I have not read the article you mentioned. But I would like to join this
discussion based on my gross understanding of the sociocultural
perspectives.
> 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.
I think that one of the crucial points to understand the sentence is to
understand the role of social process (or interaction).
The main concern of Piagetian constructivists falls on an individual's
meaning-making process. These constructivists acknowledge the role of
social process as a catalyst (tool) by which the individual _may_ gain
a benfit in reorganizing existing conceptual structure in the head.
Thus, learning (or meaning-making) is basically personal. Social process
is indirect (or secondary) in explaining a meaning-making process. In
summary, meaning is a construction by individuals.
However, sociocultural theoriests claim the direct influence of social
process into the meaning-making process. Learning (and thus meaning) is
located in the process of participation in socioculturally situated
practices. As I understand it, in the sociocultural perspective,
developmental process is understood not by cognitive self-organization,
but by enculturation into established practices through appropriation.
That is to say, the individual's engagement into the practices and social
interaction are primary constructs to understand developmental
process.