UCSD Communication

Name:	Beth Ferholt
Education:	Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, May 2009 Department of Communication Playworlds and Perezhivaniye: Emotional-Cognitive Development in Adult-Child Joint Play Michael Cole (chair), Carol Padden, Patrick Anderson, Paula Levin and Bennetta Jules-Rosette M.S., Hunter College (New York, New York), January 2002 Department of Education with specialization in Reading Education B.A., Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania), June 1993 Major in English Literature with Teacher Certification in English

Interests:	I am interested in the interconnections between play and education. I study a form of play pedagogy in which adults and children enter jointly into fantasy that is inspired by a children's novel or a commonly known fable. In my dissertation I argue that this activity holds special potential for making visible, and hence available for research, complex dynamic relations between such key processes as cognition, emotion, imagination and creativity, and also that this activity promotes the development of these processes in child and adult participants. My research contextualizes the adult-child play at the heart of this pedagogy, and its theoretical support, within an historical account of the changing nature of adult involvement in children's play and a parallel development in play theory. I argue that there is a movement from assuming adult cognitive or emotional developmental stage as a teleology for children's play, and isolating or directing children's play accordingly, towards viewing children's play as creative and employing adult-child joint play as a means of promoting the development and quality of life of both adults and children. I have also developed a multiperspectival methodology that includes holistic analysis of emotional and cognitive development. I combined more traditional tools of analysis with a form of video ethnography in which video footage was edited into short, experimental films that are used to stimulate reflection and discussion among child, teacher and researcher participants. In some of my work I provide empirical support for the concept of perezhivaniye, or "intensely emotional lived through experience," as I use this concept to guide my analysis. The recently emerging form of play that I study is the subject of an international and interdisciplinary collaborative project, based at the Labratory of Comparative Human Cognition, which includes scholars from Finland, Sweden, Japan, Serbia and the U.S. who are based in departments of Psychology, Education, Communication and Child Development (http://lchc.ucsd.edu/Projects/playworlds.html).

Publications:	Articles in Peer-Edited Journals “Horizontal movement in the zone of proximal development: Socratic dialogue in a Playworld” (with Robert Lecusay). Mind, Culture, and Activity: Special Issue on Play (accepted for publication). “Promoting narrative competence through adult-child joint pretense: Lessons from the Scandinavian educational practice of Playworld” (with Sonja Baumer and Robert Lecusay). Cognitive Development 20:4, 576–590 (2005). Book Chapters “A multiperspectival analysis of creative imagining: Applying Vygotsky’s method of literary analysis to a Playworld” in Vera John-Steiner, Cathrene Connery and Ana Marjanovic-Shane, eds. Creativity & Meaning Making: A Cultural-Historical Perspective (forthcoming). “Meaningful learning in two Playworlds: Applying Davydov’s conception of learning as a process of generalization” (with Anna Rainio) in Pentti Hakkarainen, ed. Imaginative Early Education (forthcoming). “Gunilla Lindqvist’s “pedagogy of creative play” in the United States: Current practice and Vygotsky’s theory of play” in Minati Panda, ed. Shared Worlds, Shared Minds: Research and Applications in Cultural Psychology (forthcoming). Book Contributions “Day four: Documentary film and photographs, First presentation: Jennifer Mervyn’s Metamorphosis with Beth Ferholt” in Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs), ed. The Authentic Dissertation: Alternative Ways of Knowing, Research and Representation (Routledge: 2008).
Selected Video Work:	“Alexander Luria DVD Archive” (2005) Compiled and formatted with Michael Cole and Kristen Clark Included in Michael Cole, Karl Levitin and A. L. Luria, The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with the Making of Mind (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.: 2006). “Creation of a Playworld: Learning in the Space between Fantasy and Reality” (2004) Directed, edited and produced with Sonja Baumer Used in several UCSD Human Development and Communication classes (2005–2007).

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