be brought into the equation of helping shy students with varied
personalities feel a sense of confidence. By sticking up for the new student, and inviting
them to hang out, the other students in the storyboard become allies who can help
students navigate their apprehensions with relationship development and trust their
peers, showing potential to display higher extraversion and openness to new
experiences.
Figure 1
Bullying and relationship development (illustrated by Camryn Elser).
Peer relationships provide an opportunity to learn and practice social skills. Second,
peers can help each other with schoolwork and teach others physical and cognitive
skills that others may not be able to (Ormrod et al., 2020). Next, peers provide
invaluable companionship, safety, and emotional support. Peers tend to understand the
situations of their friends more than other people who may have no idea what is going
on.
Even teachers can play an important role in incorporating varied personalities in the
classroom. Allowing shy students to participate as observers in Socratic seminars (see
MacQueeney et al., 2022 in this book), or even allowing more extroverted students to
work with more reserved individuals may allow an exchange of perspectives that
emerge from direct engagement in the classroom and from quiet individual work. Shyer
students may feel comfortable interacting with their peers because they only have to
interact with a small group of people and will express their ideas in the classroom
(Ormrod et al., 2020). Our third storyboard (Figure 3) that we present in this paper
highlights this role that teachers may play in designing collaborative learning
environments that enable bringing the experiences of students with different
personalities into classroom discussions.
Figure 3
Cooperative learning (illustrated by Myranda Smith).
By gradually modeling group activity for a shy student, the teacher in our storyboard is
able to gradually develop Mindy’s competence with learning that is guided by agentic
interactions. Pairing students who struggle with socializing with students who excel at it
can help with building social skills that the student otherwise missed out on. A lot of
these skills that students lack are due to the lack of healthy relationships and
attachments built with the people in their home life. If a parent or guardian is constantly
working long hours and cannot spend as much time with their child as others, it will
have a lasting impact on a child’s ability to trust others.
Therefore, observing the interactions among students from the teacher's point of view is
very important. This is shown in the storyboard through the teacher, Mr. Lee, observing
the interactions between his students to readjust how the class will finish their
assignments. Overall, having the student who struggles with socializing work one-on-
one with another student who excelled in it can lessen the chances of the student
feeling overwhelmed in the classroom. Not to mention the importance of informing
students of the weekly schedule in the classroom. It allows students to prepare
themselves for group work or a lot of socializing.
Other ways to do this involve assigning asynchronous and synchronous work to

students, that may allow more vocal students to express themselves in verbal
discussions and debates, and quieter students to work on tasks such as blogging and
video essays through quiet reflection on their own time.
Overall, the ways we have recommended to reorganize classroom practice to create
support systems of allyship and constructive interactions orient themselves around well-
being, and school responses to the specificities of the traits of students (Moreira et al.,
2021) that define their behavior and thinking.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have described how personality development occurs because of the
interplay between biological and social phenomena guiding human experience. We
describe how the Big Five has been used to dimensionalize personality within a
convenient framework for empirical research and show that such factor structures only
present ways in which human agents think about these constructs presented in
measurement tools.
We also show how both one’s sense of self, and the nature of the ties and social
relationship one engages in affect personality development, and how classrooms can
be designed to support discussions of individual differences and ways to navigate them.
We suggest that such approaches may help create educational environments that
incorporate the experiences of students with varied dispositions and comfort levels with
different learning modalities and activities.
REFERENCES
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engagement with school and personality: a biopsychosocial and person‐centred
approach. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(2), 691-713.
Moses, J. O., Villodas, M. T., & Villodas, F. (2020). Black and proud: The role of ethnic-
racial identity in the development of future expectations among at-risk
adolescents. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 26(1), 112.
Musek, J. (2007). A general factor of personality: Evidence for the Big One in the five-
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128
CONCLUSION: VIEWING THE WHOLE EARTH

In the conclusion to this book, we describe the process towards shared understandings
of educational theory and practice that was engaged in this class, using the cybernetic
framework of Gordon Pask (Manning, in press; Pask, 1972; Tilak & Glassman, 2022).
We show how using collaborative technologies and project-based approaches directed
towards co-authoring a multimodal text, teaching back theoretical concepts or
interviewing practitioners, and participating in social-media assisted live streams
students to not only learn about educational theory, but also visualize and more
enabled student
deeply understand the practices they may engage in as they enter their future careers.
In our system, each agent could serve as a student and a teacher simultaneously; with
technologies such as Reddit, cloud-based Google and Microsoft tools, and Carmen
Instructure acting as modelling facilities to track student progress, and work with the
class to change the syllabus on an iterative basis to better match student needs. The
students and instructor in this class acted as equal partners, compiling assignments to
create the 2022 Whole University Catalogue, and continuously reappropriating concepts
related to educational theory and practice through the lens of their own experiences,
using scholarly conjecture and visual storyboarding.
This cyclical interplay between each of our identities as students and teachers has
allowed us to become observers who can change their references frames of the world
of teaching and learning on the fly, as new phenomena emerge in our social world.
Such reactive observation, guided by the vicissitudes of emerging social phenomena,
are the crux of cybernetics, as well as teaching in the 21st century, where wicked
problems such as online polarization and the politicization of issues such as climate
change, and abortion require us to become agentic citizens. Education becomes an
outlet for the application of systems theory, to understand how to educate preservice
educators in the art of teaching and learning such that they can take what they learn,
and reappropriate/apply it in a manner that is cybernetically compliant, or reactive to the
emerging needs of students in a learning environment.
129
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Chapter 3: Special Education.....................................................................................70

Chapter 4: Social and cultural factors.......................................................................88

Chapter 5: Personality and sense of self................................................................107

Cybernetic explorations of educational theory and practice:

may constitute an approach involving curriculum creation, implementation and

If a system is legitimately said to teach, then it must be able to learn from

learning management systems (specifically Instructure), cloud-based technologies

educational practice as scientific and everyday concepts (Gutierrez, 2008; Glassman et

designed in an attempt to amplify collaborative interaction and reflexive thinking about

gravitate towards, reappropriate the concepts created by others to curate new

Setting & Tools

Syllabus & Participatory Design

As shown, till Session 17 (Week 10), we conducted live-chats bi-weekly as the

THE 2022 WHOLE UNIVERSITY CATALOGUE: A SUMMARY

In Chapter 2, MacQueeney et al. (2022) explore Piaget’s theory of development and

practice as a prospective teacher) accrued in a learning environment constitutes

IMPLICATIONS: THIRD SPACES FOR PRESERVICE TEACHER TRAINING

Glassman M., Lin T. J., Ha S. Y. (2022). Concepts, collaboration, and a company of

Deconstructing Vygotsky: Narrow structural dependency,

In this multimodal conceptual paper employing theoretical conjecture and visual

Keywords: Vygotsky, concept development, identity, third space, critical theory,

The role of schematic stage-wise progression/mental construction and organic,

A central tenet of Vygotsky’s theory is that humans reappropriate knowledge through

according to colloquialisms of Russian language, referring more to organic development

The illustrated examples used in this paper were co-generated by undergraduate

STRUCTURAL DEPENDENCY & DISTRIBUTED LEARNING: APPLICATIONS

As we have described in the introduction, there are different interpretations and

Narrow structural dependency: Scaffolding

show clear evidence of how students’ competence can be augmented through

Distributed learning & its possibilities

and concept development. This perspective can be applied by researchers, and

Looking at the Zone of Proximal Development as a space accessed through the

A simulation-based approach to cooperative learning at the college level was used by

SCIENTIFIC & EVERYDAY CONCEPTS AS PATHWAYS FOR IDENTITY

Mastering the ollie (illustration by Shantanu Tilak & Maria-Vittoria Zambelli).

ZPDS AS THIRD SPACES: AN EAST ASIAN PERSPECTIVE

Creating CSPs: Navigating Linguistic and Culinary Diversity

A storyboard outlining the creation of a third space through a potluck (illustration by

Nukaga, M. (2008). The underlife of kids' school lunchtime: negotiating ethnic

Van Der Stuyf, R. R. (2002). Scaffolding as a teaching strategy. Adolescent learning

Applying Piaget to classroom teaching: Stage development and social

In this three-part paper co-authored by undergraduate students and their instructor

Keywords: Piaget, psychology, education, cybernetics, development, teaching

general, construct schemes of phenomena that they observe in their environment, to

“Piaget: What makes the wind?

Piaget: How do you know?

Julia: I saw them waving their arms.

Piaget: How does that make the wind?

Piaget: What makes the wind on the ocean?

lifespan, cognitive development occurs through an interplay of biological and social

In this conceptual paper co-authored by undergraduate students and their instructor

ASSIMILATION, ACCOMODATION, AND EQUILIBRATION

Assimilation and accommodation through the example of the albino squirrel

When we consider these two facets of mental models as isolated phenomena,

STAGE DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATIONS TO PRACTICE

Another way to heighten sensorimotor skills in early childhood is to expose children to

As symbolic behaviors and representations start to become apparent in the child’s

Piaget’s balance scale experiment.

Concrete Operations Stage

Conservation activity (illustrated by Shantanu TilaK).

Formal Operations Stage