About Geoffrey Saxe
| My research with students and colleagues over the past 25 years is concerned with cognition and culture – ideas that are deeply related. The research is interdisciplinary, and is published in journals, books, and edited volumes concerned with issues in developmental psychology, education, and cultural anthropology. For an article that provides a history of my own efforts to develop a conceptual framework to address enduring problems of culture, cognition, and development, consider downloading, “title of paper”. | |
| I currently am engaged with two strands of research
with graduate students who are enrolled
in one of several Ph.D. programs associated with the Cognition
and Development area in the Graduate
School of Education at UC Berkeley.
The Spencer Foundation funds
both strands of work. One strand is concerned with children’s developing representational practices involving fractions in the upper elementary grades. Fractions are a continuing challenge for many children through middle school and often high school, and the work is an effort to explore in some analytic depth the interplay between cultural and developmental processes in children’s developing representational practices related to fractions in classrooms. For a more complete account of the work and the students involved, please visit our Fractions Research page. |
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| The second strand of work follows up my early work in Papua New Guinea in 1978 and 1980. In 2001, I had the very good fortune of returning to the Oksapmin area in the Sandaun province of Papua New Guinea with two of my graduate students and my 19-year-old son. The result was a series of studies that document the interplay between historical changes in practices of economic exchange and schooling and concomitant shifts in individuals’ mathematical practices. This is a fascinating world in which we learn about the dynamics of social change and changing patterns of thinking occurring in a group, a process that provides insight into the dynamics of harder to reveal processes occurring in our own communities. Explore the Culture and Cognition Research page for more information.
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I also serve as the Editor-in-Chief of Human Development, a major interdisciplinary journal that draws on a range of fields in the behavioral sciences. Information about the journal and how to submit manuscripts for review can be found on our Resources page. I am a participating faculty member in a project to support professional
development of teachers and graduate student and postdoctoral researchers
concerned with equity and diversity in mathematics education. The
project is a consortium of faculty at the University of Wisconsin,
UC Berkeley, and UCLA. |
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Geoffrey Saxe
UC Berkeley
4315 Tolman Hall
Berkeley, CA
Office: (510)643-6627
saxe@socrates.berkeley.edu