I am an assistant professor of psychology and education within the
educational psychology program of the College of Education at Michigan
State University. Here I coordinate the Sociocultural Research Group
(SCRG), a collective of faculty and graduate students that takes the
following as it underlying premise.
Our evolutionary distinctiveness as humans lies in our ability to
alter our environment
through the construction of artifacts (texts, technologies,
symbols) during our participation
in home, school, work, and community activities, along with our
ability to reconstruct the
modifications in subsequent generations, transforming our own
learning and development in
the process. Education, writ large, is the means by which
societies manifest continuity and
transformation, and individuals become unique social persons.
Education is therefore the
principal domain for studying and affecting relations between
individual learning/
development and sociocultural change.
I am interested in learning/development as it relates to changing societies
and cultures.
Within this broad area, I am attempting to build on cultural-historical and
activity theories to create a methodology for studying learning/development
as it relates to cultural process. My current work is a particular
instantiation of this: studying learning/development during school-work
transitions among working children in South Asia, American high school
students in the fast food restaurant industry (with Coleen Ludorf), and
adult machinists becoming computer numerical controlled machinists (with
Kedmon Hungwe).
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King Beach Phone: 517-353-0637
448 Erickson Hall Fax 517-353-6393
Sociocultural Research Group Email: kdbeach@msu.edu
CEPSE, Educational Psychology Server: SCRG@msu.edu
Michigan State University Web: http://www.educ.msu.edu/
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA units/Groups/SocCult/SCRG.html
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