Jaan Valsiner, a keen perceiver and creator of cultural ecology

Our work with Prof. Jaan Valsiner started with our search for psychological methodology more than 10 years ago. Since then, extremely meaningful contacts have been opened. In this chapter, we discuss Prof. Valsiner's never-ending academic pursuit of constructing psychology as a developing science and his regarding culture as a process of relating people and the world in the background of modern society's powerful requirement of measuring and controlling individuals. As an example of conducting developmental cultural psychology in the Chinese context, we present our educational intervention work of cultivating school context under a key concept of "cultural ecosystem" to illuminate the contextualized nature of developing individuals and to discuss how their subjectivity can be catalyzed and scaffolded in the school cultural ecosystem. In the last part, we also identify Prof. Valsiner's efforts of constructing an international research network as building a cultural ecosystem through his continuous support of international cooperating and communicating activities, his respect and scaffolding of researchers' subjectivity from different cultural backgrounds, and his wisdom of recognizing each culture's unique contribution in exploring possible pathways for cultural psychology.