Now is an auspicious time to make student-centered discourse a centerpiece of social and civic education, as well as across the curriculum more broadly. We describe here the features of the middle-school program we have developed and implemented for this purpose, emphasizing its concentration on direct student-to-student communication, in contrast to the more common whole-class teacher-led discussion. The Covid-19 epidemic forced us to modify the way in which we implemented the program, eliminating face-to-face contact. What had been an in-person interactive discourse-based workshop we transformed into a remotely-experienced, technology-supported interaction between rotating student pairs. Each participant debated individually with a sequence of individual peers who held an opposing view on a series of social issues. This modified distance-learning approach revealed some unanticipated benefits that we share here. Most notable among them were the enhanced comfort in sharing their views that participants reported they experienced, due to the remote, text-only connection that concealed their personal identities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives of children across the world. To understand these changes, this study explores how 14 Chinese children aged 6 to 12 years old experienced and reacted to the pandemic since its first outbreak in 2020. Applying Vygotsky's conceptualizations of perezhivanie and agency, the author interprets the children's narrative accounts of their thinking and actions during the pandemic. According to the three-dimensional narrative analyses conducted, perezhivaniya commonalities among the participating children include limited physical movement, scarcity of peer interaction, compulsory online learning, reconstruction of family relationships, and noticeable self-growth. Further, the participating children manifested their agency as resisting, exploring, self-control, committing, and envisioning. Different perezhivaniya lead children to manifest different types of agency-a process wherein mediational means play pivotal roles. This study contributes to theoretical discussions of the dialectical relation between perezhivanie and human agency. Moreover, it has practical implications for how adults can support the emergence of children's agency through means of mediation in perezhivaniya.

This paper proposes a sociocultural psychology approach to ageing in the lifecourse. It proposes to consider sociogenetic, microgenetic and ontogenetic transformations when studying older age. On this basis, it considers that older people's lives have two specificities: a longer life experience, and a unique view of historical transformation. The paper calls for a closer understanding of the specific and evolving conditions of ageing, and for more inclusion of older citizens in public debate and policy making.

Creativity training has been generally based on avoiding critique during idea generation, although benefits of argumentation have been shown during idea selection and elaboration. The research reported here aims to understand how argumentative interactions involving role-play, with subsequent group reflection on them, contribute to collaborative creative design projects. The study was carried within a specialised Masters course at the Royal College of Art (London), organised jointly with Imperial College London, and focuses on analysing group reflection sessions of two groups of students whose on-going project was initially defined as "communication by touch". Results showed that although students reported difficulties in playing argumentative roles that were not aligned with their personal views, their debates enabled them to arrive at "Eureka!" moments with respect to better grounded and precise definitions of their project concepts. We highlight the complex ways in which emotions circulate with respect to "Eureka!" moments, role-play and grounding. Given differences in ways that groups played out their assigned argumentative roles, we conclude that role play debate and group reflection on it need to be applied and considered as a whole in creative design training.

Cross-cultural differences in reminiscing styles between American and Thai mothers and their four-year-olds were examined. Twenty-one English monolingual and 21 Thai monolingual mother-child dyads participated in a Prompted Reminiscing task (Task 1). Children also completed a Child Personal Narrative task with the researcher (Task 2). Results from the first task revealed that dyads from the two cultures differed in the elaborateness of their conversations. American mothers adopted a high-elaborative style, characterized by greater use of evaluative feedback and scaffolding strategies including descriptions, extensions, labels, and recasts, compared to their Thai counterparts. Thai mothers adopted a low-elaborative style, evidenced by greater use of directives and requests for repetitions. Similar to their mothers, American children adopted a high-elaborative style compared to their Thai peers. Findings from the second task demonstrated that interlocutor scaffolding influences children's communicative styles. When reminiscing without their mother, American children produced longer narratives than their Thai peers. The present work suggested that maternal elicitation strategies differ across cultures and play a role in shaping children's developing narrative skills. By interacting with more competent social partners, particularly their mothers, children start to internalize culture-specific socialization goals and learn to converse in a culturally-appropriate way as early as preschool.