Early Childhood Education

Jean Piaget was one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. His influence on developmental psychology, education and epistemology has been enormous. This text undertakes a reconstruction of the contexts and intellectual development of Piaget's numerous texts in the wide-ranging fields of biology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, child psychology, social psychology, theology, logic, epistemology and education.Richard Kohler reconstructs the often overlooked theological basis of Piaget's theories and analyses the influence this had upon the various areas of his research and reflections, particularly in relation to education.

Lynn campus

Danvers campus

Lynn campus

Lev Vygotsky has acquired the status of one of the grand masters in psychology. Following the English translation and publication of his Collected Works there has been a new wave of interest in Vygotsky, accompanied by a burgeoning of secondary literature. Ronald Miller argues that Vygotsky is increasingly being 'read' and understood through secondary sources and that scholars have claimed Vygotsky as the foundational figure for their own theories, eliminating his most distinctive contributions and distorting his theories. Miller peels away the accumulated layers of commentary to provide a clearer understanding of how Vygotsky built and developed his arguments. In an in-depth analysis of the last three chapters of Vygotsky's book Thinking and Speech, Miller provides a critical interpretation of the core theoretical concepts that constitute Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory, including the development of concepts, mediation, the zone of proximal development, conscious awareness, inner speech, word meaning and consciousness.

Summary: Vygotsky's legacy is an exciting but often confusing fusion of ideas. An Introduction to Vygotsky provides students with an accessible overview of his work combining reprints of key journal and text articles with editorial commentary and suggested further reading. Harry Daniels explores Vygotsky's work against a backdrop of political turmoil in the developing USSR. Major elements discussed include the use of the "culture" concept in social development theory and the implications of Vygotsky's theories for teaching, learning and assessment. Academics and students at all levels will find this an essential key source of information.

By way of a new reading of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, this book introduces the notion of a theory of practice to the psychoanalytic endeavour. Spelled out in terms of interdependent components, namely; aim, technique and theoretical premises, the author takes the reader through Freud's oeuvre so that he emerges as a relentless, theoretically grounded, practitioner.Frances Moran argues that the nub of the Freudian inheritance is the concept of human subjectivity. In the light of this finding and her reading of Freud, she presents the work of Paul Verhaeghe (On Being Normal and Other Disorders), anew and calls on Marie Cardinal, (The Words to Say It), to provide telling evidence of what it means to be a freudian subject. Given the objectifying processes at work in the contemporary culture, the relevance of Freud for our times becomes compelling.Here practitioners will find a clearly presented framework within which to operate and a way of organizing the material that informs their clinical pursuits. The exploration of an underpinning structure to the Complete Works will be of the utmost assistance to those who wish to embark upon a search for knowledge of the human condition through the highways and byways of the legacy of Sigmund Freud.

Danvers campus

Danvers campus

Lynn campus

Danvers campus