Professor Ed Elbers
Utrecht University
Ed Elbers is Professor of Communication, Cognition and Culture at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Professor Elbers taught at the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science in Utrecht for 17 years. Since 2006 he has been a member of the Department of Pedagogical and Educational Sciences of Utrecht University. Between January and September 2003 he was a Guest Professor at the Max Planck Institut für Bildungsforschung (Max Planck Institute for Human Development) in Berlin.
A main theme in his research has been the relationship between the transmission of knowledge and children's contribution to their development. Much of his research concerns communication processes in the context of learning and instruction: learning through interaction. He has studied interaction processes in multi-ethnic classrooms for several years. He has also published on paradigm change in developmental psychology and on interdisciplinary social science.
While at CRASSH he will focus on learning and instruction processes in multi-ethnic schools. In what respect are interaction and instruction processes changing, because of teachers and students having to react to cultural differences? In multi-ethnic schools, students often have an unequal command of the school language: how does this fact influence and change the boundaries between language teaching and content teaching?
Some recent publications by Ed Elbers.
The Transformation of Learning (edited with Bert van Oers, Wim Wardekker and René van der Veer). Cambridge University Press, 2007.
'The social mediation of learning in multi-ethnic schools'. Special issue of European Journal of Psychology of Education, 2005, 20(1), 3-104, guest-edited with Guida de Abreu.
'The construction of word meaning in a multicultural classroom. Mediational tools in peer collaboration during mathematics lessons'. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 2005, 20(1), 45-59.
'Conversational asymmetry and the child's perspective in developmental and educational studies'. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 2004, 51(2), 201-215.
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