Colette Daiute is Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is Professor in the Ph.D. Programs in Psychology/Developmental Psychology; Educational Psychology; Urban Education; MA Program in “Childhood and Youth Studies” and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. Dr. Daiute does research on individual and societal development in extremely challenging and rapidly changing environments. She has created and implemented innovative research methods in educational and community interventions, highlighting child, youth, and adult uses of language and technologies. Colette Daiute’s recent book publications include Narrative Inquiry, A Dynamic Approach (Sage Publications, 2014); Human Development and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Website: colettedaiute.org Email address: cdaiute@gc.cuny.edu
Impairments in social and cognitive functioning are some of the most disabling features of the sc... more Impairments in social and cognitive functioning are some of the most disabling features of the schizophrenia. They result in poorer communication with others, difficulties in maintaining employment status and decrease in community involvement. Recently, cognitive remediation therapy (CRT), which relies on computer-based drill and practice exercises, has emerged as a nonpharmacological intervention that aims to target and improve cognitive and social functions. Given the recent success of CRT based approaches, the question arises: can other nonpharmacological interventions which aim to augment and improve socio-cognitive functions be effective? Building upon Vygotsky's (1934) theorizing, we conducted an 8-week long study involving 19 participants. The study uses the methodology of narrative inquiry to examine participants’ ability to employ varied socio-cognitive functions (affect, causation, perceptive-taking, logical/hypothetical inference, etc.) when writing about everyday act...
This volume of New Directions for Child Development is about literacy as a social process. For ma... more This volume of New Directions for Child Development is about literacy as a social process. For many years, reading and writing were defined in terms of the structure and correctness of the texts. More recently, educators have begun to appreciate the cognitive processes involved in comprehending and composing text. This volume extends beyond these understandings to explore how reading and writing develop in the course of children's social lives as they interact with parents, teachers, and peers. The contributors examine written language as a mode of social discourse and human development rather than as a distinct cognitive skill. This perspective offers insights about how children draw on social and affective resources to support cognitively challenging aspects of written language. For example, children who explain, explore, argue, and play with language and ideas- whether with parents, teachers, or peers- are more likely to grow as writers and readers than children who do not us language in these ways. The research reported here suggests that literacy must be integrated into children's lives because social and affective interactions support conceptual aspects of academic skills like reading and writing. This shift in perspective involves redefining what it means to become literate and what counts as basic skills. This is the 61st issue of New Directions for Child Development. For more information on this series, see the Journals and Periodicals page.
International collaborative research has the potential to advance developmental psychology in imp... more International collaborative research has the potential to advance developmental psychology in important ways. When basic science is conducted only in high-income, Western countries, the experiences of children and youth in these countries end up defining what is known about development. Young people adapt to the circumstances in which they live, so to understand development fully, research must be conducted in the range of cultural contexts in which development occurs. International collaborations, collecting data in a wide range of countries, and incorporating diverse cultural perspectives are central to this effort. This article outlines seven recommendations for researchers conducting collaborative international research on child and youth development. The recommendations address conceptual and methodological issues (avoiding a deficit perspective, rethinking ideas about standard or so-called “normative” development patterns, considering relations between age and development, and attending to comparability of samples and measures) and issues related to researchers themselves (collaborating with scholars and community members from other cultures, being strategic with potential collaborators and research participants, and communicating in person).
Citizenship, social and economics education, Mar 10, 2022
The GENE Global Education Innovation Award aims to reward and support organizations whose goal is... more The GENE Global Education Innovation Award aims to reward and support organizations whose goal is to provide innovative Global Education, valuing youth participation in democratic processes. Toward that end, funders are sensitive to whether and how organizations support youth participation and civic engagement. Funding applications, thus, become a way for organizations to enact their own values and strategies for promoting youth participation. This paper reports on a secondary analysis of applications to GENE, revealing an emphasis on participatory practices. The data includes 82 excerpts across eight applications awarded funding and 13 applications honoured as runners-up. Using values analysis, we explored how organizations described engaging participants and the importance of participants’ activities as forwarding the organization's purpose. Analysis uncovered three major values: Perspective on Participation; Rhetoric of Participation; and Agents of Participation. While all applicants shared similar values of youth participation in their organizations, how they expressed the importance of their participants differed. Ultimately, Awardees emphasized what their organization could do for participants, whereas the Runners Up focused on what their participants were doing through their engagement. The findings exhibit how participation and practice in Global Education initiatives are enacted in discourse.
Impairments in social and cognitive functioning are some of the most disabling features of the sc... more Impairments in social and cognitive functioning are some of the most disabling features of the schizophrenia. They result in poorer communication with others, difficulties in maintaining employment status and decrease in community involvement. Recently, cognitive remediation therapy (CRT), which relies on computer-based drill and practice exercises, has emerged as a nonpharmacological intervention that aims to target and improve cognitive and social functions. Given the recent success of CRT based approaches, the question arises: can other nonpharmacological interventions which aim to augment and improve socio-cognitive functions be effective? Building upon Vygotsky's (1934) theorizing, we conducted an 8-week long study involving 19 participants. The study uses the methodology of narrative inquiry to examine participants’ ability to employ varied socio-cognitive functions (affect, causation, perceptive-taking, logical/hypothetical inference, etc.) when writing about everyday act...
This volume of New Directions for Child Development is about literacy as a social process. For ma... more This volume of New Directions for Child Development is about literacy as a social process. For many years, reading and writing were defined in terms of the structure and correctness of the texts. More recently, educators have begun to appreciate the cognitive processes involved in comprehending and composing text. This volume extends beyond these understandings to explore how reading and writing develop in the course of children's social lives as they interact with parents, teachers, and peers. The contributors examine written language as a mode of social discourse and human development rather than as a distinct cognitive skill. This perspective offers insights about how children draw on social and affective resources to support cognitively challenging aspects of written language. For example, children who explain, explore, argue, and play with language and ideas- whether with parents, teachers, or peers- are more likely to grow as writers and readers than children who do not us language in these ways. The research reported here suggests that literacy must be integrated into children's lives because social and affective interactions support conceptual aspects of academic skills like reading and writing. This shift in perspective involves redefining what it means to become literate and what counts as basic skills. This is the 61st issue of New Directions for Child Development. For more information on this series, see the Journals and Periodicals page.
International collaborative research has the potential to advance developmental psychology in imp... more International collaborative research has the potential to advance developmental psychology in important ways. When basic science is conducted only in high-income, Western countries, the experiences of children and youth in these countries end up defining what is known about development. Young people adapt to the circumstances in which they live, so to understand development fully, research must be conducted in the range of cultural contexts in which development occurs. International collaborations, collecting data in a wide range of countries, and incorporating diverse cultural perspectives are central to this effort. This article outlines seven recommendations for researchers conducting collaborative international research on child and youth development. The recommendations address conceptual and methodological issues (avoiding a deficit perspective, rethinking ideas about standard or so-called “normative” development patterns, considering relations between age and development, and attending to comparability of samples and measures) and issues related to researchers themselves (collaborating with scholars and community members from other cultures, being strategic with potential collaborators and research participants, and communicating in person).
Citizenship, social and economics education, Mar 10, 2022
The GENE Global Education Innovation Award aims to reward and support organizations whose goal is... more The GENE Global Education Innovation Award aims to reward and support organizations whose goal is to provide innovative Global Education, valuing youth participation in democratic processes. Toward that end, funders are sensitive to whether and how organizations support youth participation and civic engagement. Funding applications, thus, become a way for organizations to enact their own values and strategies for promoting youth participation. This paper reports on a secondary analysis of applications to GENE, revealing an emphasis on participatory practices. The data includes 82 excerpts across eight applications awarded funding and 13 applications honoured as runners-up. Using values analysis, we explored how organizations described engaging participants and the importance of participants’ activities as forwarding the organization's purpose. Analysis uncovered three major values: Perspective on Participation; Rhetoric of Participation; and Agents of Participation. While all applicants shared similar values of youth participation in their organizations, how they expressed the importance of their participants differed. Ultimately, Awardees emphasized what their organization could do for participants, whereas the Runners Up focused on what their participants were doing through their engagement. The findings exhibit how participation and practice in Global Education initiatives are enacted in discourse.
Previous research with young people growing up during and after wars offers insights for how yout... more Previous research with young people growing up during and after wars offers insights for how youth are understanding and coping with the COVID-19 crisis. This literature review summarizes findings from research with adolescents who shared their experience and knowledge in war zones as those findings apply to research with youth in this pandemic. Circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic differ in important ways from military wars, yet emerging research explains how abrupt disruptions of daily life and consequences like lack of social support and uncertainty challenge young people's psychosocial orientations and health. A brief review of issues relevant to youth in crises sets the scene for a discussion of how their uses of narratives in war zones engaged powerful psychosocial processes, including sense making, imagining, and advising, and how those processes apply to youth narrating in disease zones. Focus is on how such discourse activities symbolically manage instability, uncertainty, and separation challenging youth in the COVID-19 era. Because narrating is an interactive process, adults' open invitations and empathetic listening to youth storytelling are, moreover, pivotal for supporting youth expression rather than shutting it down. The article concludes with implications for future research with youth growing up in the COVID-19 crisis.
The contemporary world is hyper-connected by migrations and digital media, so discourse studies s... more The contemporary world is hyper-connected by migrations and digital media, so discourse studies should consider diverse interacting voices. Given increasing contact among individuals, groups, and institutions, understanding discursive interactions across geo-political migration systems requires methodological innovation. Toward that end, this paper presents a theory-based research design and analysis of how diverse participants in migration use discourse genres to make sense of displacement and interventions. We illustrate this dynamic narrative inquiry with an activity-meaning system design sampling discourses by diverse participants along the Balkan migration route and an analysis of values salient to them. Animating this method is a study in an education intervention in Serbia, where hundreds of young refugees, arriving from violent displacements in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria attended public schools alongside local peers. This methodology integrates principles of critical discourse analysis to consider how displaced youth, their peers, educators, national/international policy makers, and public media used relevant discourse genres to perform or diversify the meaning of social inclusion. Analyses of participants' narratives, letters, policies, education guidelines, and news reports yielded seventeen values and their dynamic interactions. Values analyses revealed some echoes across student and institutional discourses (the importance of subjectivity and cultural practices) and some diverse stakeholder values: migrant students' uses of narratives to emphasize geo-political injustices, Serbian students' emphasis on local cultural practices, and institutional emphases on social inclusion strategies and challenges. The study demonstrates the ecological validity of an inquiry sensitive to webs of meaning among diverse actors, in this case adding complexity to social inclusion.
Civic engagement interacts with civic structures and communication media, so adolescent civic en... more Civic engagement interacts with civic structures and communication media, so adolescent civic engagement research must also interact with such political and technological realities. Since the turn of the 21st century, civic entities, such as nation-states, municipalities, and organizations, have changed rapidly and sometimes violently, indicating that civic engagement research could usefully ask, “How have the concept of civic engagement and related research with adolescents kept up with contemporary civic life and public media?” Toward that end, this chapter reviews recent international adolescent civic engagement research with a focus on context-sensitive transformations. The chapter summarizes definitions, contexts, methods, and findings of adolescent civic engagement research, pointing toward the ongoing need for this research field to become open to contemporary realities such as adolescents’ attempts to deal with disrupted and uncivil spaces, including war zones and refugee life spaces.
Adolescents shift from developing linguistic and cognitive skills to using those skills in strate... more Adolescents shift from developing linguistic and cognitive skills to using those skills in strategic ways. As older adolescents and adults interact in increasingly varied environments, challenges and opportunities in those environments elicit complex linguistic and processes to mediate interactions with extremely challenging and changing circumstances.
Adolescents shift from developing linguistic and cognitive capacities to using those capacities i... more Adolescents shift from developing linguistic and cognitive capacities to using those capacities in strategic ways. As adolescents and young adults interact in increasingly varied environments in their native languages (and sometimes second and third languages), they engage complex linguistic processes to mediate challenges, such as the increasingly common armed conflict, migration, and unequal access to resources. With basic linguistic skills having been developed by late childhood, adolescents and adults use linguistic genres like narrative to mediate adverse as well as less problematic life circumstances. Language, thus, integrates cognitive processes in social context. This chapter provides a foundation for studying human development as an interdependent individual and societal process as people and peoples with diverse histories interact via complex expressive genres in challenging environments.
This is the first chapter of the book "Narrative inquiry: A dynamic approach" (Daiute, 2014, Sage... more This is the first chapter of the book "Narrative inquiry: A dynamic approach" (Daiute, 2014, Sage Publications). "Narrative inquiry: A dynamic approach" provides a new theoretical orientation and practical strategies for research in field studies, classroom, community, and lab contexts. With the concept of "dynamic narrating," this approach to inquiry builds on the practices of daily life where we use storytelling to connect with other people, deal with social structures, make sense of surrounding events, and craft our own ways of relation to and changing situations. The first chapter sets the scene for the book with a review of common rationales for narrative inquiry and an explanation for a relational approach that takes social interaction and language seriously.
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