Baucal, Aleksander

2020-12-6, Grossen Peretti, Michèle, Zittoun, Tania, Baucal, Aleksander

This article introduces the special issue “Learning and Developing over the Life-Course: A Sociocultural Approach”, which collects six papers stemming from the project “Ages for Learning and Growth: Sociocultural Perspectives” (AGILE), supported by the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction. Considering that sociocultural psychology has mainly focused on development and learning in children, adolescents or (young) adults, AGILE aims at exploring learning and development in older people's lives. To do so, theoretical concepts and methodological tools used in research on other developmental periods had to be reconfigured and enlarged. The article first presents the main theoretical and methodological assumptions underlying sociocultural psychology, and shows the challenges of applying them to older people. Each of the six papers (by Aleksander Baucal, Michèle Grossen, Pernille Hviid, Kyoko Murakami, Roger Säljö, Fabienne Tarrago Salamin, Isabelle Tournier and Tania Zittoun) is then briefly introduced. In conclusion, the article emphasises the importance of accounting for the situatedness of older persons' activities, the meaning they give to these, and their experience of ageing. Methodologies that recognise the expertise of the persons participating in a study, and include them as active participants, are also called for.

2010, Grossen Peretti, Michèle, Baucal, Aleksander, Zittoun, Tania, Lempen, Olivia, Matthey, Christophe, Padiglia, Sheila

2007, Zittoun, Tania, Baucal, Aleksander, Cornish, Flora, Gillespie, Alex

We use the notion of emergence to consider the sorts of knowledge that can be produced in a collaborative research project. The notion invites us to see collaborative work as a developmental dynamic system in which various changes constantly occur. Among these we examine two sorts of knowledge that can be produced: scientific knowledge, and collaborative knowledge. We argue that collaborative knowledge can enable researchers to reflectively monitor their collaborative project, so as to encourage its most productive changes. On the basis of examples taken from this special issue, we highlight four modes of producing collaborative knowledge and discuss the possible uses of such knowledge.

2020-9-26, Zittoun, Tania, Baucal, Aleksander

This paper proposes a sociocultural psychology approach to ageing in the lifecourse. It proposes to consider sociogenetic, microgenetic and ontogenetic transformations when studying older age. On this basis, it considers that older people's lives have two specificities: a longer life experience, and a unique view of historical transformation. The paper calls for a closer understanding of the specific and evolving conditions of ageing, and for more inclusion of older citizens in public debate and policy making.

2009, Stanković, Biljana, Baucal, Aleksander, Zittoun, Tania

Youth is a period of intense changes during which young people engage in various transitions resulting in theirs acquisition of a longer time perspective and a system of orientation, enabling to set priorities and values, and to guide their actions accordingly. In a socio-cultural theoretical background, both the establishment of values and the ability to think time require some psychological distancing from the here and now, distancing which is foremost enabled by semiotic mediation. In our former studies on youth transitions, we observed that young people may use songs, movies, arts, or novels as symbolic resources, that is, as external mediators that seem to support these developmental processes. Through an abductive process linking qualitative, ideographic data and theoretical elaboration, we proposed a theoretical 7 dimensional model for analyzing people's uses of symbolic resources. This model was then turned to a first, provisional questionnaire aiming at testing the model, whose items were extracted from the first empirical investigation. In this paper, we attempted to tests this questionnaire on a population of young people in Serbia. The symbolic resources questionnaire was tested on a sample of young people (N=475). A SEM analysis was used to test the model. At large, the theoretical model is verified. However, an unexpected, very strong correlation between the dimensions had to be explained. We finally propose a further adaptation to the questionnaire.

2019-7-24, Baucal, Aleksander, Gillespie, Alex, Krstić, Ksenija, Zittoun, Tania

Debates about replication in psychology have focused on methodological issues and how to strengthen the replication culture. In most cases, these discussions have tended to assume that the phenomena being investigated are universal. In this paper, we are going to propose a theoretical distinction of different types of replication. The distinction is based on the assumption that besides of universal psychological phenomena there are also phenomena, especially in social and cultural psychology, that are expected to vary between socio-cultural contexts and across history. Taking this insight to its logical conclusion it implies that the main purpose of a replication and interpretation of its results depends on the phenomenon being studied. In the case of the universal phenomena, the replication serves to validation purpose, while in the case of the socio-cultural phenomenon it serves to advance our theoretical understanding of how the given phenomenon is formatted by the socio-cultural-historical context

2007-5-2, Cornish, Flora, Gillepsie, Alex, Zittoun, Tania, Baucal, Aleksander

This special issue examines collaborative research from a methodological point of view. It considers the implications of the social processes of collaboration for the construction of scientific knowledge, in the interest, not of problematising the scientific process, but of drawing the process of collaboration into our methodological purview. Methodological scholarship has primarily been concerned with refining methodological techniques, such as questionnaires, interviews and experiments, without regard for the social conditions of knowledge construction—such as whether the research is individual or collaborative, the nature of the collaboration, or within which kind of social institution the research is carried out. We propose that the social practices through which research is conducted, the composition of the research team, the organisation of the team, and the social dynamics within the team should all be considered part of the methodology of scientific research.