Sociocultural theory;

a framework

Tuesday 22.08.06
Oddvar.hjulstad@isp.uio.no

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 SNE4130 Obligatory reading: 593 p.

• Theoretical reading:
» Cole, Michael. (1996). Cultural Psychology.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, Ch. 1 – 7: 220p.

» Vygotsky, Lev. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge,

Harvard University press. Chapter 4 and 6. 19 p.

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 SNE4130 Obligatory reading: 593 p.

• Theoretical reading:
» Rogoff, Barbara. (2003). The Cultural Nature of
Human Development. Oxford, University Press,
ch.1,2,3, & 7,8: 150p.

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 SNE4130 Obligatory reading: 593 p.
• Klein, Pnina S. (Ed.). (2001). Seeds of Hope. Oslo,
Unipub. Ch 1-4: 124p.
• Rye, Henning. (2001). Helping Children and Families
with Special Needs - A Resource-Oriented Approach.
Article in Johnsen, Berit H. & Skjørten, Miriam D. (eds).
Education – Special Needs Education: An Introduction.
Oslo, Unipub.65p
• Rye, Henning. (2005). The Foundation of an Optimal
Psychosocial Development. In B. H. Johnsen (ed.).
Socio-Emotional Support and Development of Learning
Strategies (pp. 215 – 228) Oslo, Unipub - Oslo Academic
Press. 13 p.

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James, age 5, comes into the kitchen just as his mother has
taken some cakes out of the oven. There is a loud, metallic
”Crack.” (extract from Wells 1999, xi)

James: Who did that?

Mother: I expect it was that tin contracting
James: Which tin?
Mother: The one with your pastery in
James : Why did it make that noise?
Mother: Well, When it was in the oven, it got very
hot and stretched a bit. I’ve just taken it out of the
oven, and it’s cooling down very quickly, you see,
and that noise happens when it gets smaller again
and goes back to its ordinary shape
James: Oh! Was it a different shape in the oven?
Mother: Not very different. Just a little bigger
James: Naughty little tin. You might get smacked – if you do it again
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 Sociocultural perspective
• Not a ”school” or ”particular” tradition, but
consists of a range of different perspectives and
theories (a inter- diciplinary field), but share
some basic asumption on knowledge, learning
and development
• The task of sociocultural analysis is to
understand how mental functioning is related to
cultural, institutional, and historical context
(Wertsch 1998)

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 Just some of the many faces of
sociocultural theory

og n it ion
at ed c Socio-historic
Situ Ac
tiv ity
Culture the
-psych ory
ology

o g nit io n
u t ed c
Distrib
Dialogism
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 Social Ethno-
Ethno-
Social
antropology methodology
methodology
antropology
Distributed
cognition

Socio- Situated
Historical cogniton
psychology
psychology

Sociocultural
theory

Activity Culture-
Applied Theory Psycholgy
Applied
linguistics
linguistics

Dialogism

Education
Education
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Individualist & social philosophies &
theories of learning (Gerry stahl 2004)
Descartes (1633)
Cognitivist
Rationalism Instructionism
Empiricism Evidence-Based
Instructionism
Piaget Constructivism
Kant
(1787) Wittgenstein
Husserl individual theories

Wittgenstein social theories

Schutz Ethno- Conversation

Hegel methodology Analysis
(1807) Heidegger Situated
(1927) Cognition
Habermas Communicative
Action
Marx anthropology
(1867) Social Practice
Vygotsky
(1934) Activity Theory
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 A dicplacement (?) of focus in
cognitive research?
• Traditional focus of cognitive psychology is to posit
cognition as a fundamentally individual process. The
assumptions is that human mental functions are located
in individuals and can be modeled accordingly as mental
entities such as memory systems, thought processes,
and cognitive structures.
• But this focus has shown great limitations, more and
more cognitive researcher emphasizes social and
cultural aspects of learning
• Leading researchers within the sosio cultural paradigm
have their background in cognitive psychology and
cognitive linguistics

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 Learning theories
Behaviorism: especially before 1950
(Pavlov, Thorndike, Watson, Skinner)
Cognitive theories: especially after
1950 (”The cognitive revolution”
(Bruner, Piaget)
Sociocultural theories: 1990 (?)
(Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Mead,
Dewey,Engström, Wertch, Lave &
Wenger, Cole, Rogoff, Säljö)
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 Cognitive theories:
1)Constructivism 2)Information processing
• Cognitive theories first appeared last century, but were
usurped by behavioural theories earlier this century, only
to re-emerge as the dominant force again about 1950.
• They are concerned with the things that happen inside
our heads as we learn. They take the perspective that
students actively process information and learning takes
place through the efforts of the student as they organise,
store and then find relationships between information,
linking new to old knowledge, schema and scripts.
Cognitive approaches emphasise how information is
processed.

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Cognitive theories: Constructivism
• A reaction against
behaviorism
• Human do not
automatically respond on Jerome Bruner
exterior stimulus
• Man do not ”strive for
reward” but for ”meaning”
• The focus turns to inner,
higher mental processes

Jean Piaget

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 Constructivism
• Knowledge is organised
in cognitive schemes
• Learning take place in the
form of assimilation
(adding to the existing
schemes) or
accomodation (modifying
the schemes)
• Adaptions
• Equilibrium

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Experiments (”operational”)

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Experiments (”operational”)

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Piaget`stages of cognitive
development

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 Piaget`s stages
• Sensimotor stage (0-2Y)
– Understand the world through senses and motor action
– Develop object permanence
• Preoperational stage (2-6Y)
– Understands intiutive relations
– Thinking is egosentric, dominated by perception
• Concrete operational stage (6-12Y)
– Can do logical operations
– Understands reversibility
– Can do conservation and classification tasks
• Formal operational stage 12Y
– Can do abstract and hypotetical reasoning
– Can reason contrary to experience
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Learning and cognitive
development

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 Cognitive science:
Information processing (Especially after 1970)
• Symbolic information
processing (Chomsky, Miller,
Simon)
• Emphasize the cognitive
processes behind language
skills, thinking and
problemsolving
• Unites neuro-sciense and
”computerscience”
• The computer becomes a
model for the human brain and
mental proscesses.
• Attention, storing, memory
retrieval, ”chunking”…

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The computation metaphor

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The process of learning

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”Thinking or processing?”

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 The conduit model of
communication
The Conduit paradigme (Ledningsparadigme) Rommetveit (1996)

Signal Signal
transmitte received
d
Sender Channel Receive
r
Tankeinnhold Dekoder ved å knippe
Kodes i tale Sammen lyder eller
eller skrift bokstaver til ord til setn.
deler, til setninger osv.

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 Cognitive science:
Some critical voices
• Jerome Bruner (1990) (”The founding
father of cognitive science”)
– The cognitive revolution was expected to
focus on meaning and meaning constructions,
and be something more than just an
improvment of behaviorism, and the reduction
of minds to machines
– The de-humanisation of our understanding of
the human mind

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 Sociocultural epistemology
• What is knowledge?
• Where is knowledge?
• How is knowledge
created?
• What is knowledge
about?

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 How is knowledge created?
(Epistemology)
Social constructionism: Pragmatism:
Knowledge is a product of Knowledge appear in
constructions and interaction with objects
conventions. in the world
Reality is negotiated ”Knowing how” instead
”knowing that”.
”Truth” is not a criterion

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 Some sociocultural claims about
human learning
• Learning is mediated
• Learning is fundamentally social
• Learning is situated
• Learning is distributed
• Learning is participation in communities
of practices

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 Mediated learning
• ”Psychological tools”
• ”Cultural tools”
• ”Mediational means”
• ”Cultural artefacts”
– Language
– Symbols
– representations

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 Mediated action

M
(Artefakt)

S O
(Subjekt) (Objekt)

Subjekt og objekt sees ikke kun som ”direkte” forbundet, men også som ”indirekte”
Forbundet gjennom et medium som utgjøres av artefakter (Kultur)
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In activity theory:

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 Learning is mediated
Language: ”The tool of tools”
• Language is the most
important cultural tool
avaiable to man
– It is therefore of
particular interest for
studying processes of
learning

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 Mediated learning
Language-communication-learning

• It is through communication that

sociocultural resources are created, but
there is also through communication that
they are carried forth.
• Thinking in the individual are forms of
communication that the individual has met,
appropriated and uses as resource in
future situations (Säljö 2000)

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 Mediated learning
Classification as artefacts (tools)
The question, "What is it really?" "What is its right name?”
is a nonsense question (…) one that is not capable of being
answered. (...) When we name something, then, we are
classifying. The individual object or event we are naming,
of course, has no name and belongs to no class until
we put it in one (…). What we call things and where we
draw the line between one class of things and another
depend upon the interest we have and the purposes of the
classification.(...) Most intellectual problems are, ultimately,
problems of classification and nomenclature.
(Hayakawa, 1965, pp. 215-220)
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 Learning is
fundamentally social
• ”Any function in the child`s cultural development
appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears
on the social plane, and then on the
psychological plane. First it appears between
people as an interpsychological category, and
then within the child as an intrapsycholgical
category. This is equally true with regard to
voluntary attention, logical memory, the
formation of concepts, and the development of
volition (Vygotsky 1981:163)
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 Learning is
fundamentally social
• ”Human mental
functions are
inextricable situated in
(Wertsch 1991:86)
social, cultural,
institutional and
historical context”

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 Learning is
fundamentally social
• Levels of analysis:
– Ontogenetic development
• Changes in the individual over the lifespan
– Microgenetic development
• Changes over the brief periode of time
– Phylogenetic developement
• Changes in evolutionary time
– Sociohistorical development
• Changes in culture, values, technology
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 Learning is
fundamentally social
• The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
is the distance between the actual
developmental level as determined by
independent problem solving and the level
of potential as determined through
problem solving under adult guidance or
incollaboration with more capable peers.

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 Learning is
fundamentally social
• ZPD cont.:
• Lefrancois (1994):
Take, for example, two five-year-old children, who can
both, under normal circumstances, answer questions
that other average five-year-olds can also answer. Their
mental ages might be said to correspond to their
chronological ages, and their intelligence would be
described as average. But if, when prompted, one of
these children could successfully answer questions
corresponding to a mental age of but the other could not,
it would be accurate to say that the first child's zone of
proximal growth is greater than the other's

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 Learning is situated
Lave & Wenger(1991)

B.Rogoff (1990,2003):

• Learning occure as a function of the activity,

context and culture in which it occurs (i.e., it
is situated).
• Social interaction is a critical component of
situated learning -- learners become
involved in a "community of practice"
which embodies certain beliefs and
behaviors to be acquired. 40
 Learning is situated
• “Situated Learning”: learning
that occurs in a participative
framework, in a community of
experts, peers, and more
capable others; learning that
involves the whole person
engaged in a particular
situation
• Situated learning is usually
unintentional rather than
deliberate. These ideas are
what Lave & Wenger (1991)
call the process of "legitimate
peripheral participation."

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 Experiment: Standing without
moving under different conditions
(Average time) (Säljö 2003:135)

Cildrens On request Guard at a Competit-

age of an adult factory ion

4 til 5 år 2 min. 15 s 4 min.17 s 2 min. 12 s

5 til 6 år 5 min. 12 s 9 min. 8 min. 14 s

6 til 7 år 12 min 12 min. 15 min.

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Experiment: Remembering words
(Säljö 2003:137)
Number of correct remembered words (average):

Memory ”Shopping”
Age experiment Play
3 -4 år 0,6 1
4-5 år 1, 5 3
5-6 år 2,0 3,2
6-7 år 2,3 3,8

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 Learning is distributed
• In a situated perspective, cognition is not
regarded as a private, solo activity, but is
distributed outside the individual, to other
persons and artifacts. (Ex Xerox)
• ”Thinking” and learning is something we
paricipate in.

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 ”Who does the thinking ?”
• A 6- year- old child has lost a toy and asks
her father for help. The father asks where
she last saw the toy; the child says ”I can’t
remember” He asks a series of questions
– did you have it in your room? Outside?
Next door? To each question, the child
answers ”no”. When he says ”in the car?”,
she says ”I think so” and goes to retrieve
the toy (Tharp and Gallimore: Rousing
minds to life (1988, s.14).
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 Learning is distributed
• Human knowledge,
insights, conventions
and consepts are
”buildt into” artefacts,
and are something we
interact with when we
use them
(Leontiev 1981)

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 Learning is participation
• As the beginner or
newcomer moves
from the periphery of
this community to its
center, they become
more active and
engaged within the
culture and hence
assume the role of
expert.
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