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14th September 1993
CHAPTER 2: HUMAN COGNITION AS SOCIALLY-GROUNDED
The deployment of computers in education is a venture not greatly
influenced by theories of cognition. One reason for this is the
simple fact that psychologists have not made computer-based learning a
topic of special empirical interest. Perhaps that is not surprising,
given the confusingly multi-faceted nature of the technology. There
is nothing uniform about what these instruments "do" for learners,
even though their uniform appearance may suggest that there is.
Practising numerical estimations, using a word processor to compose
stories, programming the movements of a floor robot, exploring an
ecological simulation, the graphic design of a poster: this a very
mixed bag of practical uses for a classroom computer, although it is
typical of what we can witness happening - even within primary
schools.
Some of these learning activities seem commonplace enough (say,
estimating); while others appear to be familiar but, on reflection,
turn out to be mediated by computers in quite distinctive ways (eg.,
word processing a story). Yet others, while related to the
established curriculum (say, maths), seem to involve radically novel
approaches to its content (eg., controlling robot movements). It
might be thought unlikely that this mixed bag could be easily embraced
by singular psychological theories. If there is to be any generative
relationship between theory and practice it might seem likely only at
the piecemeal level of inspiring particular software in particular
curriculum areas. Some such examples have already been mentioned:
mathematics learning software has been informed by cognitive
psychology (eg., Resnick and Johnson, 1988; Sleeman, 1987);
computer-based reading and writing aids have been informed by ideas
from research on metacognition and its development (Salomon, 1988b;
Woodruff, Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1982).
These localized influences of psychological theory are certainly
welcome. However, can Psychology furnish any more overarching
theoretical perspective to help us think creatively about the
development of this technology in education? I believe that it can.
Indeed, to an extent, psychological thinking may already be exerting
a concealed influence. I will argue later that certain significant
directions taken by current computer-based educational practice can be
readily legitimized by psychological "worldviews" (Agre, 1993) -
although such influence is not always explicitly identified. This
creates one good reason for discussing certain broad traditions of
psychological theorising here. It will help to articulate some of the
theories of learning and cognition that form a background against
which some recent design and practice has been managed in this area.
Another reason for reviewing psychological theory is more
forward-looking: to find a framework for addressing some of those
problems associated with computer-based practice that were identified
in Chapter 1.
Later (in the next chapter), I shall make a thorough comparison of
three psychological perspectives on learning and cognition and
consider what they each imply for the effective use of new technology.
Two of these perspectives (computational theories of cognition, and
constructivism) are well-developed and well-described in other
sources. The third (socio-cultural theory) is of more recent
influence and still subject to mis-representation. For this reason
(and because it is the approach that I favour), I shall use the
present chapter to describe it more fully. I believe it is the
perspective that best addresses some of the problems of implementing
computer-based learning that I have already identified: particularly
those relating to the social context of educational activity.
In this respect, one issue that theory should help clarify is the
basis for believing that education should preserve a strong
interpersonal dimension. It is significant that practitioners are
worried about new technology on this basis. So, a formal account of
learning as a socially-grounded achievement would inform any challenge
to technological visions of the isolated pupil. Secondly, it will be
valuable to have a theoretical platform for dealing with these
concerns in a concrete, practical manner. In short, an integrating
theoretical perspective could be a powerful resource to help guide
computer-based educational ventures.
Both of these tasks can be addressed by the particular theoretical
perspective outlined below. This perspective is the cornerstone for
the remaining discussion in this book. It establishes learning as a
fundamentally social experience. It encourages the assessment
of new educational resources in terms of their potential for enriching
the interpersonal contexts of learning. This view also suggests a
framework for thinking about real options whereby this social
incorporation might occur - for example, in respect of a resource such
as computers. The theoretical perspective in question is one
associated with "socio-cultural" thinking in Psychology. More
recently, the term "cultural psychology" has been used. It is a
position pitched at a fairly grand level: indeed, it is about the very
nature of cognition.
The term "cultural theory" as applied to cognition usually refers to a
body of ideas inspired by the Soviet socio-historical movement of the
1930s (notably the work of Vygotsky, Luria and Leont'ev). Lately,
that thinking has been enriched by other lines of theorising:
particulalry from within the disciplines of cognitive science (eg.
Suchman, 1987) and anthropology (eg. Lave, 1988). The idea of a
cultural psychology has been most clearly defined by two groups: one
comprises Shweder and his colleagues (Shweder, 1990; Shweder and
Sullivan, 1993); the other comprises various researchers associated
with the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (Cole, 1987; LCHC,
1983, 1986). Their two agendas do not perfectly match (Jahoda, 1992)
but they share a core commitment to the notion of cognition as being
profoundly social in nature. Their perspective on educatonal practice
is, accordingly, one that stresses the socially-organized nature of
the achievement.
In the remainder of the present chapter, I shall concentrate on
capturing the flavour of a cultural psychology. First, I present a
general outline that stresses the central concept of mediational
means; I consider how it relates to cognitive development through the
problematic metaphor of "amplification". Then, I shall identify
central ideas flowing from the application of cultural thinking to
education. A brief qualifying observation is necessary at this point.
My purpose is not to make the following theoretical framework so
convincing that an inevitable agenda for the use of computers in
education will have to be endorsed by the reader. The point is more
to lay the ground for identifying a certain variety of empirical
strategy that is now needed. In particular, I shall recommend
research that clarifies the manner in which this technology mediates
new forms of social interactions among its (educational) users. I
believe the findings of any such research can remain informative
whether or not the theory generating it is judged to be persuasive.
Where scepticism regarding the underlying theory might become a cause
of friction is in relation to how we should best interpret, and
thereby apply, the results of that research.
A SOCIO-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON COGNITION
Many "psychological" perspectives on human nature take biological
themes as their starting point. Cultural psychology is distinguished
by its declared orientation towards the peaks of human achievement -
the practices and artefacts that constitute culture. Of course, this
does not imply a special concern with (high) Culture. In fact, a
reference to usage in biology is quite helpful in clarifying the sense
of this term as intended here.
For biologists, "culture" is the medium in which living material might
be supported. Cultural psychologists orient towards a *medium* for
human activity in this broad sense. The medium that supports
intelligent human action will comprise artefacts, institutions and
rituals that have acquired their current nature during a long
historical development. This history will be interestingly different
across different communities. The proposal is that any account of
individual cognition and learning must incorporate the nature of this
culture into its conceptual vocabulary. A conceptual vocabulary for
studying cognition should not exclusively refer to structures and
processes concealed within the thinker's skull. It should capture and
express the thinker's interaction with an environment: that is, their
contact with a culture of material and social resources that
everywhere supports cognitive activity.
Given such an orientation, we may anticipate that a cultural theory of
cognition will have a strong contextualist flavour. It will
focus on *situations* for thinking. It will resist suggestions that
the variety of intelligent behaviour can be understood in terms of a
small number of core, cognitive processes. We may also anticipate
that cultural theories of cognition will have a distinctive interest
in the fabric of *socially*-organized life: for social interaction is
surely central to the rich complexity of human culture.
Wertsch opens a recent volume written in this spirit with the
following definition. 'The basic goal of the sociocultural approach to
mind is to create an account of human mental processes that recognizes
the essential relationship between these processes and their cultural,
historical and institutional settings.' (Wertsch, 1991c, p. 6). In
this account, the cognitive attributes of an individual are
fundamentally the outcome of engagement with culture. The analysis
of cognition must invoke a vocabularly that includes reference to
the formats of this engagement - caputing how cultural resources
constrain and enable cognitive activity. The approach invites us to
see the genesis of mental life within our commerce with the products
of a lengthy cultural evolution. Indeed, it is the capacity for
actively exploitating this historical legacy that sets apart humankind
as a species. Cole comments: 'Human psychological functions differ
from the psychological processes of other animals because they are
culturally mediated, historically developing and arise from practical
activity' (Cole, 1990, p. 91). A central concept in understanding
such a perspective is "mediation": a concept now commonly discussed in
relation to the seminal writings of Vygotsky.
The central place of mediational means
Cole's reference to psychological processes in other species echoes a
key point within Vygotsky's development of the concept of
psychological mediation. If we remember that this account was
articulated in the 1920s, the reference towards animal psychology
appears quite natural: much psychological theory of this period arose
from empirical work on animal behaviour. In fact, in early
formulations, Vygotsky seemed particularly concerned to harmonize a
cultural view with the prevailing stimulus-response (S-R) psychology
(Bakhurst, 1990).
Vygotsky draws a distinction between elementary and higher mental
processes. The former define the limits of animal intelligence; they
are biologically based and invite the reductionist analysis favoured
within S-R psychology. They include involuntary processes of
perception, attention, recognition and need. They underpin a basic
repertoire of problem solving behaviour that can be organized in
response to the here-and-now of environmental stimuli. On the other
hand, higher mental functions include all the voluntary and reflective
processes of thinking, remembering and reasoning that we associate
with human mental life. They are not reducible to the elementary
psychological functions. Historically, they arose because human
beings came to turn inward upon their environment - in the sense of
acting creatively upon it to effect certain profound changes in its
relationship to us. It might be said the S-R relation was thus
rendered bidirectional. The resources arising from this creation of
human culture are regarded as central to any account of the nature of
cognition.
The important sense in which the human subject came to act back upon
nature, and thereby change it, is manifest in the creation of *tools*.
These are at once outcomes of human activity upon the environment
while, at the same time, they serve to organize further and future
encounters with it. Through material tools we gain greater control
over the physical world. This control arises from the mediating
function of these instruments: we act upon the world indirectly, we
act "through" them.
A distinctively human achievement is to have evolved tools realized in
symbolic (rather than purely material) form. Vygotysky, thus,
distinguishes between "technical tools" and "psychological tools".
Historically, it is claimed, varieties of auxiliary stimuli evolved to
have special relevance for controlling the *psychological* world:
notations, diagrams, verbal signals and so forth. The mediation
effected by this class of tools defines the problems that are now in
the domain of cognitive psychology. Through these "signs" (especially
linguistic ones) we come to regulate the behaviour of others. We also
come to exert voluntary control over our own basic psychological
processes: thereby elaborating the activities of remembering,
attention and thought. These artefacts of cultural history are
preserved and made available to each new generation. Thus, they may
serve to support our children's mediated encounters with the social
and material environment. (Indeed, the taking of measures to ensure
this continuity across generations (i.e., instruction) may also be a
uniquely human achievement.)
Vygotsky's initial formulation of this cultural conception of mind was
fairly conservative: it sought to be compatible with orthodox S-R
theory. Perhaps the analogy with technical tools was somewhat
constraining in this respect. Technical tools often have a neatly
circumscribed character; they are visibly self-contained objects
(hammers and so forth). The temptation may be to theorise about
psychological tools that also happen to have this singular character:
icons, maps, verbal instructions and so forth. Such exemplars more
readily take up the role of stimuli. Thus, they might be
conceptualized as "intervening stimuli" located between external
events and behaviour - either in some associationist S-R psychology or
some cognitive theory of human information processing.
Such a simple formulation is apparent in Vygotsky's discussion of
mediated memory and the example of the knot-in-a-handkerchief. This
folk custom is a vivid example of a discrete mediating sign: it allows
organized control of the present by the past (remembering takes place
"through" this device). So a conservative summary of this example
might have the knot-sign function as a class of intervening stimulus:
supporting an association between some past event and some response
that we now make. A more traditional psychological analysis is, thus,
preserved.
However, as Bakhurst (1990) has documented, this conception was
rejected in Vygotsky's later writing. Vygotsky became dissatisfied
with the implication that signs might be evoked in some S-R manner.
The far-reaching impact of mediation was not well enough expressed by
some catalogue of discrete signs, with their tool-like properties.
Mediational means existed in the form of more complex structural
relations, these having a more elaborate involvement with behaviour.
So Vygotsky became interested in the human capacity for inventing
whole symbolic systems: such as are represented in mathematics,
logical notations and varieties of natural language. What is
significant about engagement with systems such as these is that they
place us in a position of constantly *interpreting* the world, rather
than responding to it. They leave us experiencing the world in
particular ways, reading it in a manner that reflects our own
distinctive history of contact with such systems of mediation.
Some of Vygotsky's own empirical work encouraged this interpretative
theme - by illustrating both a creative and a constraining capacity in
our deployment of signs. Children who were offered pictures to
nmeonically support the recall of a word list used them in
idiosyncratic (but effective) ways. Their use of these signs was not
rigidly related to their physical nature. It is as if the word-item
remembered was actually an interpretative act made possible by the
symbolic device - facilitating the completion of a narrative rather
than eliciting a response. Moreover, adolescents and adults sometimes
seemed less empowered by such devices because, Vygotysky supposed, his
imposed external aids could disrupt their private devices already
internalized for purposes of organizing recall.
In terms of accounting for cognitive development, Vygotsky's changing
theoretical emphasis orients us more to "interpretative practices".
These practices are embodied in the cultural life of a community: the
artefacts, technologies and rituals that it offers. The course of
intellectual growth is, therefore, characterised by gaining access to
a culture's resources of mediational means - as ways of interpreting
experience. In the course of development, children will necessarily
appropriate and deploy whatever local resources constitute their own
opportunities for participating in socially-organized life. They
discover the "designs for living" (Cole, 1990) that have been
historically accumulated within their own culture. These are states
of the world we are born into and, to use an analogy of Bruners, it is
as if we thereby enter onto a stage where the drama and its context is
well established. Our task is to participate in the action and, thus,
to appropriate the mediational devices that can serve to manage
exchanges between ourselves and others.
Three themes arising from an emphasis on mediation
Let us relate these comments about the central place of mediation to
our interests in learning and instruction (leading us, later, to
considerations of new technology). I wish to focus on three
particular implications of the approach being sketched here; each of
them has attracted some empirical support. The first is a novel
definition of cognitive activity in terms of functional systems: a
definition that takes "cognition" to mean more than repertoires of
circumscribed and private mental processes. The second implication is
the "situated" nature of cognitive achievements: what is learned is
ways of acting in particular situations. The third is the profoundly
social nature of cognition. I will briefly summarise what each of
these propositions entails before pursuing their educational
implications in separate sections below.
The first of these points is concerned with how we define cognition
for purposes of analysing development and change. The present
cultural approach is often distinguished by claiming it regards
cognition as a "beyond the skin" phenomenon. A cultural description
of mental activity will typically incorporate reference to mediational
means - resources "outside" of the person, but resources which will be
included in the units of analysis when doing this form of cognitive
psychology. Often such mediational means will comprise artefacts that
reside "outside" in the sense of being clearly visible and external to
ourselves: the maps, diaries, notebooks and filing systems of
intellectual endeavour. Campbell and Olson (1990) propose that such
externally-supported human intelligence describes the most common and
comfortable realization of the activity "thinking". Not that this is
what is captured in popular stereotypes of someone in thought: the
popular image tends to conjure up a solitary, deeply reflective state
typified by Rodin's hunched-up figure. Provocatively, Campbell and
Olson suggest that we naturally take steps to avoid this form of
"inwardly mediated" thinking. Yet, even such contemplative states
need to be analysed with proper respect for the externally-located
mediational means that they will involve: the ways of talking and
symbolising that are appropriated from the thinker's socio-cultural
environment. The solitary thinker's activity is continuous with the
external, socially-constituted environment in this sense. In
summary, this perspective demands that we view cognition in terms of
functional systems of activity integrated by mediational means.
The situated nature of cognitive achievements is the second
implication of an emphasis on mediation. Learning is viewed in terms
of the guided appropriation of mediational means: such change results
in control over the substantive interpretative practices that
characterise a local culture. Remembering, classifying or
thinking are, thus, ways of acting and talking in particular contexts:
contexts drawn from the situations of problem solving provided by that
local culture. So, we become rememberers, classifiers and thinkers.
This is not the same analysis as one highlighting *general* cognitive
resources that underly and support a transfer to new domains of
practice. So, cognitive acquisitions are regarded as initially
situated, in this sense of being tied to contexts of learning.
The social nature of cognition is the third implication of the present
mediational approach. There are actually two senses in which
cognition is being characterised as a social phenomenon. Cognition is
socially located because mediational means are created and evolve
within sociocultural history. The various notations, diagrams,
signals, languages and so on that make up our current systems of
shared signs all embody a history of involvement in human social
interaction: their various contemporary forms will surely reflect this
past. Indeed, such an historically-determined character will serve to
constrain the ways in which they may support our present intellectual
endeavours. In addition to this, cognition is identified as socially
located because these mediational means are commonly encountered in
the course of exchanges among people. This is clearly the case in
early life: children are not left to re-invent mediational means from
scratch. They are confronted with them: this is arranged within the
course of their participation in social life. Thus, when researchers
in this cultural tradition come to consider problems of learning and
cognitive development, they will surely be interested in
problem-solving (in the broadest sense) as it gets coordinated within
arenas of people acting *together*.
I have introduced three implications of a cultural psychologal
approach: cognition as functional systems, as situated and as social.
These ideas are central to my perspective of how computers could best
be deployed within teaching and learning. I shall, therefore, say
more about each below - but stressing their relation to educational
practice. At this point, I will not puruse the link between education
and cultural conceptions of cognition by developing the case of
computer-based learning. Instead, I shall dwell on the more
thoroughly researched case of literacy. Literacy is a technology in
the sense that it involves deploying a symbol system (the written
word) to mediate interactions between ourselves and our material and
social environment. So, we may regard computer-based resources as
more modest parallels to this well-established mediational means.
With this parallel, we may then seek insight from the more extensive
studies of literacy already available.
IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING
To capture the force of a mediational analysis of intelligent action,
it is popular to cite illustrations where very vivid prosthetic
resources are involved. A challenge made by Bateson (1972) has been
widely cited to help focus this conception of cognition as something
mediated and extending beyond the skin. Bateson asks:
Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap.
Where do *I* start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the
stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick?
Does it start at the tip of my stick? (1972, p.459).
Cole's thoughts on this challenge express its general implications for
an analysis of cognition: '..the precise ways in which mind is
distributed depend crucially on the tools through which one interacts
with the world, which in turn have been shaped by one's cultural past
as well as one's current circumstances and goals' (1991, p.412).
Thus, the existence of mediational means invites us to conceptualise
mind as something "distributed" within an environment - rather than as
a repertoire of computational processes constrained to exist only
within our heads.
It is easy to see how the effects of a powerful computer application
(say, a word processor) might be analysed in parallel terms to the
tool in Bateson's example. However, understanding how cognition is
organized and how learning is supported will involve more difficult
analyses than this example might suggest. For one thing, not all
mediational means will be so conveniently circumscribed and concrete.
For another, teaching and learning can not be reduced to initiatives
for merely making new mediational means available to pupils. It is
not as if education was about helping pupils take these resources off
some shelf. That is, the nature of their appropriation will depend
upon the nature of the contexts in which they are encountered - and
to efforts relating to the guided coordiantion of those contexts.
Such claims are elaborated below in three sections. There I consider
issues of teaching and learning in respect of the three themes
introduced above.
(1) Functional systems and mediation: the case of literacy
My aim in this section is to consider how we may best conceptualise
cognitive change as it might occur within the contexts of education.
The cultural approach invites us to analyse this by considering how
mediational means become incorporated within functional systems of
intelligent activity. I will develop the discussion around the
example of literacy, as this is a mediational means that has been most
carefully researched. Thanks to the efforts of Cole and Griffin
(1980), this example also allows us to explore how the achievements of
learning are best conceptualised: in particular, whether to view them
in terms of quantitative processes of cognitive "amplification" or in
the terms favoured here - qualitative changes in functional systems of
cognitive activity.
For the original socio-cultural theorists, spoken language was the
most central of early acquisitions - a view in some contrast to that
of their contemporary, Piaget, for whom language played no powerfully
distinctive role within developmental theory. For theories in the
cultural tradition, speech is seen as an organizer of behaviour.
Speech is instrumental; it helps us to *do* things in the world, to
make things happen. In particular, we learn to effect others through
our speech. It is a small step from this insight to suppose that such
external means of regulating activity becomes, in some sense,
internalized - to become a form of private *self*-regulation (Wertsch,
1979).
The concept of internalization is not without its critics. However,
the central feature of this idea remains persuasive: the various
problem-solving experiences of reasoning, remembering, attending,
classifying and so on are - first of all - *activities*. They are
organized within social experience and supported by the resources of
speech. Through participation in social life, the developing
individual is exposed to a set of interpretative practices that may be
appropriated. In a sense then, we have to learn to "become"
rememberers, planners, classifiers and so on (eg., Middleton and
Edwards, 1990). Participation in organized social activity serves to
reveal these powers and possibilities to us. Cognitive achievements
arise as the consequence of entry into particular "communities of
practice". We encounter particular settings where problems get solved
according to specialized practices for the deployment of cultural
resources: resources of discourse, technology, ritual. By virtue of
participation within such communities we become socialized into
possible ways of thinking. Such a perspective on cognition (as
embodied in practice) is in obvious contrast to the dominant
psychological images of, for example, memory or classification as
private cognitive mechanisms.
It naturally follows that the deployment of spoken language within the
various "cultural" contexts of growing up - and the study of its
particular consequences - has been a topic of special empirical
interest to cultural theorists. Speech is the means whereby much gets
done around children and it offers for them particular "ways with
words" (Heath, 1983). It is the means whereby problems are publically
defined and acted upon (Wertsch, McNamee, McLane and Budwig, 1980;
Wertsch, Minick and Arns, 1984; Wood, Wood and Middleton, 1978).
However, there has also been great interest in the developmental
significance of the *written* word. Considering literacy as well as
speech may help further clarify how mediational means support
cognitive development.
Literacy is, evidently, a mediating technology of the kind we have
been considering: it enters into our lives to organize interactions
between ourselves and our material and social worlds. One vivid
perspective on the technology of literacy is furnished by accounts of
its development in *historical* time (eg., Cole, 1991; Goody and Watt,
1968). These accounts make it possible to trace an historical pattern
within which literate practices can be shown to have forced
transformations of human relations on the societal level. The nature
of these historical transformations then offers a seductive analogy
for psychological accounts of development within individual lifetimes.
Perhaps in growing up, our thinking undergoes comparable
transformations as it encounters new mediational means; perhaps such
transformations reflect those documented for whole societies during
periods when they are gaining access to new technologies such as
writing.
Luria (1976) reports an early psychological investigation in this
spirit. He studied (during the 1930s) the impact of literacy on
traditional communities within post-revolutionary Soviet society.
That is, he was able to observe the cognitive impact of access to a
radical new mediational means. The sudden drive to develop a literate
population offered an opportunity to evaluate the effects (among
adults) of exposure to reading and writing as it was organized in the
new schools. The inevitably piecemeal nature of the early educational
provision permitted meaningful cognitive comparisons between schooled
and unschooled groups.
Luria reports apparently dramatic effects of even brief exposure to
literacy. These effects were catalogued for intellectual functions in
the domains of perception, classification, reasoning, imagining and so
on. Briefly, the impact of literacy seemed to be associated with a
new capacity to direct thought towards "the words themselves". A
capacity to extricate discursive problems from the immediate context
of a conversational exchange: from the context of expectations and
interpretations that normally guide human discourse. Formal
consideration of words themselves in this way - as the acquisition of
literacy requires - seemed to create for newly-literate individuals a
sensitivity to the hypothetical. Literate individuals become
drawn to reflect on problems that might, sometimes, not actually exist
outside of the (mere) words used to conjure them up.
Developmental psychologists have been impressed by the idea that
access to reading and writing transforms problem solving in this way:
impressed with the idea that writing is a technology with far-reaching
cognitive consequences. For example, Donaldson (1978) appeals to this
possibility in accounting for her influential work on development of
reasoning in childhood. She describes a number of studies revealing
ways in which traditional tests of cognitive development underestimate
young children's reasoning (cf., Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp, 1971;
Siegel, 1991). She argues that the format of traditional tests are
biased towards reasoning that is most familiar within *literate* forms
of communication.
For example, in the traditional test for conserving number a child
is asked if two lined-up rows of beads each have the same number. One
row is then elongated and the same question is asked a second time.
Answering that the longer row now has more beads has traditionally
been taken to index a structural limitation in childhood reasoning.
However, there may be other factors to take into account;
including some relating to the pragmatics of this situation. Thus,
simply asking the same question twice in such a short period might
lead some children to think they are supposed to change their answer.
It seems that this can happen: children are "more logical" when only
the second question gets asked (Rose and Blank, 1974). The
implication is that children who fail the traditional form of such
tests should not be thought to lack cognitive bits in their logical
equipment. Their problem may involve some lack of familiarity with
the literate form of communication that saturates traditional formats
for testing. Children first mobilise a spontaneous form of reasoning
that reflects their rich experience of thinking in social contexts -
particularly in making sense of other people's actions. Literate
forms of problem demand that children override their expectations of
what the experimenter might be asking of them, override their beliefs
about likely motives and intentions in the situation. Instead, they
are expected to prioritise the language that is being used to define a
problem. This may often be an unfamiliar attitude for children
taking part in psychological tests. To use Donaldson's phrase,
children must cultivate "disembedded" modes of thinking to do well in
these tasks. Their thinking must be disembedded from the matrix of
expectations and interpretations that the context naturally affords
and, instead, submitted to the literal possibilities permitted by the
words themselves.
Donaldson is not alone in believing that schooled contact with the
mediational means of literacy is central to making this happen. This
view has also been championed by Olson and colleagues (eg., Olson,
1986; Olson and Torrance, 1983). Indeed, in the judgement of this
group, much of development in "intelligence" can best be analysed in
terms of variously mastering the literate modes of thinking cultivated
in school.
An important question confronts us at this point. The way we deal
with it has implications for our present concern to conceptualise the
impact of computers - as a further technology that supports access
to new mediational means. The question concerns how we should
conceptualize the *process* underpinning the impact of new mediational
means on individual cognition. The consequences may be clear and
dramatic, but by what mechanism are these outcomes achieved. Two
kinds of response to this problem are evident in the literature. One
is inclined to view the cognitive impact of cultural experience in
terms of acquiring and refining tools of thought (a literate mode of
thought, for example). This is a more cognitive kind of account, one
that toys with the notion of individuals internalizing such
technologies. The alternative is more practice-oriented and regards
the impact of access to new mediational means in terms of a
re-organization of some underlying way of acting in the world. The
distinction is slippery but I believe our attitude to it bears upon
how we understand the educational impact of new computing technologies
with their tool-like properties.
The more cognitive alternative is implicit in Bruner's arresting
metaphor of the cognitive "amplifier" - to describe the effect of
contact with some mediational means. He comments: 'Man is seen to
grow by the process of internalizing the ways of acting, imagining,
and symbolizing that "exist" in his culture, ways that amplify his
powers' (Bruner, 1966, p.320). The parallel is with more familiar
technologies that are said to amplify action - hammers, levers, knives
and so on - except that the symbolic equivalents are "internalized"
(and then deployed to support continued cognitive development). On
this model, cultures might furnish a (varying) supply of basic
cognitive resources (amplifiers) in the form of psychological tools
and symbol systems. Cultures might thereby extend cognitive
capabilities to varying degrees. This collection of mediational
means might now include computer-based resources. However, the
amplifier parallel may need a little more exploration. Cultures are
certainly forthcoming with mediational means, but is an amplifier the
best way of expressing the process of empowerment that follows from
accessing them?
An amplifier is a harmless enough metaphor if it merely implies that
access to a cultural technology can multiply our intellectual
achievements. The products of human activity may indeed be amplified
in this sense and this will be visible in cultures with a rich and
varied supply of technologies. If that is all we intend by it, then
it is both harmless and not very useful. Cole and Griffin (1980) have
analysed the amplification metaphor further and suggest that, often,
we do mean more by it. Furthermore, what we mean in addition might
deserve careful review. This is of particular interest to us here as
the notion of amplification is widely appealed to in discussions of
the cognitive effects of using computers.
The temptation of the amplifier image is to encourage a more-or-less,
or quantitative attitude to the impacts associated with new
mediational means. Yet what may actually be needed is a model of
cognitive processes that emphasises structural change, rather than
quantitative change. This structural analysis would encourage
thinking in terms of functional systems of interrelated components -
rather than singular (amplified) mechanisms. So, in respect of some
cognitive function (such as memory), rather than think of cultural
resources as producing a more powerful mechanism, we would think of a
re-organization effected in the activities that comprise remembering.
Cole and Griffin invite us to capture the controversy here by
reference to the following example. Consider *killing* as a
functional system of activity: one that hunters engage in for the
capture of their prey. The "killing power" of a hunter can be
extended if we supply him with a gun. Thereby, the products of the
killing activity are increased. But that amplification only occurs
when the tool is in his hand. So, the effect of the weapon is best
described in terms of its *re-organizing* the activity of killing, not
in terms of it extending some underlying and general-purpose killing
power. The same analysis can be applied to more culturally familiar
activity systems (perhaps with more vivid cognitive contents).
Consider, for example, shopping. Setting out to purchase a new supply
of goods for the family will be a different kind of activity if we do
so equipped with a pen and paper. We thereby exploit the device of a
list; it will probably help us do this task more efficiently (more
quickly, more thorougly etc.). The incorporation of this mediational
means into the activity system serves, again, to re-configure the
manner in which it is carried out. In this case, the underpinning
activity of remembering has been re-mediated.
Cole and Griffin also refer to the example of memory to express their
point about amplification. They note that, in a test, a child with a
pencil displays a more powerful memory than an undergraduate without
one. It might be said that the child's "memory power" has been
extended. The pencil is a sort of amplifier perhaps: the products of
remembering are increased through its use. This seems a
straightforward claim, but suppose we take the pencil away? Where
does this leave the child's memory in relation to the undergraduate?
The effect of the pencil is to re-organize things we do in relation to
the task of memorizing. This task calls upon a functional system, not
a dimensionalized cognitive power. Cognitive amplifiers may largely
act through re-organizing underlying *activities* (such as might be
involved in remembering) - not by amplifying cognitive powers in some
general-purpose manner that exists as "residue" when the mediational
means are not to hand.
This last point discourages thinking about the impacts of new
mediational means in terms of very *general-purpose* changes in ways
of thinking. The reorganizations effected by access to cultural
resources may be powerful but quite localized, or situated, in their
impacts. Both of these points - cognitive development as functional
reorganizations, and the situated nature of the achievements - are
empirically pursued in cross cultural work by Cole and Scribner
(1974).
Cole and Scribner studied literacy and its consequences among the
peoples of Liberia. This setting offered a distinctive opportunity
for evaluating claims that access to literacy leads to powerful and
general cognitive changes. In Liberia, several different forms of
written language existed serving different communities and different
cultural purposes. These scripts included Arabic, English and Vai.
For some communities the use of a script was principally associated
with a particular form of cultural activity - religious recitation,
business transaction, schooled instruction, the writing of letters and
so on. With literate and non-literate members of these communities,
Cole and Scribner conducted a series of tests of a kind familiar to
cognitive psychologists: tests concerned with memory, attention,
classification and other traditional cognitive functions. They found
no evidence that exposure to literacy itself created across-the-board
cognitive advantage. Rather the effect of literacy was more
localized. For example, familiarity with the Vai script for purposes
of (postal) communication might confer an advantage on tests of
referential communication skill.
This conclusion is in tension with that proposed by Luria to account
for effects of literacy among the people of Uzbekistan. Cole and
Scribner argue against conceptualizing the impact of literacy in terms
of general and quantitative extensions of cognition - such as might
then be labelled more "rational" or more "theoretical" modes of
thought. Rather, literacy is conceptualized as a technology that
restructures the manner in which we carry out certain cognitive
activities; such as those to do with recalling, classifying, ordering
and communicating. To understand the action of such technologies on
development it is then necessary to study "literate practices".
Writing enters into particular forms of culturally-organized activity
in distinctive ways to regulate interactions among the participants.
The consequence of becoming literate is therefore visible in
situations reproducing particular core activities that literate
cultures typically porvide. So, for example, if a culture's literacy
is mainly for supporting letter writing, then it will most likely
promote a certain sort of cognitive reflection; for example,
reflection about how to specify meaning and intention under
circumstances of limited communicative context. Experience in such
situations will have cultivated practices that are then manifest, for
example, in formal psychological tests of referential communication.
I have pursued the example of literacy in order to illustrate the
general approach that cultural psychology takes towards issues of
cognitive change as it is explored in comparative study: historical,
cross-cultural or developmental. The analysis stresses how we
variously come to think "through" mediational means. Goody, Luria,
Donaldson, Olson and others show how cognition is extended by access
to the particular technology of literate forms. Cole and Scribner
caution against too readily interpreting such mediation in terms of a
general amplification of the way in which we process information.
They observe that the mediational role of the written word may be
associated with circumscribed literate *practices*. It thereby
supports only bounded sets of human activities. (Of course, where
these literate practices are those of "schooled reasoning" then that
bounded set will certainly be a highly prized one for many
technological societies.) In the terms used earlier: the child
becomes socialized into particular traditions of interpretative
practice involving reading and writing. Thus, the key to
understanding the impact of literacy during development will be to
study how the written word enters into children's activity settings -
organizing those settings in distinctive ways.
I believe that we can also understand the cognitive impact of access
to computing technology according to the same agenda being presented
here for literacy. This is an important implication of the present
discussion. It follows from this discussion that computers might be
regarded as entering into certain problem solving enterprises and
achieving their impacts by reorganising or re-mediating the activities
involved. In the end, this is an analysis concerned with
conceptualising cognitive changes associated with learning through new
technology. However, it is not a traditional cognitive analysis. It
is one that dwells upon changes to the structure of activity systems
that a pupil participates in - rather than changes in a pupil's covert
knowledge structures.
Such a view does have important implications for how we think about
ways of using new technology in support of learning. If the
experience of a computer-based cognitive task is conceptualised as
acting to effect some abstract, private cognitive structure (cognitive
"tool" or whatever), then the broader *context* of that experience may
seem less significant. On the other hand, the present mediational
view highlights this context. Pupils should encounter computers as
mediational resources incorporated within suitably rich settings of
activity. That is, settings with authentic goals and purposes for
those pupils, and settings that are explicitly integrated with other
experiences of knowing and understanding as they get organized at
other times. The point about actively seeking integration is one that
I shall return to: it strongly implicates a role for social (teacher)
intervention in support of its achievement. The other point - that
activity settings should be authentic - is one strongly argued by
Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) in their analysis learning as a
'situated' achievement. This takes us to the second broad theme to
arise from a sociocultural analysis.
(2) The situated nature of cognition
Within the psychological literature, there are two contexts within
which the term "situated" gets used to describe cognition. The first
entails an orientation towards the *outcomes* of cognitive activity -
what is learned. In particular, it concerns a long-standing issue of
how far learning in one situation can be expected readily to influence
the activities of the learner within other, different situations.
This is the issue of transfer of learning. To say that a cognitive
achievement is "situated" is to draw attention to limited
possibilities of transfer: the effects of the achievement are
constrained to its context of acquisition (at least, in the first
instance). Psychologists associated with the socio-cultural tradition
are particularly concerned with this issue.
The second sense of "situated" arises more commonly within cognitive
science. In that discipline there has recently emerged a variety of
theorising distinguished by its situated perspective on cognition.
This perspective has implications for the question of transfer but,
first, it concerns definitions of knowledge itself. It is argued
that knowledge should not be conceptualised as a catalogue of stored
mental representations; instead, knowledge is always created within
the circumstances of interacting with the world - in other words, it
is situated within these interactions. Here, I shall comment first on
the transfer issue as commonly encountered in socio-cultural
theorising and then turn to make a few brief remarks about "situated
cognition" as more typically encountered within cognitive science.
Claims about the generality of learning made within the former
tradition may be made more substantial by theoretical conceptions
developed in the latter. Thus, the two perspectives on cognition as
situated are closely related.
Three groups of empirical observation have encouraged a view of
cognition as tied to particular contexts of acquisition (rather than
general and context-free). The first is research showing that, at a
given point in development, children's thinking may manifest logical
characteristics in some domains while the same characteristics do not
get mobilized in others. Donaldson (1978) summarises some examples of
how the quality of children's reasoning can vary according to the
format of the problem itself. The second is a comparable tradition of
comparative research involving different cultures (eg. Cole et al,
1971): utilization of cognitive resources may vary across cultural
settings according to local familiarity with the terms of the problem.
The third set of relevant empirical observations are laboratory
studies that demonstrate how difficult it can be for experimental
subjects spontaneously to transfer strategic thinking from one problem
(where it has worked) to a new and related problem (Detterman, 1993).
Together these lead to a particular conception of intelligence or
"expertise". Shweder (1990) summarizes this in his outline of
cultural psychological principles:
..what seems to differentiate an expert from a novice (chess player,
abacus user, medical diagnostician, etc.) is not some greater amount
of content-free pure logical or psychological power. What experts
possess that neophytes lack is a greater quantity and quality of
domain-specific knowledge of stimulus properties, as well as dedicated
mastery of the specialized or parochial "tools" of a trade (p. 23).
Vygotsky's stand on this issue was clear; in his words: 'the mind is
not a complex network of [general] capabilities, but a set of specific
capabilities....learning...is the acquisition of many specialized
abilities for thinking' (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 83).
Of course this bias towards viewing new acquisitions as being tied to
contexts does bring its own problems. The consequences of a strongly
situated view of cognitive achievements have been considered by Jahoda
(1980). Something like an integrating theory of situations is needed
in order to avoid multiplying accounts of achievements restricted to
their contexts of acquisition. Moreover, the unavoidable fact
remains that things mastered in one domain can be found to serve us
well elsewhere: generalisation of understandings is something we
surely feel does occur.
I will take up this challenge in a later chapter. I agree with
theorists who argue that it is best to start from situations 'and
discover the sources of generality in what are initially context
specific achievements' (Cole, 1990, p.16). However, I shall argue
that what is "in" achievements that affords generalisation is
something that is invariably put there by the social environment. In
other words, this is an account of learning that views new
acquisitions as initially situated, but which recognizes the
possibilities of transfer. Such possibility arises through supportive
interventions of a sociocultural nature.
Evidently, this position carries implications for how we organize
experiences in educational contexts. It suggests that things could
get done and said around computer-based learning (or other settings of
mediated learning) that serve to support the transfer of
understandings between situations. This is a straightforward sense in
which we must come to define a social context for computers deployed
in educational settings. It is part of what we might mean by claiming
a social context for cognition - although this rather specific
argument relating *transfer* to social experience is not the feature
most commonly identified within that claim. In the following section
I discuss the more traditional version of the claim.
What has been said so far in the present section reflects perspectives
typical of socio-cultural theorising. I shall conclude with some
remarks inspired by the second theoretical framework in which
cognition is currently said to be "situated". In this case, the
claims that emerge sit comfortably with cultural thinking about
cognition, but their history owes more to debates within cognitive
science - particularly in relation to the issue of artificial
intelligence.
We may begin by declaring what is not controversial. Human cognition
implicates an agent with some underlying neural organization, and it
implicates an environment from which sensory stimulation arises
and towards which action is directed. The task for cognitive
psychology is to attend to the way in which agent and environment
interact. The intelligent action that, thereby, can result needs to
be described and explained within a suitable theoretical vocabulary.
Controversy surfaces at this point. Traditionally, the vocabulary
preferred by psychologists has invoked a layer of cognitive concepts.
These concepts refer to structures that are somehow instantiated in
the neural organization. They arise as a result of interactions with
the environment; they serve to direct such interactions. In short,
cognition is said to entail stored, mental representations of the
world (knowledge), and mental manipulations performed upon those
representations (thinking). Intelligent action is, thus, driven by
the output from such an underlying mental life.
All of this relates to the development of educational practice,
including what may be attempted with the help of new technology. It
is relevant because educational interventions may be conceived and
evaluated by reference to this framework of cognitive concepts. So,
the issues being identified here will resurface in later chapters:
specificaly, the implications of this cognitive theorising for
practical applications of computers in learning will be discussed in
the next chapter. For the moment, I will just note that cognitive
theories of the sort sketched above will tend to promote certain
ventures at the boundaries of cognitive science and computer science.
In particular, the idea of knowledge as stored representations
promotes the venture of reproducing such a knowledge "database" in
machine form. This would be an attempt, perhaps, to reproduce human
expertise. This cognitive theory might also imply a particular model
of human communication: one in which computers could be programmed to
transfer data in such a way as to simulate communicative processes.
Any such simulation would be of special interest to us here - insofar
as it addresses that special form of communication known as
"instruction".
However, the credibility of these symbolic theories of cognition has
been questioned - along with their implications for computer-based
education (eg. Suchman, 1987; Winograd and Flores, 1986). This
questioning includes the promotion of an alternative conception. The
alternative is sometimes identifed as a "situated" theory of
cognition, a term favoured within the cognitive science community. The
situated view makes a commitment to the idea that knowledge is created
within interaction: it does not exist "behind" that interaction as
mental events that drive it. Thus, the situated approach is
successful in developing the cultural theorist's interest in the
distributed, mediated nature of cognition. The empirical strategy of
the approach is to study cognitive agents in interaction with their
environment - the various contexts of material and social resources
that mediate action.
This alternative to traditional cognitive theorising is not as
subversive as my contrast might imply. Proponents of a situated view
are anxious to stress that cognitive modelling remains a useful
resource. Clancey (1991) characterises the situation this way.
Cognitive psychology has furnished a description of a covert cognitive
space. Essentially, this has involved looking at the products of
human rational behaviour (language, rituals, strategies etc.),
discovering "patterns" therein and then (here is the suspect move)
locating such patterns inside our heads - supposing this mental world
comprises a mechanism that drives the rational behaviour. Clancey
argues that this approach has been useful; but its value is more to
define an agenda - something to be explained - rather than as, itself,
an achievement of explanation. 'Pattern descriptions now serve as a
specfication for how adapted behavior must appear, rather than the
mechanism to be put inside the robot' (1991, p.111).
If the traditional approaches only go this far, what must be
done to construct a more explanatory account of rational behaviour?
It is proposed that knowledge must be conceptualised as an activity,
rather than as a (stored) property of the individual. *Knowing* (in
preference to (*knowledge*) is activity always exercised in relation
to the situations individuals find themselves in. Knowing is a
relationship between the human agent and a material and social
framework that defines the momentary circumstances for acting.
*Learning*, thus, becomes an adaption of the learning person to
aspects of such circumstances, as they encounter them. This has
implications for what happens in settings that we arrange explicitly
to promote learning. What happens to learners in these settings needs
to be expressed in terms that capture a dialectic: in terms that
include features of the environment as they entered into some
interaction that occured. At later times, when learners might be said
to "remember" things, their achievements would be expressed as the
reorganization of earlier ways of perceiving and acting. New actions
(including purely contemplative intelligence (Greeno et al, 1991)) are
coupled to past learning in this sense - rather than through the
mediating intervention of stored symbolic cognitions.
Such theorists reveal an affinity with those sensory psychologists
such as Gibson who have specifically considered the integration of
perception and action. Such ecological theories address, for example,
how we account for an animal's skillful dash through dense terrain.
The account would not be in terms of the animal activating some
underlying cognitive plan that triggers a complex sequence of action,
but in terms of invariant features of the physical environment that
"afford" certain behaviours at the given moment. Greeno et al (1991)
have studied human learning with special attention to the manner in
which a material environment affords problem solving actions in this
sense. However, the thrust of empirical work influenced by the
situated tradition has concentrated on the management of human action
within the *social* "terrain". Here, the opportunity has been
taken to apply techniques from conversation analysis (Goodwin and
Heritage, 1990) to situations where discourse is central to the
learning or problem solving under examination (eg., Suchman, 1987;
Roschelle, 1992). This bias towards studying situations where social
interaction predominates is typical of theorising influenced by the
socio-cultural tradition. It is this theme within that tradition
that I turn to next.
(3) The social nature of cognition
As I stressed earlier in this chapter, there are really two senses in
which the cultural perspective insists that cognition is fundamentally
social in nature. First, it is claimed that all higher mental
functions are entrenched in a framework of rituals, conventions,
technologies and institutional practices: this framework arose in
sociocultural history. Even the most private of cognitive pursuits
will involve us with media and symbol systems that have a social
nature in this sense. Moreover, some are unambiguously social
by virtue of being encountered through the behaviour of others:
particular ways of talking and acting. Second, cognition is social
because the *acquisition* of new understandings is made possible
through participation in certain kinds of supportive social
interactions.
The influential writing of Vygotsky concerns both of these themes
(Valsinaar and Winnegar, 1992). However, the emphasis of Vygotsky's
own empirical work (and, largely, that of his followers also) was on
the second of them. Thus, many commentators have been led to reflect
only upon the social *interactional* basis of cognition. For example,
in a sympathetic but fairly critical review, Schaffer (1992) appears
to be evaluating present claims regarding the social constitution of
cognition. However, the empirical work cited is exclusively concerned
with cognitive outcomes arising from experience in joint problem
solving (bearing, therefore, only on "social" in the second -
interactional - sense above). So, a perspective does get usefully
reviewed in this exercise but it forms only part of the claim that
cognition is socially constituted.
Some cultural psychologists have been at pains to counter too narrow a
conception of the "social" as it relates to cognition; arguing that
interaction among people does not exhaust the proper sense of social
involvement. Thus, Scribner (1990) suggests that the contemporary
emphasis on interpersonal issues has distracted us from investigating
sociocultural mediation in a fuller sense. A comprehensive empirical
agenda must embrace the influence of interpersonal interactions
("social" themes) as well as the influence of artefacts, technologies
and conventions ("societal" themes, perhaps). In focussing too much
on the former only, researchers have neglected to pursue, for example,
'how cultural communities this world over organize activity settings
for the "social transfer of cognition"' (p.93). Recent literature
indicates that cultural theorists are now turning their attention more
in the "societal" direction (eg., Wertsch, 1991a).
I shall return to such matters in the next chapter, when focussing
more closely on computer-based learning in relation to cultural
thinking. The topic will arise there because the institutions and
practices of formal education do illustrate a societal theme very
well. They illustrate organized activity settings of a kind that our
culture has indeed fostered - for the particular purposes of promoting
the social transfer of knowledge. New technology is an intriguing new
component of such settings. However, I shall suggest that when we do
consider this societal theme, we are still required to attend to
issues of social *interaction*. This is because cognitive change
within educational activity settings may depend upon certain kinds of
coordination achieved for us by the efforts of other people in these
contexts. For this reason, I shall turn next to say a little more
about the typical analysis of instructional interaction that is
associated with cultural psychology.
That central place of social interaction in cultural theory is most
clearly expressed in the form of one key concept - Vygotsky's zone of
proximal development (ZPD). It was conceived to deal with two
educational issues. Firstly, the issue of how one might
satisfactorily assess a child's level of understanding in some
domain. Thus, it addresses the problem of testing. Secondly, it
deals with what goes on during processes of instruction. Thus, it is
about how learning is organized between people.
The relation of the ZPD to issues of testing arises from Vygotsky's
attention to the gap existing between 'actual developmental level as
determined by individual problem solving' and 'potential development
as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in
collaboration with more capable peers' (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). This
leads to an appealing conceptualization of assessment that focuses on
*potential* to learn and on teachability.
The relation of ZPD to issues of instruction arises from what is said
about the nature of productive collaboration as it might be best
organized with adults or "more capable peers". Just how to define
effective interpersonal exchanges within this "zone" has concerned
cultural theorists rather more than the complementary question of how
it might serve assessment purposes. Some conceptions of interaction
within the ZPD will be outlined here, although discussed in more
in Chapter 4.
If we believed that instruction involved only the efficiency of
Intitiation-Response-Evaluation exchanges (of the kind described in
Chapter 1), then the idea of a teaching *machine* would have some
credibility. However, this conception of instruction - one focussed
on the direct transmission and confirmation of information - misses
the rich possibilities of social interaction organized between
individuals of varying expertise. Truly productive encounters between
them will depend on something more subtle than the didactic exchange.
Theorists developing the ZPD concept invite us to view instructional
exchanges more in terms of collaborations.
A popular metaphor to capture what a collaboration might involve
within instructional settings is that of the "scaffold" (Wood, Bruner
and Ross, 1976). To make this work, we assume that the learner is
oriented towards a goal (the completed structure, in our metaphor);
the goal would not be attainable without external aids and support;
the expert's presence serves to ensure such support and thereby
creates an occasion of collaboration. Such encounters do not entail
simple demonstration or direct explanation: they require more
participation on the part of the novice and more sensitivity on the
part of the expert. The encounter is a collaborative one requiring
jointly coordinated problem solving. This image of scaffolding is
helpful but, as a number of commentators have suggested (eg. Newman,
Griffin and Cole, 1989; Wertsch and Stone, 1984) the metaphor should
not be pursued to slavishly. For one thing, it's static and rigid
connotations fail to suggest a real dynamic to activity as it is
jointly organized in this zone of interaction.
A critical commentator will rightly seek fuller definition of this
dynamic: exactly how does the expert's presence in the zone of
interaction serve to create cognitive support? I shall say a little
more in Chapter 4 about the detail of what could actually go on
between participants in this zone. Suffice to say here that I believe
the active creation of socially-shared understandings (between expert
and novice) is an important investment within such instructional
interactions. Tutorial initiatives will often need to build upon a
mutual foundation of that kind. Then, the sense in which such
interventions may become useful - have lasting impacts on
understanding - might be pursued in terms of a further important
concept associated with Vygotsky's account of this zone: the notion of
internalization.
Vygotsky proposes that all cognitive functions are first experienced
on the *inter*mental plane before they exist on the *intra*mental
plane. That is, our private mental reflections arise from experiences
that have first been organized in the public forum of social
interaction. A much-cited passage from Vygotsky's writing expresses
this well:
*An interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one*.
Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice:
first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first
*between* people (*interpsychological*) and then *inside* the child
(*intrapsychological*)....All the higher functions originate as actual
relationships between human individuals. [Italics in original]
(Vygotsky, 1978, p. 57).
Thus, we are offered a parallel between the external world of jointly
managed problem solving and the internal world of mental functioning.
Cognitive psychology might become the study of an interplay between
these two. In Vygotsky's analysis, a process of "internalization" is
conjectured to allow the social experiences of one to be realized
within the privacy of the other. So, Vygotsky's special interest in
language arises from his regarding it as the mediational means common
to both the inter- and intra- individual world of intelligence.
This account is not without problems. In particular, some critics
have complained that the internalization concept is underspecified.
Even so, this renewed emphasis on learning through the dynamics of
social interaction has proved immensely influential within
contemporary thinking about cognitive development and educational
practice. It is not an easy framework to evaluate empirically
(Schaffer, 1992). However, the evaluation strategy typically
preferred by cognitive researchers - poorly contextualized, short term
studies of outcomes from joint problem solving - is a strategy not
well matched to the scope of the claims. Yet, I believe this kind of
theorising does fit well the experience of practitioners and it fits
well ethnographic descriptions of teaching-in-progress.
Deploying this conceptual scheme here for concrete discussion of
computer-based learning may help to make these claims fully
convincing.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have outlined one agenda - taken from contemporary
Psychology - for the analysis of cognition, cognitive development and
educational practice. This is the socio-cultural perspective; or that
perspective roughly corresponding to what is now termed "Cultural
Psychology". I argued that the central concern of this approach
was to understand how new mediational means enter into human
behaviour in order to recoordinate it.
Several commitments are entailed by adopting such a theoretical
attitude. Firstly, accounts of intelligent action must now go beyond
the narrow, mental-process vocabulary of traditional cognitive
psychology. Cultural accounts will want to incorporate reference to
the role of mediating technologies as they enter into functional
systems of behaviour. These mediational means will include structural
features of the environment, artefacts, institutionalized
relationships, symbol systems and (most powerful of all) 'ways with
words'. Secondly, the appropriation and elaboration of new
interpretative practices is a situated achievement: it is not best
analysed in terms of the acquisition of generalised cognitive tools or
representations. There are still issues of learning transfer and
flexibility to be addressed - they are central to our interest in
educational practice - but such issues might best be understood in
terms of supportive interventions organized by the socio-cultural
environment. At least, I shall argue along these lines later.
Finally, this cultural approach converges upon a socially-grounded
conception of cognition. Mediational means may be appropriated during
the short spans of individual lifetimes, but they are themselves
resources fashioned over very long periods of cultural history. Most
important, their history reflects their lengthy involvment in human
affairs and this constrains how we may relate to them now. Cognition
is also social in nature because so many of the specific
interpretative practices we encounter during development are made
available to us within interpersonal communication. It follows that
the settings of formal education will be of special interest to
socio-cultural theorists. For it is here that practices of
communication have become especially crafted: refined and concentrated
for the explicit purposes of conveying interpretative practices to
others in the culture. The thesis of this book is that such
traditions of educational "collaboration" should be carefully
evaluated when we contemplate the incoporporation of powerful new
information technologies.
There are, of course, other theoretical traditions addressing problems
of cognition and cognitive development. There are other
traditions, therefore, that might inform the deployment of a new
educational technology. Those that are most influential within
contemporary psychology tend not to put such strong emphasis upon
social processes. By way of acknowledging this, and trying to learn
from it, I shall review these alternatives in the following chapter:
making some contrasts between the approach outlined here and that
associated with two other significant theoretical traditions. I have
chosen these two for their central importance in current psychological
thinking, but also because they both have been influential in guiding
applications of technology to education.