I welcome potential doctoral students interested in exploring processes of human development, at the intersection with learning, situated in cultural-historical settings such as education, day care, welfare system, immigrant communities, family and so on. In collaboration with students, we focus on development and learning as a process that is socially situated, collaborative, dynamic, dialogical, embodied and mediated by socially developed cultural tools and signs. I am especially interested in doing research and theory with a social/activist agenda of achieving changes in policies and social practice contexts such as education. Many of the students collaborating with me bring innovative theories and concepts into various practices that strongly depend on how we understand human beings and their development and learning.

Potential areas of research include (but are not limited to): applying innovative theories of human development to understanding processes of growth and learning, educational practices and pedagogies; disability, child welfare policies, creativity, play, agency, identity, gender, communication, family dynamics and social interactions.

Sample topics of recent dissertations: the role of play and parental beliefs in child development; disability as a sociocultural and distributed process; identity in development and learning; learning identity in students with diverse cultural background; humanizing child welfare; community intervention in a group home setting; cultural tools for development of collective and individual agency.