In-class writing

In-class writing How could I extend my research into the realm of biological processes?

In a constructionist learning environment, or in a literacy community, the sociocultural factors of learning (roles, identities, mediated cognition) are foregrounded. The biological systems responsible for responding to stressful situations— ANS, HPAA—are implicated in roles and identities in learning settings. It would be interesting (feasible) to include biological measures in analyzing such a learning environment. For example, Obradović (2012) suggests that longitudinal patterns in cortisol levels are tied to social trajectories such as being the popular kid who makes friends quickly and easily, being an outsider with few friends, or competing for status. Emergent social effects such as coregulation and distributed cognition would also be interesting to consider in biologically-embedded context. 

I found the mechanistic accounts of phenomena traversing levels of abstraction fascinating. For example, Boyce & Kobor (2015) trace biological sensitivity to context through to glucocorticoid levels, to the “chaperone protein,” to epigenetic demethylation during a critical period. This trace illustrates the potential of a level-crossing developmental cascade model. At the same time, as the biological level of factors becomes part of the story in complex social systems, I would be interested in working on rethinking the epistemologies and theories of action we apply to complex systems. My hunch is that we need much more caution and humility, and more attention to practitioners’ unformalized experience, when intervening in nonlinear dynamic systems where we cannot accurately predict the results or even the probability distribution of results. 

Finally, in the spirit of my current effort to focus research questions, there is a widespread popular theory that there is something different about computer scientists (sometimes manifested as a claim that some people are fundamentally  

This would be a 

Belonging and Loneliness      Emma Adam (Northwestern)

Del Giudice, 2011 Adaptive Calibration Model: 

Chris, Audrey, Stephanie: Peers and Teachers