Persistent Innovation: James Mark Baldwin and Developmental Science (SpringerBriefs in Psychology)

This book aims to rescue Baldwin’s concept of persistent imitation. Through persistent imitation, Baldwin explained the major mechanism under which human development happens by investigating the origin of consciousness with important implications for psychology. Based on persistent imitation, this book addresses adult human development in innovative educational contexts to portray how innovation can be a trigger for development for teachers and how they came about to produce innovations. The fields of education and psychology cross the work and represent a current trend in educational systems toward innovation. However, innovation is designed from a historical perspective in order to challenge the ever-new production and the homogenous appeal of innovation concerning technological improvements and prepacked projects.

This work is framed from a developmental perspective in psychology based on cultural-historical theoretical traditions. It considers James Mark Baldwin as one of the forerunners of current human development science with an interdisciplinary agenda.

Ana Luiza de França Sá has been a teacher in Basic Education in Brasília, Brazil, since 2011. She is currently working as a professor in teachers' training courses at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Brasília- IFB, Riacho Fundo campus, Brazil. She works as an assistant professor at the University of Development- UDD from Chile in the psychology undergraduate course, teaching the discipline “Human Agency at Schools”. She has a master's in education from the University of Brasília- UnB and a Doctorate degree in Developmental Psychology from the University of Bahia- UFBA, with an internship period from the University of Salerno-UNISA, Italy. Since 2020, she has drawn attention to human development through a decolonial lens, using cultural psychology theory as her primary source of reflection. She is an associate editor in the book series Cultural Psychology of Education (Springer) and for the journal Trends in Psychology, the Journal for the Brazilian Society of Psychology (Springer). She also serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology at Ball State University (USA). Her most interesting topics include the history of psychology, epistemologies from the South, and educational innovation grounded in local changes toward global issues.