Cultural-Historical Approach

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Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

M. Gauvain, in Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development, 2008

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

Vygotsky was a leader in the formation of a theoretical approach that emphasizes
the contributions of the social and cultural world to intellectual development. This
approach, which is called the sociocultural or cultural–historical approach to the
study of the mind, has had substantial impact on theory and research in cognitive
development in Russia since the 1920s. The influence of this perspective extended
beyond Russia in the early 1960s when the first English translations of Vygotsky’s
writings appeared in the book Thought and Language. The sociocultural approach
draws attention to the role played by cultural tools and signs in mediating thinking
and intelligent action. It emphasizes how the social world is instrumental in the
development and use of these mediational means, and therefore, is a constituent
element of human intellectual functioning.

Three critical aspects of Vygotsky’s sociocultural approach are the role of mediational
means in higher psychological functioning, the contributions of social and cultural
experience in providing and supporting the development and use of these media-
tional means, and the primacy of the developmental or, in Vygotsky’s terminology,
genetic method. This article discusses the theoretical features of this approach,
including the distinction Vygotsky made between elementary and higher mental
functions that is important for understanding his approach. A brief description of
Vygotsky’s life and the context in which he developed his ideas provides a useful
backdrop for understanding this theory and the research derived from it.
> Read full chapter

Art History
H. Bredekamp, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences,
2001

4 Methods
Art history as an academic discipline was mainly the product of German-speaking
Europe, a fact that had consequences for the development of its specific methods.
These ranged from methods strictly oriented to the object to philosophical and
cultural–historical approaches.

In analogy to the critical methods of the historians, Friedrich von Rumohr and
Gustau Friedrich Waagen, director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, developed a
method of source criticism and a technique of formal observation that permitted the
assessment and continuation of Vasari's Lives (Bickendorf 1991). The achievements
of this school were embodied in the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, planned by the two
private scholars Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker and published in 37 volumes from
1907 to 1950, with entries for ca. 150,000 artists and craftsmen from 92 countries.

Post-Hegelian Berlin saw the emergence of Gustav Hotho's and Carl Schnaase's
developmental histories, oriented to the philosophy of the world spirit, and Franz
Kugler's history of world art encompassing all times and peoples, derived from
the Kosmos lectures of Alexander von Humboldt. Burckhardt's cultural-historical
orientation likewise drew essential inspiration from this climate. Burckhardt strove
for an art history ‘according to problems,’ in other words in accord with external
aims, in order, on the basis of this kind of investigation, to be able to define the
autonomy of art even more precisely (Waetzold 1924, Vol. 2, pp. 47–92, 141–210).

The two poles of dependence on external conditions and the unmistakable unique-
ness of art determine art historical methods to this day. A series of attempts un-
dertaken around 1900 on the basis of Burckhardt's work, aimed at responding to
modern experience, still maintain their essential validity (Podro 1982). Represen-
tatives of the Vienna School such as Alois Riegl operated with the concept of the
Kunstwollen in order to develop an art history that transcended individual artistic
personalities. Riegl's Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901), which sought to structurally
analyze a hitherto unconsidered epoch, used late antiquity as a mirror to reflect the
art industry coming to expression in the mass culture of Riegl's own time. With a
view to an ‘art history without names’ in accord with the abstractions of modern art,
Burckhardt's Swiss student Heinrich Wölfflin developed criteria of a stylistic history
which, as a strict school of vision, rejected everything oriented to other disciplines.

With sensitivity to contemporary tensions between art and politics, the Hamburg
art historian Aby Warburg developed a method diametrically opposed to that of
Wölfflin: iconology. Already in his dissertation on Sandro Botticelli (1893), Warburg
dealt with problems of the psychology of form connecting historical forces of action
and image-making. His dictum, formulated in 1912, that art history should be
written as cultural history in a struggle against the boundaries of the academic dis-
ciplines (Warburg 1999, p. 585) lives on in present-day efforts to understand artistic
form in its liturgical, political, and social function and its relation to literature and
documentary sources. Warburg's foundation of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek
Warburg and the development of the iconological method constitute probably the
most profound impulse art history has contributed to the history of scholarship in
the twentieth century. The continuing publication and translation of his collected
works into English will probably further increase his influence.

Another response to the problematization of the ego and the artistic personality
in modern mass culture was the sociology of art, a field that moved between the
poles of Burckhardt—who, although he wanted to write art history on the basis of
defining ‘problems,’ nonetheless saw it as an equal partner alongside the political
and social realm—and Karl Marx, who derived artistic activity from social conditions
(Warnke 1970). The sociology of art has researched the changing social status of the
artist, examined relations between patrons and artists, defined the determinative
role of function for artistic form, explored the role of patronage, and reconstructed
historical manifestations of the art market. In addition, stylistic forms have been
associated repeatedly with socially determined ways of seeing and thinking.

Landmarks of the sociology of art were written on the Italian Renaissance. Funda-
mental works dedicated to the status of art and artists (Wackernagel 1938, Kempers
1992, Goldthwaite 1993) and to the sociology of style (Antal 1947, Meiss 1951).
Meiss's work, inasmuch as it mediates between style and class structure far more
flexibly than does Antal, numbers among the most important works of art sociology
of all time. Hauser's handbook (1953) constitutes the most comprehensive work on
the social history of art and is notable for having also included film as a genuine area
of art history. In contrast to Hauser's social history, oriented to the bourgeoisie and
the cities, Warnke's work on the court artist (1996) investigates the princely court as
the motor of artistic development, while Bätschmann (1997) focuses his analysis on
the modern market- and exhibition-oriented artist.

> Read full chapter

Archaeology
Patricia A. Urban, E. Christian Wells, in Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, 2005

Introduction
In the United States, archaeology has two intellectual homes: the classics, in which
the focus is Greek and Roman culture in the Mediterranean world, and anthro-
pology, which encompasses everything else from ancient times, as well as certain
approaches to more modern eras. Classical archaeology is definitely allied with the
humanities, but anthropological archaeology, hereafter simply called archaeology,
is firmly within the social sciences. The methods and ideas used in archaeology are
drawn from the natural sciences (14C dating, neutron activation studies of artifact
composition, and so forth), the humanities (art historical analysis; some postmod-
ern approaches to interpretation), and the social sciences. There is a relationship
between theory in anthropological archaeology and other social science theories,
i.e., cultural anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, history (arguably
a social science), geography, and women's and gender studies (also a discipline
that straddles the humanities and social sciences). The focus here is more on the
theories derived from the social sciences than on methods, for the simple reason that
archaeology shares few actual methods with other social sciences: most procedures
are either unique to the field, or similar to procedures from other field-based
disciplines, particularly geology.

The common roots of American archaeology and anthropology lie in the particular-
ities of the New World, in which colonists encountered societies with demonstrable
ties to prehistoric cultures. The juxtaposition of “primitive” Native Americans and
“advanced” Europeans led to the development of cultural evolutionary frameworks
for evaluating and classifying contemporary and extinct peoples, theories used by
archaeologists and cultural anthropologists alike. For archaeology, the presence of
living decedents of ancient peoples gave rise to the direct historical approach, that
is, using contemporary people and their cultures as analogies for interpreting the
past. Interpretation using analogy remains a common method in contemporary
archaeology. In the 20th century, the evolutionary approach of 19th century prac-
titioners withered and died, but the direct historical approach lives on, informing
much current interpretation.

The earliest school of archaeological thought in the 20th century, the cultural histor-
ical approach, focused on the systematics of space (where groups were located, how
they migrated through time, and how sites and regions were organized) and time
(dating). To gather spatial data, archaeologists in the early 20th century developed
basic methods used to this day, including ground survey (generally on foot) and
recording by mapping the site and determining the geographic location. Lacking the
precise dating techniques developed after World War II, culture historians in the first
half of the century developed regional chronologies based on stratigraphy (the study
of the natural and cultural layers found in sites) and cross-dating through artifact
similarities and traded items; both of these methods are borrowed from geology,
but adapt well to archaeology. Artifacts, for example, substitute for geology's type
fossils in comparisons. Artifacts, botanical and faunal samples and other materials,
and stratigraphic profiles are obtained through controlled excavations, a method not
employed by other social sciences. The first chronologies developed were imperfect
(e.g., Stonehenge was thought to date to the time of the Phoenicians, although it is
3000 years earlier), but they laid the framework for later work. Though it is unlikely
that any modern archaeologists would characterize themselves as culture historians,
space–time systematics are still fundamental to archaeology, as is the social science
theory that cultural historians borrowed from history: the present situation of a site
or area can be explained in terms of its antecedent conditions. This is sometimes
known as genetic explanation, not due to any connection to biology, but because of
the relationship through descent of modern and ancient cultures.

After World War II, technical dating methods, largely based on newly understood
atomic decay processes, brought refinement to cultural historical sequences. At
the same time, American archaeologists became dissatisfied with the normative
picture of the past delineated by culture history. That approach did not deal well
with behavioral variation within cultures, nor did its practitioners seek to explain
change except by antecedent conditions or supposedly self-evident processes such
as population migration or diffusion of objects and, to a lesser extent, ideas. The
school developing in the 1960s and onward was self-named the “new archaeology”
to emphasize its break with the past. The goal was explicit explanation, development
of covering laws to aid both in explanation and the deduction of hypotheses and test
implications, and a greater understanding of human–ecology relationships. Many
of the ideas borrowed from other social sciences (see later) became part of “normal
science” during the heyday of the new, or processualist, archaeology (because of its
interest in the processes of cultural change and adaptations), which was considered
a science modeled after natural sciences, particularly physics and chemistry.

The inevitable backlash against the excesses of processualist approaches is the

unfortunately named postprocessual archaeology. This set of diverse approaches
has a number of goals, among which are looking at decision making and agency;
understanding sites in their particular landscapes; looking at identity, including
the components of individual identity such as gender, age, sexual orientation, and
ability/disability; and promoting the idea that knowledge is contingent, and that we
cannot escape the ideas and language of our own era. Thus what we say about the
past is as much about our times as ancient days. Inspiration is drawn from both the
social sciences and the humanities.

The following discussions highlight the models and theories drawn from other social
sciences that have been particularly important to anthropological archaeology since
World War II. The text is telegraphic, and citations are at a minimum; nonetheless,
readers should obtain enough background to follow up on particular approaches.

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Children's self-talk in naturalistic class-

room settings in middle childhood: A
systematic literature review
Róisín M. Flanagan, Jennifer E. Symonds, in Educational Research Review, 2022

4.5 Study trends

Fitting with a Vygotskian cultural historical approach, we analysed the trends in pub-
lication year, geographic locale, study theoretical perspectives, and study methods,
to give further insight into the field of self-talk in classrooms in middle childhood.
We found that the self-talk publications emerged in the USA in the mid-1980s, and
it was not until the mid-1990s that research began to be published in Australasia
(Australia and New Zealand) and Europe. Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective on
self-talk was the predominant theory across the decades, with cognitive behavioural
theories being used in the 1980s and 1990s but not in the 2000s. Questionnaires,
observations, interviews, and methods of recording utterances (e.g., think alouds)
were used relatively consistently across time, with written methods for recording
self-talk (journaling and thought listing) emerging in the late 1990s. All geographic
locales (the USA, Australasia, and Europe) used Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective
to frame their studies, with cognitive behavioural perspectives being used in the
USA and Australasia but not in Europe (Fig. 1). There was a clear trend in use of
methods with observation only being used in the USA, and Australasian studies
using questionnaires the most (Fig. 2) mainly due to the popularity of Burdett's
(1996) Self-Talk Inventory. Finally, the different theoretical perspectives did not
appear to relate systematically to the different methods used, other than studies with
no theoretical perspective using only questionnaires (Fig. 3).
Fig. 1. Study theoretical perspective by locale.
Fig. 2. Study methods by locale.
Fig. 3. Study methods by study theoretical perspective.

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Moral Imagination as a cultural-histor-

ical concept
Anne Edwards, Mariane Hedegaard, in Learning, Culture and Social Interaction,
2021

2 Bringing together moral imagination and cultural-historical

approaches
The editors have therefore insightfully created a space for innovative work; where
moral imagining is used as a prism through which all the contributors, steeped in
cultural-historical approaches, can augment their interpretations of the limits and
possibilities of educational practices. Consequently, we ask what has moral imag-
ining brought to cultural-historical sensitivities and what does a cultural-historical
approach bring to accounts of moral imagining?

The first question reminds us of Wartofsky's discussions of three dimensions of

artefacts, including language alongside material objects, as tools (Wartofsky, 1973).
The highest forms of tools, he termed tertiary artefacts, where imagination allows
people to see new possibilities within current practices, pointing to where they might
make changes in those practices. In brief, moral imagining as deployed in this special
issue brings to the fore how cultural-historical approaches can lend themselves to
alternative ways of seeing and ultimately activism. All the papers, in different ways,
call for envisioning to lead to action, lending support to cultural-historical work on
researcher as activist (Stetsenko, 2016).

Moral imagining also involves a fusion of cognition and affect, a matter of concern
to the authors of this short epilogue. We are currently writing on a Vygotsky-based
care-full approach to supporting children, which recognises how emotion under-
pins reason (Hedegaard & Edwards, in preparation). The book was prompted by
the widespread approaches to education, which fail to acknowledge that children
have emotional lives. These connections between cognition and affect were also
recognised by John Dewey. Fensmire, in his 2003 account of Dewey and moral
imagination, describes the importance Dewey placed on the interplay between
perception, reasoning and feeling. Bringing a focus on feeling through attention
to moral imagination is, to our minds, a major contribution from the collection of
papers.

The second question: “what does a cultural-historical mind-set bring to work on

moral imagining?”, takes us first to Vygotsky's accounts of imagination and the
differences between the imagining of young children and of adolescents (Vygotsky,
1998). In three of the articles (Adams & Morgan; Bøttcher; Vadeboncoeur, et al.)
moral imagining is discussed in relation to difficulties experienced by young people
in established educational practices. Moral imagining is offered as an explanation of
how they can be supported in education to build new orientations to their futures. In
the other three articles (Fleer; Li, Ridgeway & Quińones; Winther-Lindqvist) the focus
is care and young children's motives in early childhood education settings. We were
intrigued by how two of the papers drew on observations of very young children in
play activities with adults (Fleer and Li et al.). These two papers both stop at accounts
of “As Is” and, like Winther-Lindqvist, indicate the need for more attention to the
intricacies and sensitivities of the adult role in children's play activities.

Those studies drawing on data from young people reflect Vygotsky's view that
“the imagination of the adolescent enters into close connection with thinking with
concepts; it is intellectualized…and begins to fulfil a completely new function in
the new structure of the adolescent's personality.” (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 154). The
imagination of the young child is, however, to be found in play in the here and
now. But as the growing raft of work on playworlds evidence, younger children need
models to base that play on if their imagination is to be captured productively (Fleer,
2019). This attention, we would suggest, should involve adults in presenting models
of possible activities that can engage children in imaginative play, which guides their
positioning as actors in their worlds.

Such positioning is key to a child's motive orientation, a cultural-historical concept

that can assist a drilling down into the quality of moral imagining relationships.
Hedegaard describes motive orientation and motive development “as a movement
initiated by the learner's emotional experience related to the activity setting.” (Hede-
gaard, 2012, p. 21). It directs how people recognise, interpret and take actions to
respond to the demands in a practice. Relationships with others are the foundation
for children's motive orientation and the development of motives (Elkonin, 1999;
Lisina, 1995; Winther-Lindqvist, this issue). These relationships point to possible
futures by orienting children to what is salient in their worlds. Through being a
member of a family and a community, children learn by modelling the motives and
capabilities of adults and older children (Elkonin, 1999). Bronfenbrenner (1970) sim-
ilarly recognised children's modelling of others' activities as central to development;
with this modelling encompassing feelings, morals and values. All the articles point
to how moral imagination contributes to orienting to new motives; while motive
orientation offers insights into the processes of this orientation.

Another set of cultural-historical concepts that can augment analyses of the relation-
ships that support moral imagining are “relational expertise”, “common knowledge”
and “relational agency” (Edwards, 2010, 2017). All the contributions indicate the
need for sensitively attuned interventions by adults in order to guide the orientations
of learners towards new possibilities. Guidance, based in the idea of accepting and
building, involves eliciting what matters currently for learners and jointly building
images of alternative futures. It also involves supporting the unfolding agency of
learners as they begin to assume responsibility for the actions that will take them
towards that future. The relational expertise of the adult is therefore crucial to
eliciting from learners what is important to accept and to guiding them towards
building a new future. This relational expertise in eliciting and guiding can produce
common knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the motive orientations of both the learner
and the adult. Common knowledge of the motive orientations of adult and learner
can then become a resource to inform the envisioning. Relational agency is seen
in the building of new futures and the gradual unfolding of learners' responsible
agency while they take steps towards that future, as is seen so clearly in Bøttcher's
contribution.

Our final response to the question is that the dialectical foundations of cultural-his-
torical approaches to learning and development recognise that for new futures to
be accomplished, practices need to change and that we can change them. The key
to these changes is Vygotsky's emphasis on externalisation in the learning process:
we are shaped by practices, but we can also shape them by our actions in and on
them. Shotter described Vygotsky's contribution as follows: “Vygotsky is concerned
to study how people, through the use of their own social activities, by changing
the conditions of their own existence can change themselves.” (Shotter, 1993, 111).
This is an optimistic view of personal and social development and is in line with the
aims of moral imagining; while moral imagining as presented by the contributors,
reminds us of the social and interactive aspects of such externalisation and how
learners need to find themselves in, or create conditions for, externalisation.

> Read full chapter

Student's activity and development: Dis-

entangling secondary issues from the
heart of the matter
Nathalie Bulle, in Educational Research Review, 2019

4.1 The internal use of mediating cognitive tools

The alternative broad perspective of developmental and educational psychology op-
poses all the functionalist currents of psychology by rejecting the adaptive model of
development and learning in the name of human rational specificity. It can, in a very
general way, be associated with the work of Vygotsky. A basic assumption is that the
semiotic mediation of thought involves the use of artificial signs to act upon oneself.
The internal use of mediating cognitive tools in Vygotsky's psychology is assumed
to change all psychological processes (Vygotsky [1930–1933] 1978, pp. 54–57). It
is at the basis of higher order forms of thinking and underpins voluntary action.
Intellectual development and learning depend notably on the progressive appropri-
ation by the individual of scientific or theoretical concepts whose meaning depends
on the systems they constitute. This appropriation correlates to a structuration of
thought, so that scientific concepts play an underlying logical role. For instance, the
need to avoid contradictions supposes a hierarchical structure of concepts so that
two contradictory ideas can be assessed against a unique general concept (Vygotsky,
[1934] 1986). Because the meaning of scientific or theoretical concepts depends
on their links to other scientific or theoretical concepts, understanding involves a
logical linking of ideas. Scientific or theoretical knowledge thus plays a meaningful
mediating role related to the organization and hierarchical structure of conceptual
systems.

On these bases, the gradual building of conceptual networks is assumed to underpin

the reflexive capacities of individuals, that is to say their understanding potential.
In David Ausubel's psychology of meaningful verbal learning, the learner's cognitive
structures represent a dynamic framework where the new elements of knowledge are
interpreted with the help of concepts having an appropriate level of inclusiveness.
Without such a framework, rote learning occurs instead of meaningful learning.
Due to the role played by conceptual structures in understanding, central or key
ideas, which have the strongest explanatory power, must, in the main, be transmitted
before concepts and further peripheral information (Ausubel, 1961a; 1961b; 2000).11
Correspondingly, according to cultural-historical approaches, ideas are within the
grasp of pupils because they are implicitly based on more general ideas that pupils
can develop consciously and understand with the help of someone more advanced
than them. The developmental dynamics depends on their progressive appropria-
tion of these elements, which are located at a higher level than the one they have
already reached intellectually.

Therefore, abstract, scientific or, else, theoretical concepts drive the processes of
thinking and development characterizing higher forms of thought. This defines
a specific (cultural-historical) line of development which involves the internal re-
construction of structured bodies of concepts. The assumed driving developmental
dynamics thus moves downward. It fosters in Vygotsky the interrelated, adaptive,
upward dynamics associated with individuals’ experiential knowledge. Vygotsky
([1934] 1986, pp. 109; 185; 193-194) explains:

The inception of a spontaneous concept can usually be traced to a face-to-face

meeting with a concrete situation, whereas a scientific concept involves from the
first a ‘mediated’ attitude towards its object (…) Scientific concepts grow downward
through spontaneous concepts; spontaneous concepts grow upward through scien-
tific concepts.

Thought finds its reality and form in speech and develops according to its proper
structuration. This is manifested in the “the interdependence of the semantic and
the grammatical aspects of language” (Vygotsky [1934] 1986, p. 221).
It should be noted here that major misconceptions regarding Vygotsky's psychology
pervade education research literature (see for instance Duncan, 1995, Gredler &
Shields, 2004; Gredler, 2007 and, for overall views, Toomela & Valsiner, 2010;
Yasnitsky, van der Veer, & Ferrari, 2014). Especially, social constructivism is often pre-
sented as rooted in Vygotsky's works emphasizing the social dimension of thought.
Nevertheless, the “social” stance in social constructivism serves an adaptive view on
development and learning: Social interactions are supposed to underpin knowledge
construction and growth. In Vygotsky, the social dimension of thought relies on
cognitive tools as such which represent social constructs. This social dimension of
knowledge engages the simple version of epistemological constructivism: Artificial
(social) constructs have to be internally reconstructed by the subjects and underpin
structural or conceptual understanding. Therefore, the current, socio-constructivist,
interpretation of Vygotsky's contribution to developmental psychology overturns his
central argument, involving a downward driving developmental dynamics.

This theoretical misappropriation is not new. As explained by Alex Kozulin (1986), the
role of signs as the chief mediators of thought, which is at the heart of Vygotsky's
theory, was played down by his disciples, led by Alexis Leontiev. The latter developed
a theory of activity more in line with Marxist philosophy, according to which practical
and social activities toward objects lead the individual to cognitive mastery of a
situation.

4.1.1 Conceptual understanding and downward driving developmental

dynamics in contemporary rationalistic approaches
The rationalistic trends of developmental and educational psychology involve the
logical and meaningful role of theoretical or scientific concepts in human un-
derstanding. Contemporary theories of conceptual change, when developed as
non-adaptive forms of constructivism,12 fall within this perspective (see especial-
ly Vosniadou, 2013 for a comprehensive overview). They represent a group of
works broadly rooted in the paradigm shifts interpretation of science development
proposed by Thomas Kuhn. These constructivist approaches consider the role of
conceptual structures in understanding and the role of systematic instruction in
the acquisition of new concepts. The research frameworks involved may be dis-
tinguished around the impetus of some leading works, respectively under the
ideas of “theory theory”, “framework theory”, “ontological” or “classical” view and
“knowledge in pieces”. Basically, the first three approaches consider that students’
naïve conceptions present a tendency toward coherence and distinguish themselves
according to their interpretation of it, whereas the latter see naïve conceptions as
fragmented in a great number of ideas or “pieces” (see Carey, 2009; Chi, 1992;
DiSessa, Sherin, & Levin, 2016; DiSessa, 2017; Vosniadou, 2007; 2013).13
We may add to conceptual change approaches the important body of cognitive
science research in mental modelling, developed since the 1980s, which nevertheless
cannot be grouped under any unified theoretical framework and do not aim at
studying conceptual structures as such. “Organized units of mental representation
of knowledge” (mental models) are assumed to serve as tools for thought and may
contribute to accounting for conceptual change and understanding meaning in
learning and cognitive development (see for instance Nersessian, 2013).

The naive intuitive theories, constructed on the basis of everyday experiences under
the influence of secular culture, Stella Vosniadou (2007) explains, have to be sup-
planted by scientific education. For instance, when an external representation, such
as a map or a globe, is proposed, individuals tend to reason on the basis of the
external model rather than by creating their own model. These cultural artifacts allow
them to correct their representations based on everyday experience. According to the
psychologist, resorting to experience − that is, to the bottom-up type of learning
mechanisms − is not effective as a way of engaging the conceptual transformations
necessary for scientific learning programs. Such transformations require systematic
forms of learning. Concepts such as those of force, energy, heat or photosynthesis
require many hours of explicit teaching to be understood because the scientific
knowledge has been developed over centuries to form elaborate and counter-intu-
itive theories, differing by their concepts, their structure and the phenomena they
explain, from explanations developed on the basis of daily experience. The concep-
tual change invoked here brings into play the recursive abilities of human thought:
It is a matter of opening the conceptual space by developing meta-conceptual forms
of consciousness.

According to these views, the internal reconstruction of knowledge (conceptual sys-

tems, models and ideas etc.) is a major aim of formal learning. This internal recon-
struction leads children to logically develop ideas and understand the relationships
between elements that structure knowledge. Moreover, the meaning of scientific
or theoretical concepts does not directly refer to concrete experience, but depends
on the conceptual frameworks which have been constructed to understand the
relationships that link elements of reality together, that is why theoretical learning
necessitates conscious and explicit approaches.14

The relevance of rationalistic types of approaches is confirmed by studies showing

that the scientific learning of students aims at a progressive understanding of the
rational structure of the discipline studied (Kirschner et al., 2006; Sweller, 2009) and
that scientific education, aiming at a long-term mastery of scientific knowledge,
is enhanced when relationships between concepts, theories and models are made
explicit (Allen & Reif, 1992; Hiebert, 1997; Richland, Stigler & Holyoak, 2012).15 This
does not mean that intellectual education can only focus on the development of
organized bodies of knowledge. Firstly, very young children need to apprehend the
meaning of simple concepts through experience. This does not apply to complex
notions but to the most basic concepts, like that of number or of “smaller than” and
“larger than” (Aharoni, 2005). Secondly, the progressive understanding of organized
bodies of knowledge requires the student to grasp the hidden rational structure
of the subjects taught, which assumes that a consistency, or in other words a
certain inherent logic, can be found, or can be taught on a basic level. This rational
basis of learning is necessarily incomplete for epistemological reasons (Arievitch &
Stetsenko, 2000, p. 86).

Finally, the recurring distinction made in education literature, echoing the evolution
of its major trends, between cognitive and sociocultural perspectives overshadows
the more fundamental opposition evoked here between two different driving devel-
opmental dynamics and, in correlation, between contextual/functional and concep-
tual/structural forms of understanding (see in particular Cobb, 1994; Cobb & Yackel,
1996; Packer & Goicoechea, 2000 and the special issue of Educational Psychologist
42, 2007). For instance, Paul Cobb (1994, p.13) observed that considerable debate in
education research divided, on one side, those who thought that development and
learning were individual processes of cognitive self-organization and, on the other
side, those who thought that they represented processes of “enculturation into a
community of practice”. This opposition can be compared with the distinction made
by Sfard (1998) between the educational approaches where knowledge is an aim
(acquisition metaphor) and those where knowledge is supposed to develop through
students’ interaction with their social environment (participation metaphor). It does
not allow to distinguish the naturalistic and rationalistic types of approaches, and
sets the assimilationist conceptions derived from empiricism, the cultural-historical
theory, and radical constructivism itself in opposition to situative approaches of the
sociocultural and social-constructivist type.

4.1.2 From the students' own involvement to the teacher's leadership in

rationalistic approaches
From a teaching methods perspective, rationalistic developmental trends can be
placed on a continuum according to whether importance is given to the teacher's
leadership or the students' own involvement. In this regard, the objection that
minimal guidance is in conflict with our knowledge of human cognitive architec-
ture relies on the observation that various forms of discovery learning approaches
inefficiently resort to problem solving when learners have not sufficiently high
prior knowledge to provide “internal” guidance (Kirschner et al., 2006, p. 79; Karpov,
2003). Alternatively, the conceptual understanding that underpins rationalistic types
of approaches may use to its educational benefit the knowledge mastery it develops
in students and their interest in carrying out inquiries, research and problem-solving
activities (see for instance Furtak, Seidel, Iverson, Briggs, & Derek, 2012).
 In these rationalistic types of approaches, students have access to knowledge sources
allowing them to progressively construct, with the aid of explicit bases, the concep-
tual foundations of knowledge. At one extremity, students progress more or less
autonomously on the basis of other means of conceptual understanding than the
teacher himself. One example in this respect is the experience of the French teacher,
Joseph Jacotot, who managed to make Flemish students, whose language he did
not understand, learn French without his help but using a bilingual edition of the
Adventures of Telemachus by Fénelon (Rancière, 1987). At an intermediary level could
be placed mathematics teaching in East Asia, in which the teacher is described as
a mediator between the mathematics and the students (Hiebert & Stigler, 1999).
Finally, from this point there is an array of other different forms of “explicit teaching”,
and at the extreme, “direct instruction”, aiming to develop the students’ rational
understanding and involving the teacher to varying degrees as a “transmitter”.

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