TLRP Seminar Series - Contexts, Communities, Networks

ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP)

Thematic Seminar Series

Contexts, communities, networks: Mobilising learners’ resources and relationships in different domains

Seminar One, 15-16 February 2005

Glasgow Caledonian University

Understanding Mind in World: The Vygotskian Legacy

Anne Edwards, University of Birmingham*

Introduction

In the spirit of this seminar I am simply offering a review or scoping of what some cultural historical approaches, and there are many, can offer to an understanding of context and cognition. To do that I need first to point towards what many people who started to work in the sociocultural field in Europe and North America in the 1970s and 80s were moving away from when conceptualising mind and context.

Some Legacies from US and UK Psychology

Back in 1978 Laurence Pervin, in his book Current Controversies and Issues in Personality, tackled the dualist legacy which was bedevilling studies of what North American and many UK psychologists termed personality. He noted that our behaviour varies according to the situation we are in, yet while we behave differently in different situations, we nevertheless regard ourselves as the same person. He illustrates this premise with the story of Mr Krim, who had been a cool, rational and encouraging editor but then changed occupations and became an author. As an author he was aggressive, anxious and demanding. While Mr Krim knew he was the same man in both situations, he still smoked the same cigarettes, wore the same clothes and so on, he came to the conclusion that the situation you find yourself in determines who you are in quite profound ways.

Pervin tackled the issues raised by Mr Krim as a 1970s US-based psychologist might be expected to. He traced a succinct history of different emphases given to internal i.e. essentialist and external determinants of behaviour by US psychologists over the previous four or so decades. This text was an important one at the time, because it signalled a mainstream interest in the problems of a dualist psychology.

The arguments, however, tended to stay at the level of behaviour and the determinants of behaviour whether these were essentialist and internal or environmental and external. Consequently he reached the conclusion that

Were it not for the fact that the dichotomy between internal and external determinants is so common, one would wonder about how the issue developed this way in the first place…Mr Krim is not the person or the situation he is the interplay between the two (Pervin, 1978, p. 27 my emphases)

Poor Mr Krim, no wonder he needed advice once he became aware of differences in his behaviour. Pervin was focusing on behaviour rather than cognition and was therefore finding it difficult to see Mr Krim as an active thinking agent capable of interpretations of his worlds and differential responses to them.

Although the conceptual tools that Pervin used were, with hindsight, limited there was work afoot which was opening up a route to a more cognitive approach to the relationship between mind and world. This area of research was being led by psychologists who were focusing on early cognitive development, including in the UK Trevarthen (1977) and Schaffer (1977, 1992).

Researchers working in the growing field of developmental psychology were largely pursuing the cognitive question that Piaget had set, which was how does knowledge develop? Their work was particularly interesting because, by using newly available technologies, they were able to examine the intricate interactions that occurred between infants and their caregivers. As a result, they saw the extent to which the minds and actions of even very young babies are not simply shaped by their worlds, but that they also play active parts in shaping them. From that point on, there was a discursive shift in the way one talked about context. Context as represented by ‘the other’ was not a separate layer, which influenced behaviour, but it both shaped and was shaped by one’s actions in it.

The more cognitive line taken in developmental psychology as researchers struggled with issues of mind and context made significant breakthroughs in understanding the interplay. Work moved on from examinations of adult-child and child-child interactions to a recognition, for example, that children respond in ways they think the situation demands (Light and Perret-Clermont, 1989). Studies revealed how children made sense, and how that sense-making was often situation specific and dependent on the resources available to them in that situation.

In one influential strand of research, for example, it was found that competent child street traders were unable to repeat calculations they made daily when selling fruit or candy, when they were placed in classrooms (Carraher et al, 1985; Saxe, 1991). From this and similar work there developed an understanding of how contexts not only shape how we think but can be designed to enhance our thinking or, as Clark has put it, to ‘turbo-charge’ our performance in and on our worlds (Clark, 1996).

The cognitive turn in teasing out the relationship between mind and world was a long time arriving in US-influenced psychology. Indeed during that period several US-based developmental and cognitive psychologists turbo-charged their own intellectual journeys by following Bruner (1962) and looking to Russia to explore the rich vein of work that drew on Vygotsky’s legacy from the late 1920s and early 1930s (e.g. Cole, et al, 1978; Wertsch, 1985). As a result they produced a much enhanced notion of interactionism which, for example, acknowledged the history of situations and interactions and the affordances offered by discourse practices and which, in turn, became Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)[1].

In this paper I shall continue to take the cognitive line and focus on how contexts can be conceptualised as resources which we use and which shape our use but which we also transform as we act on the world. In taking that line I shall trace how culture is inscribed in the conceptual tools we use, in how we interpret and act on our worlds and in how we are supported in those actions. I shall conclude by identifying some of the challenges still to be tackled. To start that journey, I too will turn to Vygotsky.

Vygotsky and Culturally Inscribed Tools

Vygotsky’s own conceptual tool kit was Northern European.[2] He saw the limitations of both essentialism and early behaviourism and was motivated for much of his working life by an exploration of consciousness, i.e. how we think.

One of his major achievements was to create a unit of analysis, which reveals consciousness as we act on features of our worlds. That unit of analysis is seen in Figure A. It neatly resolves the mind world dualism upon which much western psychology is predicated and which Pervin was trying to overcome, but gets beyond behaviour to reveal thinking in action. For example, the conceptual tools we bring to bear when doing our financial accounts or making an omelette are revealed in what material tools we select for the job, the way that we use them and in the language we employ.

Figure A Vygotsky’s Mediational Triangle

However, Vygotsky also looked at what the tools brought to the way we think and act. He saw that both conceptual and material tools were inscribed with historical legacies of our cultures.[3] These tools might be the conceptual tools revealed in what language we use and how we use it, or they might be inscribed in the generations of knowledge which have led to a refining of material artefacts[4]. In such an analysis context is mediated in and by the tools we use. It shapes our interpretations of what we are working on and how we might work on it. However as we usetools, we too shape them as we bring to bear our own histories, experience and expertise.

Vygotsky’s pedagogic work has also made a useful distinction between public meaning making and individual sense-making[5]. In crude summary this distinction enables us to see, as Bruner later put it, that ‘learning is from the outside in’ (Bruner, 1966). That is, we recognise the meanings valued in the cultures we inhabit through immersion in those cultures and the mediation, by others, of what is important. We then engage in a process of sense-making in which we make that knowledge our own and undergo a change in the way that we think and act.

Most of these features of Vygotsky’s work are well known. What is less widely acknowledged is his detailed work on development (Vygotsky, 1999). That work lies at the core of his research. In many ways the features listed above are merely the conceptual tools necessary for the more intricate analysis of cultural formation of mind over time which was arguably his primary quest.

He sought to explain the process of interconnection between biology and culture. The quest had methodological ramifications i.e. in order to study how children or young people are making sense (using concepts, perception, memory and so on) we need to study them in relation to the social situation of their development. The social situation of development is an important concept as it takes us to the notion of leading activity. Taking a developmental perspective Vygotsky, as Chaiklin (2003) has explained, saw the leading activity as the situation which shaped development. He associated leading activities directly with periods of intellectual development and saw the source of development in the affordances of the activity[6].

The quest also had practical pedagogic ramifications often summarised as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Again Chaiklin’s recent work is helpful (Chaiklin, 2003). Reminding us that the ZPD was originally conceived as a tool for assessment

rather than pedagogy, he points out that Vygotsky did not suggest specific ways of guiding interactions in the ZPD. Rather the main focus is to reveal the learners’ maturing intellectual functions[7] and much will depend on the learners’ capacities to draw upon the resources being made available. The notion of the resourceful learner, though not explicated in Vygotsky’s own work is, I suggest, a necessary concept in pedagogies which approach learning from the starting point of culture and context[8].

Leont’ev and Culturally Inscribed Interpretations of the Object

Leont’ev, a close colleague of Vygotsky, was obliged to leave Moscow in 1930 and subsequently built up a group in Kharkov. There the focus shifted from attention to tool mediated action to interpretations of the object that was being acted on. That change itself illustrates the kind of nuanced shift that Vygotsky’s ‘cultural-historical method’[9] was able to capture. In Stalin’s Russia a focus on language could be seen as dangerously pre-revolutionary and bourgeois, whereas attention to the materiality of the object being acted on was suitably Marxist. Leont’ev’s development of the work he started with Vygotsky has allowed us to see how interpretations of an object are constructed by the activity in which it occurs. For example, a classroom task in the English curriculum may be interpreted as something to be completed quickly, a vehicle for exhibiting neat presentation skills, an opportunity for discussion or a chance for exploratory writing. How pupils and teachers interpret the task provides a key to understanding what is important in the English lesson as an activity system.

One of Leont’ev’s contributions to understanding relationships between mind and world, therefore, was to help us see how the object, for example the task, is inscribed with the history of previous actions which have, in part, constituted the activity system. However, the relationship between object, mind and action was strengthened further by his suggestion that object within a system of activity, such as an English lesson[10], calls forth particular responses. This phenomenon he termed object motive (Leont’ev 1978). In brief we seek meaning in the objects we work on and that meaning in turn is evident in how we engage with that object. If, for example, the meaning in the classroom task is seen as neatness, then that is how pupils interpret and act on the task[11].

Leont’ev, like Vygotsky, was also concerned to distinguish between meaning and sense in relation to interpretations of the object. Particularly, he began to identify what he saw as potential contradictions between an individual’s sense-making in his or her ‘real practical life experience’ and the ‘ready meanings’ which are obtained from contact with others (Leont’ev, 1978). For Leont’ev these ‘ready meanings’ are given value from the relative power positions of those who offer them[12]. The shift of gaze from the object to how interpretations of it are shaped by social positions within an activity system has been elaborated by Engeström who has particularly focused on the contradictions to be revealed in the analysis of relations within systems (Engeström, 1999). But rather than following the obvious lead to Engeström at this point I want to take a very different route. This will involve an exploration of the connections between what CHAT in its broadest sense might term interpretations of the object, the motives for action it elicits and how responses to the object are supported by the social practices of a system. This route takes me to the work of Jean Lave.

Lave and Situated Learning

Lave’s work clearly does not originate in the Marxist psychology of Vygotsky and Leont’ev and will be very familiar. As a social anthropologist she examines the structuring functions of social contexts. Her major contribution to early debates about thinking and context was to argue, for example, that when settings are very different, such as school and the supermarket, transfer rarely happens. Therefore that what is needed is a theory that that explains how cognitive activity is structured by situations (Lave, 1988). Her book with Wenger (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and her later edited collection (Chaiklin and Lave, 1993) were attempts to examine how thinking and action are structured by our social interactions.

As a social anthropologist, she encourages us to fix our analytic lenses on the structuring environment and how it produces or allows certain ways of participating and the construction of particular identities (Lave, 1997; 2001). Her concern is with the processes which enable our participation in the social practices of our worlds.