User:Sldezutter

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Interests: My background as a theatre director and an [http://www.laacting.com/id13.html acting teacher] has led me to an interest in the way people's thinking is interdependent -- theatre is a collaborative art, and I have often had the opportunity to observe the ways that group creations are far more than the sum of the contributions of individual members. That's why, as an academic, I study [http://www.unm.edu/~devalenz/handouts/sociocult.html sociocultural psychology], which offers an interdisciplinary approach to human mental functioning that explores the relationships between social interaction, social context, and individual cognition. I am also interested in distributed cognition (how many minds work together to accomplish a single cognitive task) and creativity, especially improvisation. Currently, I am designing my dissertation research project, which reflects my interests in how people learn to teach, how teaching is embedded in a social context, and how it is also a group collaborative process. The project will investigate the implicit ideas about teaching that are found in nonschool learning communities. It is my hope that by looking at teaching in settings outside of schools, I might offer educators ways to think about teaching that move beyond the limited approaches that tend to dominate our schools.