In this chapter, the author examines clinical psychological, traumatic developmental, and sociocultural perspectives of a serial murder. This includes media dynamics and feminist perspectives. The author discusses malingering, or the faking of mental illness. The case of female serial killer (FSK) Aileen Wuornos is revisited to illustrate clinical psychological issues. The cases of male serial killers (MSKs) Ronald Dominique and Dennis Rader (BTK Strangler) highlight phenomena from the chapter.

Anyone who studies design today is confronted with a professional field that places a variety of demands on future designers. Designers are expected to solve problems of all kinds in innovative ways: They should be able to implement briefings reliably and keep the production method and its costs in mind; they should be able to predict trends reliably; they should know their target groups and deliver products tailored to them. Of course, designers should also be able to communicate, visualize, and present their ideas convincingly. Rarely are these skills combined in one person, which is why designers also need to be able to work in a team. Students should therefore not only be sensitized to design, but also to intercultural differences, and be familiar with and able to classify different social milieus in order to design accordingly for specific target groups (families with small children, for example, hardly ever buy tables with sharp edges). Students should also become aware of their own esthetic preferences and staging strategies. This chapter presents an example of undergraduate research in design and discusses theoretical and conceptual problems of research in design.

In offering a context for Benjamin Britten, we approached his milieu from vantage points that could adequately represent the fullness of his position in England and in the twentieth century. We were rewarded by the richness of Britten’s engagement with his contemporaries in music, art, literature, and film, British musical institutions, royal and governmental entities, and the church. Equally, his ground-breaking projects that intersected across diverse entities and explored his philosophical and ideological tenets provided food for thought.

This chapter presents an approach to the study of learning which analyzes small groups – such as a dyad, a group, a classroom – or large groups – for example, a community or a social movement. This approach is based on a situativity or sociocultural theory of cognition and learning, where learning is “situated” within complex social and material contexts known as activity systems. Sociocultural theories are related to cultural-historical activity theory, situated learning theory, distributed cognition theory, and cultural psychology. These theories suggest that a full account of learning must extend beyond individualist psychology to analyze and explain social practices, technological artifacts, interactional patterns, and the different roles occupied by the participants.

The learning sciences (LS) is an interdisciplinary field that studies teaching and learning. This chapter explains how the thirty-three chapters are organized. The chapter is grouped into four key themes: (1) a shift from thinking of knowledge as facts and procedures to a conception of knowledge as situated in visible practice; (2) an expansion of a view of learning from purely cognitive to a sociocultural view that also incorporates collaboration and conversation; (3) the role of technology in learning; (4) research methodologies used in LS. The chapter closes with a short history of the field of LS from the 1980s through the present.

This chapter describes the intellectual foundations that have influenced the learning sciences (LS) from its beginning, and identifies the core elements that unify many chapters of this handbook. Its theoretical influences include pragmatism, constructivism, sociocultural theory, situated learning, and distributed cognition. The chapter organizes LS research into two levels of analysis: the individual or elemental, and the sociocultural or systemic. The chapter reviews the methodologies that have been used to study each level of analysis and summarizes research findings at each level. LS research bridges research and practice and combines elemental and systemic perspectives on learning across a range of timescales of human behavior.

The present chapter focuses on the benefits of task-supported interaction among child foreign language learners. It reviews research carried out in English as a foreign language (EFL) and content and language integrated learning (CLIL) contexts, and highlights the affordances of child–child interaction in settings where access to input is restricted. The chapter provides a rationale for the increasing interest in research with the underexplored population of young learners in foreign language contexts. It also features a summary of the main findings from research carried out to date within two frameworks, namely, interactionist (Long, 1996) and sociocultural (Vygotsky, 1978). The children in the studies are in the so-called middle childhood stage, a developmental stage characterized by their becoming more logical in their thinking. The studies chosen for this chapter have considered the importance of negotiation of meaning and the impact of repeating a task on interactional patterns, attention to language form, complexity, accuracy and fluency of production and the use of the first language. The contribution ends with several suggestions for further research with young learners.

Three chapters, all focused on ways in which conversational contexts influence children’s subsequent memory and learning, are discussed. Across these chapters, three aspects of Peter Ornstein’s larger integrative vision of developmental science emerge: first, an integration of theoretical perspectives; second, an integration of basic and applied research; and, third, an integration of memory with other developing systems internal and external to the child.This broad, integrative perspective provides a vision of the process of development as systematic, socially mediated, and complex.