- Email: [email protected]
Introduction: Culture and learning
Learning and Imtrucdon Printed m Great Britain.
pp.179-185.
Vol. 1, All rights
1991 0
reserved.
INTRODUCTION:
0!2594752/91 So.00 + 50 1991 Pergamon Press plc
CULTURE AND LEARNING ROGER
SALJO
University of Linkiiping, Sweden As topics of scientific inquiry, the areas of culture and learning have been living in different, and for most of the time, clearly separated enclaves. The student of learning in the heyday of behaviorism for obvious reasons took pride in having nothing to do with such an obscure and elusive mentalistic phenomenon. However, the situation did not change radically during the ’60s with the onset of what is often referred to as the “cognitive revolution”. The focus on human information processing, and the adoption of a Cartesian dualism separating form and content, as well as mind and body, made the subject of inquiry in cognitive research the mechanisms through which individuals process information. Since these mechanisms allegedly were of a very “general” and “fundamental” nature, the object of inquiry was - and is? - construed as something much more “basic” than the “trivial” particulars of how people actually make sense of the world around them. Perception, attention, memory, reasoning and other similar processes were assumed to be unaffected by the social and cultural conditions under which people live. Or, in the event that cultural factors could play a role, those would have to be dealt with once the true nature of these processes had been fully researched. Given the problems in reaching a common agreement among anthropologists, ethnologists and other scholars of culture on how to define this concept, it is not surprising that researchers in fields dominated by either behaviorist or cognitivist attitudes felt little enthusiasm for trying to grapple with the relationships between culture and cognitive and psychological phenomena. Why import another fuzzy concept into the study of a phenomenon such as learning which already seems to evade all attempts at a clear definition? Consequently, in influential textbooks, such as for instance Bower and Hilgard (1981), culture does not appear in the subject index. But times have changed and so have the perspectives on the relationship between cognitive phenomena and culture (in the broadest sense of this term). Factors external to research, such as the fact that we live in a world which is increasingly multicultural and technologically and socially complex, have put issues that relate to the cultural dimensions of knowledge and human growth on the political agenda in many countries Address for correspondence: S-581 83 Linkliping, Sweden.
R. Saljti, Department
of Communication
179
Studies, University of LinkBping,
180
R. S&J6
or at least made them visible. Within academia, the monoculturalism and epistemological monopolies of behaviorism and cognitivism are history (although they may still play a dominant role within some fields). As a result of these changes in the surrounding world and in the paradigmatic assumptions of researchers, a broad set of issues that concern the cultural dimensions of learning and schooling have come to the fore and are currently addressed in interesting ways. These issues concern the nature of teaming inside and outside the formal institution (Lave, 19@3), the achievements of different ethnic groups in the formal school system (Ogbu, 1990), noninstitutionalized forms of learning such as apprenticeship (Rogoff, 1990), the relationship between cultural practices such as literacy (Scribner & Cole, 1981), numeracy @axe, 1991) and learning, and the consequences of technological changes for human contexts of work and learning (Engestrom, 1990) to mention just a few examples of explicit attempts to reintegrate learning with its cultural and social foundations. In addition, we have during recent years witnessed a growing interest in perspectives on human learning and cognition that recognize the inherently cultural nature of human activities. The recent reintroduction of the works of Vygotsky and his followers on the scene is perhaps the best example of this reorientation. One path to further the understanding of human learning is to recognize and take seriously the assumption that human beings live in a world that is cultural in nature and that is constituted through our shared cultural practices. Culture is thus not an entity that can be introduced as a separate variable and, as it were, be added on to an acultural conception of human activities (Cole, 1990). The division of academic labor which construes culture as contents (and the res~nsibility of the anthropolo~st) and cognition as generalities (and the territory of the psychologist) is untenable if we are going to be able to understand human growth and change as has been forcefully argued by Lave (1988). Learning and any form of cognitive change take place within the context of a socially and culturally shared reality - a world of artifacts as well as of ways of interpreting and codifying reality. Culture is thus what allows us to perceive the world as meaningful and coherent and at the same time it operates as a constraint on our understandings and activities. In the Vygotskian theoretical framework, to which most of the contributors to this volume relate their findings and discussions, culture can be seen as a mediating device, a filter through which we perceive the world and render it intelligible. However, culture is not merely ideational and abstract. It is also concrete and embodied in the objects and technologies through which we manipulate reality. Devices such as word processors, calculators, telephones, etc., extend our powers to communicate with other human beings, and they shape our social activities and our expectations of what is possible to achieve. In this sense, they are not simply external to our cognition. On the contrary, they are instruments through which we coordinate with reality and which thus have a profound impact on us as psychological beings through our participation in social activities. An illustrative, although perhaps somewhat limited example of this’ process of the intertwining between culture, mind, and objects, can be seen in the article on elementary geometry learning in Japanese schools in this volume. Here, a deck of cards - a familiar object for Japanese children - is used in a new and unfamiliar context as a device for illustrating fundamental geometrical principles for calculating the area of parallelograms. By making the children focus on the side of the deck of cards, they
IN’IRODUCTION
181
come to realize that no matter how the side is transformed in shape, the surface stays the same - and therefore the area of the parallelogram created is constant. What may be difficult to understand through the traditional form of mediation - cutting paper - may become easy to accept when mediated through an object that is familiar and where the particular principle to be illustrated is clearly visible. The preunderstanding of children thus already appears tuned in to accepting that when no cards are taken away or added, the area does not change. However, this understanding is clearly culturally mediated through the particular object and through children’s previous exposure to decks of cards.
Culture, Learning and the Complex Society Thus, the argument is that a cultural conception of cognitive phenomena, and of human action in general, is vital not merely for the comparison of human thinking across what is readily recognized as different cultures. The modem society with a highly differentiated system for production, administration, education, etc., and a complex system of ways of understanding and explaining the world, is a cultural microcosm. Just as persons from two different parts of the world may have different cosmologies and different ways of understanding and explaining human conduct, the professional physicist and the trained psychologist entertain forms of explaining nature and human activities that may deviate sharply from those considered natural in everyday discourse among nonspecialists. Questions such as “why does an object set in motion lose speed?“, or “why does a person become a criminal?” are embedded in sharply differing explanatory frameworks in different provinces of meaning (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) in a complex society. My reading of the articles that make up this issue of Learning and Instruction is that they all represent attempts to break with the reductionist nature of cognitivism and discuss issues of human change and learning against a background that I understand as having to do with culture and “ways of worldmaking” to borrow Nelson Goodman’s (1978) famous expression. Although the concept of culture is not used by all the authors, their search for an understanding of how learners act, the resources - conceptual as well as material - they draw on, and the difficulties they encounter, are rooted in a recognition of the significance of culturally mediated ways of understanding and explaining the world. In the first article, Michael Cole brings up a broad range of fundamental issues that concern our theories of human development and the ways in which we bring these theoretical positions to bear on the lives of people. Cole bases his analysis on his extensive experiences of developmental work during a quarter of a century in different parts of the world. His major point is one of arguing for the need of a cultural psychology. The notion of a cultural psychology contains two significant elements: first, human beings are studied as members of social systems and as historically and culturally situated. This implies that a psychological understanding cannot satisfy itself with what is inside people’s heads but must work on the basis of human beings as involved in organized activities and as users of practical and symbolical tools which are integral to their actions: second, and following this logic, a potential contribution
182
R. sAud
of cultural psychology for improving human life conditions would be to overcome the isolation of theories of human development by making the application of the work a natural aspect of the test of the feasibility of theoretical assumptions. In line with this argument, Cole presents a long term research project that he and his research group have been conducting outside San Diego. The point of the project is to create an organized and enduring social setting in which children in an after-school activity are involved in educational and developmental activities. The children, who participate on a voluntary basis, work and play with computers in interaction with peers, staff and students, and as they gain experience they get involved in more complex tasks which eventually include carrying responsibility for helping less experienced participants. Cole concludes by discussing the conditions under which such activity systems can be made into autonomous and selfsustaining activities that can survive with minimal outside support. In a different sense, the education of blind-deaf children brings to the fore practical and theoretical problems that concern the nature of learning and development, and children’s appropriation of basic human competencies. David Bakhurst and Carol Padden, introduce the fascinating work of Alexander Meshcheryakov, a Soviet educationist whose contributions are little known in the West. Meshcheryakov devoted his life to developing an approach to the education of blind-deaf children based on the principles of the sociohistorical school of psychology that Vygotsky conceived. Working under the assumption that mental, or better still, communicative activity is essentially social and cultural in nature, Meshcheryakov systematically attempted to design a strategy for educating blind-deaf children that would, literally, create a conscious being. Thus, for Meshcheryakov consciousness is a result of the introduction of the child into a socially shared reality, it is not something that resides inside the child and precedes his or her internalization of cultural tools, including language. This philosophy thus sees joint activity between people, and the creation of situations which require meaningful communication, as means to achieving common goals, as a developmental path that will allow the child to share culturally significant practical and abstract activities. Instead of using traditional pedagogical techniques that build on drill and repetition, and that are based on a deficiency hypothesis, Meshcheryakov attempted to design an approach to learning practical and abstract skills that would make the child a participant and a contributor to interaction. In this way, the child will learn and develop through sharing authentic interactional responsibilities and it will eventually internalize the activities that were encountered in joint activity. In a concluding section, Bakhurst and Padden discuss the fate of Meshcheryakov’s work in present day Soviet Union where it has come under severe criticism for different, including political, reasons. This critique gives important insights into the political and philosophical climate of a society in transformation. Rik Pinxten in his article on the cultural dimensions of geometry education, reports on an extensive empirical study of Navajo culture. The Navajo construction of knowledge in general as well as their use of spatial concepts are far removed from the standardized Western perspective offered by the formal school system. Perceiving knowledge as decontextualized pieces of information, and learning as the rational memorization of these pieces, has no counterpart in the world view of the Navajo. As a result, the educational system has largely been unsuccessful in offering an approach to teaching and learning that the Navajo find suitable to their needs. Pinxten and his colleagues
INTRODUCTION
183
set out to study the intuitive constructions of spatial concepts that the Navajo use and that are culturally appropriate in different contexts. They also attempted to achieve a grounded understanding of how knowledge is construed in Navajo culture by studying the attitudes and “taken-for-granteds” about knowledge transmission procedures that are salient. On the basis of this knowledge, a curriculum was designed which builds on indigenous classifications and terms for spatial relationships, and which starts in the description of familiar objects such as the hooghan. Pinxten describes in concrete terms elements of this approach to teaching and learning that were found to be congenial with Navajo expectations and perspectives, and he discusses the significance of using teaching strategies that do not alienate children (or adults) from the everyday competence they use in other situations in life. In the next article, Yutuka Sayeki, Naoki Ueno and ~oshihiko Nugasaka invite the reader to share a naturalistic experiment in elementary geometry teaching in a Japanese school. The basic interest concerns the role of mediation in children’s mastery of symbolic reasoning, a central theme in the sociohisto~cal school of psychology. What the authors want to show is that the mediational means that children use while learning play a considerable role for the nature of the knowledge acquired. The traditional approach for familiarizing children with how to calculate the area of a parallelogram in Japanese (and probably many other) schools is through cutting paper. A rectangle can thus be created from a parallelogram by cutting one side and fitting the piece to the other side. However, the authors - drawing on Cavalieri - introduced an alternative mediational device, a deck of cards. By focussing on the side of the deck of cards., and by illustrating that however the shape is transformed, the height and the base remain the same, children are made to understand that the area remains invariant under the transformations, The performance of children being taught through the traditional approach and through the method using the deck of cards were studied in an experiment. The outcome reveals not only a better result for children being taught the latter method, but also a more principled understanding of what is involved in the transformation between different shapes. The particular way in which objects mediate geometrical concepts, thus plays a significant role in children’s understanding. The separation of school learning from “everyday life” has become a problem receiving significant attention by researchers focussing on the sociocultural nature of cognition. Through the works of Carraher, Carraher and Schliemann (1985), Hatano and Inagaki (1987) and Rogoff (1984) to mention a few examples, the problem of how knowledge acquired in one context carries over to another has become a visible part of the research agenda. Yr@ Engestriim takes a look at three different research perspectives to see what they suggest with respect to the problems of overcoming the “encapsulation of school learning”. The starting point of Engestrom’s analysis is a study of how people understand and explain the phases of the moon, an analysis inspired by the work of Martin Wagenschein, who, using this example, managed to illustrate how school learning results in forms of knowledge that apparently in no way connect with the observations that you can make if you look out your window at night. The three approaches to teaching and learning that Engestriim applies to his discussion of how knowledge acquired in the formal setting could be brought to bear on everyday understandings are; the theory by V. V. Davydov - building on the idea of going from the abstract to the concrete, the work by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger - “legitimate peripheral pa~icipation” by
184
R. SALJB
learners in communities of practice, and, finally, Engestriim’s own work - “learning by expanding”. In the final article, Roger Sd@ reports an empirical study of how a cultural tool, a postage table, is used by nonexperts. The basic assumption of the article is that learning to a significant extent is a matter of mastering the tools that the culture offers for handling reality. These tools (be they concrete or abstract) represent condensed versions of knowledge and conventions that have developed in a society. To understand a seemingly trivial tool such as a postage table, the problem for the user is one of establishing how the information in the table (headings, rows and columns) is to be coordinated with a complex reality. It is argued that this coordination is not a matter of applying algorithmic forms of quantification (in fact, trying to use such knowledge is the most common ground for misunderstanding the table), but rather must rely on an understanding of the sociocultural premises on which this particular tool has been designed. Thus, conventions such as the use of a standardized postage within a country (rather than having the postage be a function of the distance a letter is sent), and the practical advantages of having limited number of postages (rather than having the postage be an exact function of the weight of a letter), are all grounded in cultural and political assumptions (such as the notion of a nation state) that thus have to be recognized by the users if they are to use the table competently. Seeing knowledge and skill as the application of standardized algorithms to a ready made world is a convenient characterization that fails to capture the deeply cultural nature of tools, and the necessity of considering the complexity of situational constraints that determines the nature of a specific tool. Following the articles, there are two commentaries that address some of the specific issues brought up by the authors as well as the general question of the relationship between culture and learning. The commentaries have been written by Giyoo Hatano and Naomi Miyake, and by Stella Vosniadou. To conclude, the attempts to bring the concept of culture into focus, and the strive to put it on the agenda when it comes to studying human learning and change, can be construed as an attempt to create a discourse that corresponds to the experiences people currently have in many parts of the world. Many societies are becoming increasingly multicultural through migration as well as through increasing cultural and technological differentiation. These processes serve as important underpinnings for rethinking the reductionist notions of learning - behaviorist as well as cognitivist - that have limited the study of learning to the “senseless” acquisition of behaviors on the one hand, and to the disembodied application of mythical cognitive processes to the world on ihe other. Human experiences are inescapably cultural in nature, and learning and growth take place within cultural boundaries. A psychological understanding that recognizes this nature of human thought and action will enrich our understanding of human growth, and, ultimately, add to the possibilities of research to relate to a complex world.
References Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966) The social construction ofreulify. New York: Doubleday. Bower, G., & Hilgard, E. (1981). Theories offearning (5th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Cole, M. (1990). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline? In J. J. Berman (Ed.), Nebraska
INTRODUCTION
185
symposium on motivation, 1989: Cross-cultural perspectives (Vol. 37, pp. 279-336). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Carraher, T. N., Carraher, D. W., & Schliemann, A. D. (1985). Mathematics in the streets and schools. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 3, 21-29. Engestrom, Y. (1998). Learning, working, and imagining. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsuitit. Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of worldmaking. Hassocks: Harvester. Hatano, G., & Inagaki, K. (1987). Everyday biology and school biology: How do they interact? Quarterly Newsletter of the.Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 9 (4), 120-128. Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J. (1990). The culture of acquisition and the practice of understanding. In J. W. Stigler, R. A. Schweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology (pp. 309-327). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ogbu, J. U. (1990) Cultural model, identity, and literacy. In J. W. Stigler, R. A. Schweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology (pp. 52&541). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogoff, B. (1984). Introduction: Thinking and learning in social context. In B. Rogoff & J. Lave (Eds.), Everyday cognition: Its development in social context (pp. l-8). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press. Saxe, G. (1991). Culture and cognitive development: Studies in mathematical understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
pp.179-185.
Vol. 1, All rights
1991 0
reserved.
INTRODUCTION:
0!2594752/91 So.00 + 50 1991 Pergamon Press plc
CULTURE AND LEARNING ROGER
SALJO
University of Linkiiping, Sweden As topics of scientific inquiry, the areas of culture and learning have been living in different, and for most of the time, clearly separated enclaves. The student of learning in the heyday of behaviorism for obvious reasons took pride in having nothing to do with such an obscure and elusive mentalistic phenomenon. However, the situation did not change radically during the ’60s with the onset of what is often referred to as the “cognitive revolution”. The focus on human information processing, and the adoption of a Cartesian dualism separating form and content, as well as mind and body, made the subject of inquiry in cognitive research the mechanisms through which individuals process information. Since these mechanisms allegedly were of a very “general” and “fundamental” nature, the object of inquiry was - and is? - construed as something much more “basic” than the “trivial” particulars of how people actually make sense of the world around them. Perception, attention, memory, reasoning and other similar processes were assumed to be unaffected by the social and cultural conditions under which people live. Or, in the event that cultural factors could play a role, those would have to be dealt with once the true nature of these processes had been fully researched. Given the problems in reaching a common agreement among anthropologists, ethnologists and other scholars of culture on how to define this concept, it is not surprising that researchers in fields dominated by either behaviorist or cognitivist attitudes felt little enthusiasm for trying to grapple with the relationships between culture and cognitive and psychological phenomena. Why import another fuzzy concept into the study of a phenomenon such as learning which already seems to evade all attempts at a clear definition? Consequently, in influential textbooks, such as for instance Bower and Hilgard (1981), culture does not appear in the subject index. But times have changed and so have the perspectives on the relationship between cognitive phenomena and culture (in the broadest sense of this term). Factors external to research, such as the fact that we live in a world which is increasingly multicultural and technologically and socially complex, have put issues that relate to the cultural dimensions of knowledge and human growth on the political agenda in many countries Address for correspondence: S-581 83 Linkliping, Sweden.
R. Saljti, Department
of Communication
179
Studies, University of LinkBping,
180
R. S&J6
or at least made them visible. Within academia, the monoculturalism and epistemological monopolies of behaviorism and cognitivism are history (although they may still play a dominant role within some fields). As a result of these changes in the surrounding world and in the paradigmatic assumptions of researchers, a broad set of issues that concern the cultural dimensions of learning and schooling have come to the fore and are currently addressed in interesting ways. These issues concern the nature of teaming inside and outside the formal institution (Lave, 19@3), the achievements of different ethnic groups in the formal school system (Ogbu, 1990), noninstitutionalized forms of learning such as apprenticeship (Rogoff, 1990), the relationship between cultural practices such as literacy (Scribner & Cole, 1981), numeracy @axe, 1991) and learning, and the consequences of technological changes for human contexts of work and learning (Engestrom, 1990) to mention just a few examples of explicit attempts to reintegrate learning with its cultural and social foundations. In addition, we have during recent years witnessed a growing interest in perspectives on human learning and cognition that recognize the inherently cultural nature of human activities. The recent reintroduction of the works of Vygotsky and his followers on the scene is perhaps the best example of this reorientation. One path to further the understanding of human learning is to recognize and take seriously the assumption that human beings live in a world that is cultural in nature and that is constituted through our shared cultural practices. Culture is thus not an entity that can be introduced as a separate variable and, as it were, be added on to an acultural conception of human activities (Cole, 1990). The division of academic labor which construes culture as contents (and the res~nsibility of the anthropolo~st) and cognition as generalities (and the territory of the psychologist) is untenable if we are going to be able to understand human growth and change as has been forcefully argued by Lave (1988). Learning and any form of cognitive change take place within the context of a socially and culturally shared reality - a world of artifacts as well as of ways of interpreting and codifying reality. Culture is thus what allows us to perceive the world as meaningful and coherent and at the same time it operates as a constraint on our understandings and activities. In the Vygotskian theoretical framework, to which most of the contributors to this volume relate their findings and discussions, culture can be seen as a mediating device, a filter through which we perceive the world and render it intelligible. However, culture is not merely ideational and abstract. It is also concrete and embodied in the objects and technologies through which we manipulate reality. Devices such as word processors, calculators, telephones, etc., extend our powers to communicate with other human beings, and they shape our social activities and our expectations of what is possible to achieve. In this sense, they are not simply external to our cognition. On the contrary, they are instruments through which we coordinate with reality and which thus have a profound impact on us as psychological beings through our participation in social activities. An illustrative, although perhaps somewhat limited example of this’ process of the intertwining between culture, mind, and objects, can be seen in the article on elementary geometry learning in Japanese schools in this volume. Here, a deck of cards - a familiar object for Japanese children - is used in a new and unfamiliar context as a device for illustrating fundamental geometrical principles for calculating the area of parallelograms. By making the children focus on the side of the deck of cards, they
IN’IRODUCTION
181
come to realize that no matter how the side is transformed in shape, the surface stays the same - and therefore the area of the parallelogram created is constant. What may be difficult to understand through the traditional form of mediation - cutting paper - may become easy to accept when mediated through an object that is familiar and where the particular principle to be illustrated is clearly visible. The preunderstanding of children thus already appears tuned in to accepting that when no cards are taken away or added, the area does not change. However, this understanding is clearly culturally mediated through the particular object and through children’s previous exposure to decks of cards.
Culture, Learning and the Complex Society Thus, the argument is that a cultural conception of cognitive phenomena, and of human action in general, is vital not merely for the comparison of human thinking across what is readily recognized as different cultures. The modem society with a highly differentiated system for production, administration, education, etc., and a complex system of ways of understanding and explaining the world, is a cultural microcosm. Just as persons from two different parts of the world may have different cosmologies and different ways of understanding and explaining human conduct, the professional physicist and the trained psychologist entertain forms of explaining nature and human activities that may deviate sharply from those considered natural in everyday discourse among nonspecialists. Questions such as “why does an object set in motion lose speed?“, or “why does a person become a criminal?” are embedded in sharply differing explanatory frameworks in different provinces of meaning (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) in a complex society. My reading of the articles that make up this issue of Learning and Instruction is that they all represent attempts to break with the reductionist nature of cognitivism and discuss issues of human change and learning against a background that I understand as having to do with culture and “ways of worldmaking” to borrow Nelson Goodman’s (1978) famous expression. Although the concept of culture is not used by all the authors, their search for an understanding of how learners act, the resources - conceptual as well as material - they draw on, and the difficulties they encounter, are rooted in a recognition of the significance of culturally mediated ways of understanding and explaining the world. In the first article, Michael Cole brings up a broad range of fundamental issues that concern our theories of human development and the ways in which we bring these theoretical positions to bear on the lives of people. Cole bases his analysis on his extensive experiences of developmental work during a quarter of a century in different parts of the world. His major point is one of arguing for the need of a cultural psychology. The notion of a cultural psychology contains two significant elements: first, human beings are studied as members of social systems and as historically and culturally situated. This implies that a psychological understanding cannot satisfy itself with what is inside people’s heads but must work on the basis of human beings as involved in organized activities and as users of practical and symbolical tools which are integral to their actions: second, and following this logic, a potential contribution
182
R. sAud
of cultural psychology for improving human life conditions would be to overcome the isolation of theories of human development by making the application of the work a natural aspect of the test of the feasibility of theoretical assumptions. In line with this argument, Cole presents a long term research project that he and his research group have been conducting outside San Diego. The point of the project is to create an organized and enduring social setting in which children in an after-school activity are involved in educational and developmental activities. The children, who participate on a voluntary basis, work and play with computers in interaction with peers, staff and students, and as they gain experience they get involved in more complex tasks which eventually include carrying responsibility for helping less experienced participants. Cole concludes by discussing the conditions under which such activity systems can be made into autonomous and selfsustaining activities that can survive with minimal outside support. In a different sense, the education of blind-deaf children brings to the fore practical and theoretical problems that concern the nature of learning and development, and children’s appropriation of basic human competencies. David Bakhurst and Carol Padden, introduce the fascinating work of Alexander Meshcheryakov, a Soviet educationist whose contributions are little known in the West. Meshcheryakov devoted his life to developing an approach to the education of blind-deaf children based on the principles of the sociohistorical school of psychology that Vygotsky conceived. Working under the assumption that mental, or better still, communicative activity is essentially social and cultural in nature, Meshcheryakov systematically attempted to design a strategy for educating blind-deaf children that would, literally, create a conscious being. Thus, for Meshcheryakov consciousness is a result of the introduction of the child into a socially shared reality, it is not something that resides inside the child and precedes his or her internalization of cultural tools, including language. This philosophy thus sees joint activity between people, and the creation of situations which require meaningful communication, as means to achieving common goals, as a developmental path that will allow the child to share culturally significant practical and abstract activities. Instead of using traditional pedagogical techniques that build on drill and repetition, and that are based on a deficiency hypothesis, Meshcheryakov attempted to design an approach to learning practical and abstract skills that would make the child a participant and a contributor to interaction. In this way, the child will learn and develop through sharing authentic interactional responsibilities and it will eventually internalize the activities that were encountered in joint activity. In a concluding section, Bakhurst and Padden discuss the fate of Meshcheryakov’s work in present day Soviet Union where it has come under severe criticism for different, including political, reasons. This critique gives important insights into the political and philosophical climate of a society in transformation. Rik Pinxten in his article on the cultural dimensions of geometry education, reports on an extensive empirical study of Navajo culture. The Navajo construction of knowledge in general as well as their use of spatial concepts are far removed from the standardized Western perspective offered by the formal school system. Perceiving knowledge as decontextualized pieces of information, and learning as the rational memorization of these pieces, has no counterpart in the world view of the Navajo. As a result, the educational system has largely been unsuccessful in offering an approach to teaching and learning that the Navajo find suitable to their needs. Pinxten and his colleagues
INTRODUCTION
183
set out to study the intuitive constructions of spatial concepts that the Navajo use and that are culturally appropriate in different contexts. They also attempted to achieve a grounded understanding of how knowledge is construed in Navajo culture by studying the attitudes and “taken-for-granteds” about knowledge transmission procedures that are salient. On the basis of this knowledge, a curriculum was designed which builds on indigenous classifications and terms for spatial relationships, and which starts in the description of familiar objects such as the hooghan. Pinxten describes in concrete terms elements of this approach to teaching and learning that were found to be congenial with Navajo expectations and perspectives, and he discusses the significance of using teaching strategies that do not alienate children (or adults) from the everyday competence they use in other situations in life. In the next article, Yutuka Sayeki, Naoki Ueno and ~oshihiko Nugasaka invite the reader to share a naturalistic experiment in elementary geometry teaching in a Japanese school. The basic interest concerns the role of mediation in children’s mastery of symbolic reasoning, a central theme in the sociohisto~cal school of psychology. What the authors want to show is that the mediational means that children use while learning play a considerable role for the nature of the knowledge acquired. The traditional approach for familiarizing children with how to calculate the area of a parallelogram in Japanese (and probably many other) schools is through cutting paper. A rectangle can thus be created from a parallelogram by cutting one side and fitting the piece to the other side. However, the authors - drawing on Cavalieri - introduced an alternative mediational device, a deck of cards. By focussing on the side of the deck of cards., and by illustrating that however the shape is transformed, the height and the base remain the same, children are made to understand that the area remains invariant under the transformations, The performance of children being taught through the traditional approach and through the method using the deck of cards were studied in an experiment. The outcome reveals not only a better result for children being taught the latter method, but also a more principled understanding of what is involved in the transformation between different shapes. The particular way in which objects mediate geometrical concepts, thus plays a significant role in children’s understanding. The separation of school learning from “everyday life” has become a problem receiving significant attention by researchers focussing on the sociocultural nature of cognition. Through the works of Carraher, Carraher and Schliemann (1985), Hatano and Inagaki (1987) and Rogoff (1984) to mention a few examples, the problem of how knowledge acquired in one context carries over to another has become a visible part of the research agenda. Yr@ Engestriim takes a look at three different research perspectives to see what they suggest with respect to the problems of overcoming the “encapsulation of school learning”. The starting point of Engestrom’s analysis is a study of how people understand and explain the phases of the moon, an analysis inspired by the work of Martin Wagenschein, who, using this example, managed to illustrate how school learning results in forms of knowledge that apparently in no way connect with the observations that you can make if you look out your window at night. The three approaches to teaching and learning that Engestriim applies to his discussion of how knowledge acquired in the formal setting could be brought to bear on everyday understandings are; the theory by V. V. Davydov - building on the idea of going from the abstract to the concrete, the work by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger - “legitimate peripheral pa~icipation” by
184
R. SALJB
learners in communities of practice, and, finally, Engestriim’s own work - “learning by expanding”. In the final article, Roger Sd@ reports an empirical study of how a cultural tool, a postage table, is used by nonexperts. The basic assumption of the article is that learning to a significant extent is a matter of mastering the tools that the culture offers for handling reality. These tools (be they concrete or abstract) represent condensed versions of knowledge and conventions that have developed in a society. To understand a seemingly trivial tool such as a postage table, the problem for the user is one of establishing how the information in the table (headings, rows and columns) is to be coordinated with a complex reality. It is argued that this coordination is not a matter of applying algorithmic forms of quantification (in fact, trying to use such knowledge is the most common ground for misunderstanding the table), but rather must rely on an understanding of the sociocultural premises on which this particular tool has been designed. Thus, conventions such as the use of a standardized postage within a country (rather than having the postage be a function of the distance a letter is sent), and the practical advantages of having limited number of postages (rather than having the postage be an exact function of the weight of a letter), are all grounded in cultural and political assumptions (such as the notion of a nation state) that thus have to be recognized by the users if they are to use the table competently. Seeing knowledge and skill as the application of standardized algorithms to a ready made world is a convenient characterization that fails to capture the deeply cultural nature of tools, and the necessity of considering the complexity of situational constraints that determines the nature of a specific tool. Following the articles, there are two commentaries that address some of the specific issues brought up by the authors as well as the general question of the relationship between culture and learning. The commentaries have been written by Giyoo Hatano and Naomi Miyake, and by Stella Vosniadou. To conclude, the attempts to bring the concept of culture into focus, and the strive to put it on the agenda when it comes to studying human learning and change, can be construed as an attempt to create a discourse that corresponds to the experiences people currently have in many parts of the world. Many societies are becoming increasingly multicultural through migration as well as through increasing cultural and technological differentiation. These processes serve as important underpinnings for rethinking the reductionist notions of learning - behaviorist as well as cognitivist - that have limited the study of learning to the “senseless” acquisition of behaviors on the one hand, and to the disembodied application of mythical cognitive processes to the world on ihe other. Human experiences are inescapably cultural in nature, and learning and growth take place within cultural boundaries. A psychological understanding that recognizes this nature of human thought and action will enrich our understanding of human growth, and, ultimately, add to the possibilities of research to relate to a complex world.
References Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966) The social construction ofreulify. New York: Doubleday. Bower, G., & Hilgard, E. (1981). Theories offearning (5th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Cole, M. (1990). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline? In J. J. Berman (Ed.), Nebraska
INTRODUCTION
185
symposium on motivation, 1989: Cross-cultural perspectives (Vol. 37, pp. 279-336). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Carraher, T. N., Carraher, D. W., & Schliemann, A. D. (1985). Mathematics in the streets and schools. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 3, 21-29. Engestrom, Y. (1998). Learning, working, and imagining. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsuitit. Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of worldmaking. Hassocks: Harvester. Hatano, G., & Inagaki, K. (1987). Everyday biology and school biology: How do they interact? Quarterly Newsletter of the.Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 9 (4), 120-128. Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J. (1990). The culture of acquisition and the practice of understanding. In J. W. Stigler, R. A. Schweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology (pp. 309-327). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ogbu, J. U. (1990) Cultural model, identity, and literacy. In J. W. Stigler, R. A. Schweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology (pp. 52&541). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogoff, B. (1984). Introduction: Thinking and learning in social context. In B. Rogoff & J. Lave (Eds.), Everyday cognition: Its development in social context (pp. l-8). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press. Saxe, G. (1991). Culture and cognitive development: Studies in mathematical understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.