Carol D. Lee Knihy

Employing Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory, this collection offers insightful analyses of the educational system and its impact on human development. It explores how cultural and social contexts shape learning experiences, emphasizing the interplay between individual growth and educational practices. The contributors examine various aspects of schooling, providing a nuanced understanding of how cultural factors influence cognitive development and educational outcomes.

This special issue of Human Development offers theoretical and empirical studies of the ways that technologies – digital and otherwise – structure learning and development within cultural practices. The papers expand our conception of affordances of technologies for broader development goals than simplistic technocratic goals. Studies include a historical analysis of impacts of technology in structuring both individual and community development. There is longitudinal documentation of the evolution of the design of overlapping ecological systems in a midwestern city to expand opportunities for taking up digital tools for problem solving at the level of individual and community development. An empirical study of the design of a digital tool to support narrative sensemaking among child refugees acts as a resource for understanding children’s perceptions of their re-settlement experiences. A study of the uptake of video game playing in a social design-based experiment examines how such digital tools invite imaginative play that, in this design, support inter-generational problem solving and identity development among Latinx youth, families, and college-aged mentors.