Name:	Robert Lecusay CV website
Education:	Ph.D. Student, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego B.A. in Cognitive Science, New College of Florida. Senior thesis: Exploring the Influence of Language on Pitch Perception: The Tritone Paradox in Spanish-Speaking, English-Speaking and Bilingual Populations.
Research Interests:	Broadly my interests include cultural-historical activity theory, distributed and embodied cognition, conversation analysis, phenomenology, intersubjectivity, language, and sound. I am a member of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition were I have collaborated on a variety of projects examining the relationship between symbolic play among adults and children, and the development (or becoming) of the human mind. All of these projects have taken place in enriched play and learning environments - settings designed to include artifacts and cultural practices intended to promote the cognitive, emotional and social transformation of adult and child participants. The first project I was involved in is known as a Playworld. Playworlds are dramaturgical classroom interventions that focus on children's emotional experience and aesthetic relation to reality through involving them in staged as well as spontaneous pretend play. I collaborated with fellow lab members Beth Ferholt, Sonja Baumer, and Lars Rossen on this project. We staged our Playworld over a one year period with the teacher and students of a K-1 classroom housed in a public elementary school on a local military base. Through my involvement in the Playworld project, my observations of the interactions between teacher and students, I became interested in how adults and children develop a sense of how the other experiences their joint activity. As a result, I have since engaged in studies of the microgenetic development of intersubjectivity between undergraduates and children in informal learning environments.  I have conducted my research at La Clase Magica, (see also The Fifth Dimension), and am currently doing my research at Town and Country Learning Center. In this work, I focus on the process by which adults and children develop a sufficient shared sense of the other's understanding of a given activity to be able to accomplish successful explanations and hence, enable learning. Combining participant-observation and detailed video analysis, I have been documenting how undergraduates and children work collaboratively to make stop action animations that illustrate physics concepts. My analyses are grounded in transcripts, video recordings of the interaction from multiple perspectives, my own and participant's field notes, and observations of the products embodying participants’changing understandings. I draw on conversation analysis, distributed and embodied cognition approaches, and cultural-historical activity theory as frameworks for interpreting these materials. This work is being conducted in collaboration with the physics education groups at the University of Colorado, Boulder (Noah Finkelstein, Laurel Mayhew) and Tufts University (Brian Gravel, Chris Rogers, William Church).