The American emphasis on what the authors term "metacognitive" mediation
seems to me to have arisen from a dissatisfaction with Piaget's emphasis
on the child's direct interaction with the physical world. Thus many
neoVygotskian analyses in the US have focused on how the focal child
interacts with adults and older children in learning about the physical
world. Vygotsky's Law (inter before intra) provided a sharp theoretical
formulation to justify a shift of emphasis that situated the child's
developing cognition within a social context. To some degree this has
served as an antidote against the Western cultural tendency to treat
individual minds in isolation, and to objectify scientific knowledge.
Why then did this emphasis on the social situatedness of cognitive
development not command the same priority attention for Russian (and other
Soviet) psychologists ? Was it perhaps that, in the sociopolitical context
of soviet socialism, acknowledgement of the social interdependency of
cognition was less at risk (the water in which the fish were swimming, as
it were) ? Karpov and Haywood offer no explanation, but assert that in
their enthusiasm for elaborating Vygotsky's other type of mediation
(termed "cognitive") into a "theoretical learning" approach to the design
of instruction, Russian researchers have "underestimat (ed) ... the role
of students' collaborative problem-solving activity"(p.33).
The second thing that stood out for me in Karpov & Haywood's description
of the Russian account of cognitive mediation was its unproblematized use
of the concept of "internalization". In the "theoretical learning"
approach to instruction, we are told that "teachers teach methods of
scientific analysis, and the students then master and internalize these
methods in the course of using them." (P.31).
I was challenged by a distinguished philosophical psychologist at a talk I
gave recently for attributing the concept of "appropriation" as a central
feature of cognitive development to Barbara Rogoff rather than to
Vygotsky. And when I asked for some clarification, I was assured that
Vygotsky was very much opposed to the dichotomy of internal vs external
that underlies the concept of internalization. Our discussion turned to
issues of language and translation, and I began to wonder whether the term
"internalization" might be a mistranslation from Vygotsky's Russian text
of what should really have been translated as "appropriation".
Is there any substance to that idea, I wonder ? I am aware that the
English word pairs "speech/language" and "teaching/learning" have been
problematized with respect to early translations of Vygotsky's works. Can
any of the bilinguals and textual experts on Vygotsky's writing clarify
for me whether this is also true of "internalization/appropriation"? Or
did Vygotsky have another term in his vocabulary that translates as
"appropriation" ? (Any page citations to available English translations of
Vygotsky would be much appreciated on this last point).
In case it is not apparent, the connection that I draw between these two
issues is as follows. If indeed the preoccupation with social situatedness
in Vygotsky's theory is partly a reflection of a cross-cultural contrast
between the context from which his research and writing originates and
that of post-1960 American psychology, then perhaps its lower salience in
Russian elaborations of the theory is connected with use of the concept
"internalization," which lacks the social underpinnings of the alternative
concept "appropriation". K & H cite Jerome Bruner (1966) as stating that
"culture ... is not discovered; it is passed on or forgotten". But for me
"passing on" is too simple a transmissionist expression, incorporating
what Lakoff & Johnson criticize as "the conduit metaphor". That part of
the culture that is taken on by the next generation is what makes sense to
them to such an extent that it becomes their own, or "appropriated". And
this sense of ownership is intimately connected with a sense of membership
of the community of practice that it informs (Serpell, 1997a).
Robert
Robert Serpell tel: ( 410 ) 455 2417
Psychology Department 455 2567
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore MD 21250 fax: ( 410 ) 455 1055