While reading the article "Cognition as a Collaborative
Process" in Handbook of Child Psychology written by Barbara
Rogoff(1998), a sentence "meaning is more than a construction by
individuals" seemed ambiguous to me. Rogoff(1988) argued;
For Piaget, the social process provides individuals the
opportunity to see alternatives and explore the logical
consequences of their own positions in a meeting of
individual minds, as opposed to a shared thinking process.
To understand how individuals learn and develop through
participation in the sociocultural world, it is necessary
to grant that
meaning is more than a construction by individuals.
Piaget's use of the isolated individual as the
unit of analysis, in my view, makes it impossible to develop
a sociocultural approach to cognition using his theory as
the basis;sociocultural aspects of cognition are not merely
the addition of individul changes in thinking resulting
from social interaction.(Rogoff, 1998, p. 686)
Though trying to figure out the sentence, I'm not sure my
understaning. I think Developmental process is a individual's
meaning-making process through participating sociocultrual activities.
So, in sociocultural approaches, meaning may exist outside a individule,
therefore, meaning is given as well as constructed.
Help me to make sense the deep meaning of the sentence...
Sincerely,
Kwang-Su Cho
-------------------------------------------------
TEL : +82-2-361-4723 FAX : +82-2-365-4354
Pager : 015-950-3686
E-mail : mailto:ksthink@psylab.yonsei.ac.kr
midascks who-is-at chollian.net
Address: Kwang-Su Cho
Cognitive Engineering Lab(B110)
Dept. of Psychology, Yonsei University
Shinchon-dong, Sedaemun gu,
Seoul 120-749, Korea
-------------------------------------------------