Vygotsky and Research

Harry Daniels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134156559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides readers with an overview of the implications for research of the theoretical work which acknowledges a debt to the writings of L.S. Vygotsky. A concise introduction to Vygotsky's original thesis and discussions on his approach to research methods is given; this is followed by an exploration of the research practices which have arisen in fields developed on the basis of his original thesis. These include: Socio-cultural studies with a focus on mediated action; Distributed Cognition, Situated Cognition and Activity Theory.

To aid understanding, chapters devoted to each area will provide excellent accounts of specific studies which illustrate the underlying methodological principles and the specific methods which are being deployed. In each case assumptions and limitations are discussed. The book concludes with some proposals for future developments at both methodological and conceptual levels.

Chapter 1
An introduction to Vygotskian theory

In 1959 Wright Mills argued the case for sociology as an imaginative pursuit which necessarily retained a certain playfulness (Mills, 1959). In this book I intend to scope some of the possibilities for a Vygotskian research imagination. In so doing I will try to avoid the sense of singularity that Mills imposed with his title The Sociological Imagination (Morgan, 1998). My argument is that Vygotsky and his followers provide a rich and vivid palette of theoretical and methodological ideas which can be utilised as we struggle to understand the processes through which the human mind is formed. He argued that creativity is a social process which requires appropriate tools, artefacts and cultures in which to thrive (Vygotsky, 2004). A central argument of this book is that Vygotsky and those who have been influenced by him provide us with tools and artefacts which can be deployed in creative social science. These are the tools and artefacts for imagining ways of researching and ways of thinking about the objects of our research.

The original texts are themselves rich and complex. They afford a multiplicity of stimulating avenues for exploration and development. The nature and extent of this source of inspiration is captured in the following intriguing statement made by a modern-day Russian writer whose own imagination is inspired by his early twentieth-century countryman.

Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory (like any great theory) resembles a city. A city with broad new avenues and ancient, narrow backstreets known only to longtime residents, with noisy, crowded plazas and quiet, deserted squares, with large, modern edifices and decrepit little buildings. The individual areas of that city may not be situated on a single level: while some rise above the ground, others are submerged below it and cannot be seen at all. In essence, it is as though there were a second city that has intimate and complex associations with the ground-level city but completely invisible to many. And the sun rises above it all and the stars come out over it at night. Sometimes dust storms and hurricanes rage, or the rain beats down long and hard and ‘the sky is overcast.’ Life is a constant feeling of effervescence. Holidays and the humdrum follow one another. The city changes, grows, and is rebuilt. Whole neighborhoods are demolished. The center is sometimes over here, sometimes over there. And so it goes.

(Puzyrei, 2007, pp. 85–6)

This image of a city, with its popular as well as relatively unknown spaces, visible and invisible structures that change in time with a variety of tempos and rhythms, captures the complexity and excitement of Vygotsky’s legacy. It points to the political nature of the development of ideas (‘sometimes dust storms and hurricanes rage, or the rain beats down long and hard and “the sky is overcast” ’) as well as the subtlety and complexity that underpins ostensible simplicity and the processes of its renewal.

His work has influenced the development of many research imaginations which share core assumptions and celebrate their own distinctiveness. In this first chapter I will draw on, extend and update the arguments laid down in Daniels (2001) in order to discuss the core elements of Vygotsky’s theoretical framework. I must emphasise that this will inevitably be a partial account. I am not attempting to give a full history of his theoretical work. That is not the purpose of this chapter. Such a history can be found in Yaroshevsky (1989), Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991) or Veresov (1999). My intention is to provide an introduction to the key theoretical moves that Vygotsky made in his somewhat frenetic period of research in the social sciences. This was a relatively brief period of furious creative activity in which he drew on the ideas of other European thinkers such as Marx, Hegel, Durkheim, Spinoza, Janet and the Gestalt psychologists, amongst many others. It gave rise to a body of writing that continues to inspire and excite a large number of social scientists today.

The Russian cultural-historical school of social theory that developed in the wake of Vygotsky’s contribution placed great emphasis on the need to develop robust theories and methodologies which would enable social scientists to study the ways in which humans both shape and are shaped by the artefacts which mediate their engagement with the world. Theories themselves are, of course, cultural-historical products. This book brings together several culturally and historically shaped interpretations and developments of the work of that Russian school. At the outset, I must draw attention to the culturally situated interpretations of Vygotsky’s work which have been developed:

The Vygotsky described in the books of J. Wertsch (1985a) does not resemble the Vygotsky in the works of A.V. Brushlinskii (1994) or V.P. Zinchenko (1996). M.G. Iaroshevskii (1991) and Kozulin (1990) do not agree in their evaluations of Vygotskian theory with Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991), Veresov (1992), or Leontiev (1998).

(Koshmanova, 2007, p. 62)

This is an important moment in the development of social theory. The material and communicative circumstances which obtain at this point at the beginning of the twenty-first century present new challenges for conceptions of learning. These challenges are themselves mediated and shaped by the culturally and historically specific understandings of learning that have been developed and are available at specific moments in time and space.

Vygotsky’s ideas were originally forged at another time of rapid and intense social upheaval: the Russian Revolution. It is arguably the case that his involvement with the development of state system for the education of ‘pedagogically neglected’ children (Yaroshevsky, 1989, p. 96) also had a formative effect. This group included the homeless, of which there were a very large number. In many respects, this was a group of young people whose engagement with the social world was mediated by the cultures of the street rather than those of Russian homes and schools. They were disconnected from the historical legacy of Russian culture as sedimented in the practices of family-based upbringing and schooling. They were deprived of access to these legacy understandings and ways of thinking by dint of their social circumstances of isolation, marginalisation and deprivation. It is hardly surprising that Vygotsky’s gaze should been directed to the development of the cultural-historical theory of the formation of mind. He was also working in a political world which was developing new priorities for the development of Russian or, more specifically, Soviet society and its citizens. This political world was directly informed by the writings of Marx and there is no doubt that this tradition energised Vygotsky’s efforts to create an approach to social science that was commensurate with the aspirations of this new political order. In July 1924, the 28-year-old Lev Vygotsky was appointed to work in the People’s Commissariat for Public Education. He argued that the culture of education as it had existed was itself in need of profound transformation and that this was possible in the new social circumstances that obtained in Russia. He embarked on the creation of psychological theories that he and others used as tools for the development of new pedagogies for all learners.

The development of Psychology as a discipline has passed through several stages. Each part of this history provides an important legacy for the next. One of the reasons that so many Western psychologists are reading the writings of a long-dead Russian may be that they are seeking to extend the insights of the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ and yet are painfully aware of the shortcomings of so many of its products (e.g. Hirst and Manier, 1995). The research practice of experimentation in artificial situations has provided valuable insights but incurred significant costs. Questions of the extent to which cognition is situated in particular contexts and distributed across individuals acting in those settings remain a challenge to theories and methodologies that are deployed in the study of human functioning. Vygotsky provided some key concepts and proposals that are now regarded as important contributions to the development of a contemporary social theory that acknowledges these features of cognitive and affective processes. The rest of this chapter consists of a discussion of some of these key ideas and in so doing surfaces some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that confront researchers who wish to adopt and adapt this tradition in their own studies. Chapter 2 will move on to an examination of some of the methodologies and methods developed by Vygotsky and his co-workers, before moving on in the rest of the book to consider how this legacy has been developed and applied in the emergent dialects of post-Vygotskian and related social theory.

Mediation

Wertsch (1985a) proposed that Vygotsky’s theoretical approach can be understood in terms of three major themes. These are: (1) the claim that an adequate account of human mental functioning must be grounded in an analysis of the tools and signs that mediate it; (2) a reliance on a genetic or developmental method; and (3) the claim that higher mental functioning in the individual has its origins in social life. I will now explore each of these themes.

Vygotsky (1978, p. 87) viewed the concept of mediation as being central to his account of social formation. It opens the way for the development of a non-deterministic account in which mediators serve as the means by which the individual acts upon and is acted upon by social, cultural and historical factors in the course of ongoing human activity. Engeström (2001a) has summarised the significance of this start:

The insertion of cultural artifacts into human actions was revolutionary in that the basic unit of analysis now overcame the split between the Cartesian individual and the untouchable societal structure. The individual could no longer be understood without his or her cultural means; and the society could no longer be understood without the agency of individuals who use and produce artifacts. This meant that objects ceased to be just raw material for the formation of logical operations in the subject as they were for Piaget. Objects became cultural entities and the object-orientedness of action became the key to understanding human psyche.

(Engeström, 2001a, p. 134)

Figure 1.1 represents the possibilities for subject–object relations in such an activity. Such relations are either unmediated, direct and in some sense natural or they are mediated by culturally available artefacts. It is important to note that Vygotsky’s thoughts on the nature of mediation changed during the course of his writing. Wertsch (2007) distinguishes between the accounts of mediation that appear to be rooted in the psychology of stimuli and stimulus means and those that seem to owe more to Vygotsky’s roots in semiotics, literary theory, art and drama. He invokes the terms ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit mediation’ in order to distinguish between the two conceptions. The following quotation provides an illustration of his attempts to develop an idea in the prevailing language of early Soviet psychology. Here explicit mediation refers to the incorporation of signs into human action as a means of reorganising that action:

In natural memory, the direct (conditioned reflex) associative connection A-B is established between two stimuli A and B. In artificial, mnemotechnical memory of the same impression, instead of this direct connection A-B, two new connections, A-X and B-X, are established with the help of the psychological tool X (e.g., a knot in a handkerchief, a string on one’s finger, a mnemonic scheme).

(Vygotsky, 1981c, p. 138)

Figure 1.1 The basic triangular representation of mediation.

Wertsch contrasts explicit mediation with implicit mediation. In so doing he discusses the dialectical relation between thinking and speech in the development of one of Vygotsky’s preferred units of analysis: word meaning.

In his critique of the kind of false and misleading isolation of thought and word that he saw in the research of his day, Vygotsky (1987) proposed taking ‘word meaning’ as a unit of analysis, something that allows us to recognize that it is ‘a phenomenon of both speech and intellect’ (p. 244). Throughout this chapter Vygotsky emphasized the need to focus on the dialectic between thought and word. He viewed this dialectic as a sort of developmental struggle and asserted that this was ‘the primary result of this work [and]… the conceptual center of our investigation’ (p. 245). In his view ‘The discovery that word meaning changes and develops is our new and fundamental contribution to the theory of thinking and speech.’

(Wertsch, 2007, p. 183)

Hasan (2005) argues it is in this way that Vygotsky links the development of consciousness to semiosis, and specifically to linguistic semiosis, and thus links the specifically human aspects of our practical and mental life to sociohistorical contexts (Hasan, 2005, p. 135–6). Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) suggestion that language is ‘over populated with the intentions of others’, reminds us that the processes of mediation are processes in which individuals operate with artefacts (e.g. words/texts) which are themselves shaped by, and have been shaped in, activities within which values are contested and meaning negotiated. In this sense, cultural residues reside in and constrain the possibilities for communication. Thus the mediational process is one which denies neither individual or collective agency nor social, cultural or historical constraint. For Wertsch (2007), implicit mediation involves signs, especially natural language, whose primary function is communication, that are part of a pre-existing, independent stream of communicative action that becomes integrated with other forms of goal-directed behaviour. The emphasis here is on the negotiation of meaning in implicit semiotic mediation. This is also the case for Hasan (2005), who agrees with Vygotsky’s identification of speech as a most powerful means of mediation:

of all the semiotic modalities only language at once defies time, is capable of being reflexive, classifies reality, construes communicable human experience, and articulates the many voices of a culture with equal facility, which is not to say that it ensures their social privilege, or that other modalities make no contribution.

(Hasan, 2005, p. 134)

Importantly, however, in an earlier paper, Hasan (2002) also echoes Wertsch’s (2007) distinction between implicit and explicit mediation with the introduction and discussion of visible and invisible semiotic mediation. For her, visible semiotic mediation is aimed at mediating a specific category of reasoning, a certain range of technical concepts and a particular relation to the physical phenomena of the world whereby the world is classified and categorised in a certain way (Hasan, 2002, p. 152); whereas invisible semiotic mediation occurs in discourse embedded in everyday, ordinary activities of a social subject’s life. However, she draws on Bernstein (1990) to argue that, whilst the context for mediation is always the social practices of discourse, an important qualification is that in such practices individuals take up specific social positions and are positioned. The same context offers different possibilities for socially positioned actors.

Participation in social practices, including participation in discourse, is the biggest boot-strapping enterprise that human beings engage in: speaking is necessary for learning to speak; engaging with contexts is necessary for recognising and dealing with contexts. This means, of course, that the contexts that one learns about are the contexts that one lives, which in turn means that the contexts one lives are those which are specialised to one’s social position.

(Hasan, 2005, p. 153)

This argument advances the case for an account of the structuring of discourse in relation to that of implicit and/or invisible semiotic mediation. Bernstein (1990, p. 13) used the concept of social positioning to refer to the establishing of a specific relation to other subjects and to the creating of specific relationships within subjects. He relates social positioning to the formation of mental dispositions in terms of the identity’s relation to the distribution of labour in society. I will return to the methodological implications of this assertion in Chapter 7.

In this section I have identified two approaches to the notion of mediation as announced by Vygotsky. These have been nuanced and developed in the writings of Wertsch (2007) and Hasan (2005). This central concept in the Vygotskian thesis is, as with so much of his work, a rich and inspirational starting point in the development of social theory. At this point I wish to flag the point that the notions of invisible or implicit mediation may well be developed through the incorporation of sociological understandings of the ways in which practices of semiotic mediation are structured and in which individuals take up, contest, resist and reformulate social positions.

Tools, signs and artefacts as mediators

When writing in the language of what Wertsch (2007) terms ‘explicit mediation’, Vygotsky (1978) announces the importance of psychological tools as cultural artefacts which could be used to ‘control behaviour from the outside’: ‘Because this auxiliary stimulus possesses the specific function of reverse action, it transfers the psychological operation to higher and qualitatively new forms and permits the humans, by the aid of extrinsic stimuli, to control their behaviour from the outside’ (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 40). Vygotsky described psychological tools as devices for mastering mental processes. They were seen as artificial and of social rather than organic or individual origin. He gave the following examples of psychological tools: ‘language; various systems for counting; mnemonic techniques; algebraic symbol systems; works of art; writing; schemes, diagrams, maps and mechanical drawings; all sorts of conventional signs’ (Vygotsky, 1981c, pp. 136–7). From Vygotsky’s persp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction to Vygotskian theory
• 2 An overview of research undertaken by Vygotsky and some of his colleagues
• 3 The sociocultural tradition
• 4 Researching distributed cognition
• 5 Situated action and communities of practice
• 6 Activity theory and interventionist research
• 7 Institutions and beyond
• References