Cultural-Historical Theory and Pedagogy: The Influence of Vygotsky on the Field
This chapter discusses in some detail Vygotsky’s dialectical approach to human learning and its implications for teaching. Topics include how people may create their own social situations of development in which they propel themselves forward as learners,
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Cultural-Historical Theory and Pedagogy: The Influence of Vygotsky on the Field Anne Edwards Abstract This chapter discusses in some detail Vygotsky’s dialectical approach to human learning and its implications for teaching. Topics include how people may create their own social situations of development in which they propel themselves forward as learners, the role of teachers in creating learning environments which contain both demands on and support for learners, how concepts are used to work on the world and the implications for designing learning sequences and how important it is to recognise that learning, development and knowledge deserve equal consideration when considering pedagogy. The discussion recognises the extent to which Brian Simon’s emphasis on the contribution that sound pedagogical understandings can make to social equality drew on early translations and interpretations of Vygotsky’s work. It therefore attempts to deepen those understandings by paying close attention to Vygotsky’s own ideas and ideas from those who have picked up his legacy in order to enhance student learning. Keywords Learning • Learners • Teaching • Vygotsky • Simon
Introduction When Black and Wiliam introduced their influential overview of the impact of formative assessment on achievement in schools, they used the metaphor of the ‘black box’ to refer to what happened in classrooms (Black and Wiliam 1998). Observing that education policies tended to focus on inputs, such as target setting, and outputs, such as pupil performance, they commented that what happened inside classrooms, while teachers worked with these inputs and achieved the outputs, remained largely unexamined. Consequently, practitioners were left without guidance and were sometimes burdened by input demands that were counter-productive to the expected achievement.
A. Edwards (*) Department of Education, University of Oxford, 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6PY, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 R. Maclean (ed.), Life in Schools and Classrooms, Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects 38, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3654-5_10
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One important exception to the mystification of what happened in classrooms was the ORACLE (Observational and Classroom Learning Evaluation) study of teaching processes in primary school classrooms led by Brian Simon and Maurice Galton in the 1970s (Galton and Simon 1980; Galton et al. 1980) and Galton’s follow-up study two decades later (Galton et al. 1999a, b). Simon had long argued for increased attention to pedagogy (Simon 1980). His aim was not to prescribe what should be done, but to recognise how pedagogy can promote inclusion and equality. This analysis was in sharp contrast to how psychology had been used in the UK to segregate children into different academic programmes on the basis of an examination at 11. ORACLE took forward Simon’s emphasis on pedagogy by placing a research lens on the practice of teaching, opening up the black b
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