One might imagine that with over 30,000 faceparts for avatars, there would be no lack of diversity, but even virtual worlds are notthe color-blind utopia, they have often been portrayed to be in early media reports.Racial issues also come to the forefront in Whyville, as our article ‘‘‘Blacks deservebodies too!’ Diversity and Race in a Virtual World’’ illustrates (Kafai et al., 2010).

An alternative approach to studying transfer is rooted in an ethnographic tradition thatis sometimes called situated, everyday, or distributed cognition.1

By the time the boy turns 3 years old, he has developed an island of ex-pertise around trains. His vocabulary, declarative knowledge, conceptual knowledge, schemas, and personal memories related to trains are numer-ous, well-organized, and flexible.

Monique’s comments reflect a strong sense of identification with the work

The discovery of the functionalities of the piece are largely discoveredin and through interaction with others, both people accompanying otherpeople and others who happen to be in the same space.

teacher in these classrooms is that of a mediator, in the Vy-gotskian sense: to provide guidance, strategic support, and assistanceto help the children assume control of their own learning

We conceive this step as devaluation, rather than diffusion, as Schwartz and Merten call it

Telling AA personal stories also helps members identify with one an­other in ways that are harder to document. As a public event, one that is not only observable but material and co-participatory, the telling encom­passes body practices, including vocalization, that realize structures of affect and disposition. Not only social theorists, from Durkheim and Mauss to Bourdieu, but any participant in such performances would tell you that the fellow-feeling born in these ceremonies is a powerful means of identification.

This is why, as members often say, "AA is for those who want it, not for those who need it." AA members must agree to become tellers, as well as listeners, of AA stories.

As a cultural system, and one that no one is born into, this entire figured world of AA is new to neophytes.

AA constitutes a figured world, a meaning system within a meaning system. It draws upon spe­cific sets of interpretations and assumptions which circulate alongside many others in the United States.

No distinct line runs between "so­cial" or "normal" drinker and "problem drinker" or "alcoholic," and different sectors of U.S. society do not agree on what these terms mean.

This context of flux is the ground for identity development. It sets the conditions for what we called in Chapter 2 the authoring self-what in Chapter 8 we will expand to call the "space of authoring."

Because of its roots in Marxian analyses of capitalism and other historically specific modes of produc-tion, activity theory pays more attention to the articulation of activities within larger syste_ms_<.>f power and prlvilsge

Each is a simplified world populated by a set of agents (in the world of romance: attractive women, boyfriends, lovers, fiances) who engage in a limited range of meaningful acts or changes of state (flirting with, falling in love with, dumping, having sex with) as moved by a specific set of forces (attractiveness, love, lust)

We must also appreciate what social constructivism and practice theories tell us about the imagined worlds in which we conduct our lives.

These socially generated, culturally figured worlds, many linguists believe, are necessary for understanding the meaning of words.

Identities

A figured world is formed and re-formed in relation to the everyday activities and events that or-dain happenings within it.

a frame becomes a world-a space

"as-if" worlds are sociohistoric, contrived interpreta-tions or imaginations that mediate behavior and so, from the perspective of heuristic development, inform participants' outlooks

Why is it confusing to ask if the Pope is a bachelor? After all, a bachelor is an unmarried man and the Pope is an unmarried man. Yet there is something peculiar about referring to the Pope as a bachelor. The problem is that "'bachelor' frames ...

"figured world," then, we mean a socially and culturally con-structed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others.

To what extent does culture determine behavior? Is culture-defined as collective interpretations of social and material experience-merely an after-the-fact labeling of deep-seated human needs and interests stem-ming, say, from psychodynamic forces or from in-built materialist orien-tations?

Both "getting the upper hand" and "keeping ·one man up front" were strategies for achieving the valued outcomes of romantic involvements while avoiding the bad.

The themes of male/female relationships also dominated a vocabulary that the students used to talk about one another.

;, our neo-Vygotskian developmental approach, thoughts and feel-ings, will and motivation are formed as the individual develops. The individual comes, in the recurrent contexts of social interaction, to per-sonalize cultural resources, such as figured worlds, languages, and sym-bols, as means to organize and modify thoughts and emotions.

Tlie figured wortaD£ romance acquired motivating force as ---the women developed mastery of it, and their mastery, in turn, depended upon their development of a concept of themselves as actors in the world of romance.