Transactional Psychology of Education: Toward a Strong Version of the Social PDF
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Cultural Psychology of Education 9 Wolff-Michael Roth Transactional Psychology of Education Toward a Strong Version of the Social Cultural Psychology of Education Volume 9 Series Editor Giuseppina Marsico, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy Editorial Board Jaan Valsiner, Department of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark Nandita Chaudhary, Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India Maria Virgínia Machado Dazzani, Instituto de Psicologia, apt 501 Ed. Mon, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil Xiao-Wen Li, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai Shi, China Harry Daniels, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Nicolay Veresov, Monash University, Australia Wolff-Michael Roth, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Yasuhiro Omi, Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan This book series focuses on the development of new qualitative methodologies for educational psychology and interdisciplinary enrichment in ideas and practices. It publishes key ideas of methodology, different approaches to schooling, family, relationships and social negotiations of issues of educational processes. It presents new perspectives, such as dynamic systems theory, dialogical perspectives on the development of the self within educational contexts, and the role of various symbolic resources in educational processes. The series publishes research rooted in the cultural psychology framework, thus combining the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, education and history. Cultural psychology examines how human experience is organized culturally, through semiotic mediation, symbolic action, accumulation and exchange of inter-subjectively shared representations of the lifespace. By taking this approach, the series breaks through the “ontological” conceptualization of education in which processes of education are localized in liminality. In this series, education is understood as goal-oriented personal movement that is at the core of societal change in all its different forms—from kindergarten to vocational school and lifelong learning. It restructures personal lives both inside school and outside the school. The cultural psychology approach to education fits the global processes of most countries becoming multi-cultural in their social orders, reflects the interdisciplinary nature of educational psychology, and informs the applications of educational psychology in a vast variety of cultural contexts. This book series: • Is the first to approach education from a cultural psychology perspective. • Offers an up-to-date exploration of recent work in cultural psychology of education. • Brings together new, novel, and innovative ideas. • Broadens the practical usability of different trends of cultural psychology of education. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13768 Wolff-Michael Roth Transactional Psychology of Education Toward a Strong Version of the Social Wolff-Michael Roth University of Victoria Victoria, BC, Canada ISSN 2364-6780 ISSN 2364-6799 (electronic) Cultural Psychology of Education ISBN 978-3-030-04241-7 ISBN 978-3-030-04242-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04242-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966876 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface of the Series Editor Overcoming Dichotomies: Transaction as a Core Issue in Educational Processes When Wolff-Michael Roth sent me the first proposal of this book, Transactional Psychology of Education: Toward a Strong Version of the Social, I was positively surprised. Little time had passed since he had published his previous volume in my series, titled Understanding Educational Psychology (Roth and Jornet 2016). He was again ready with another interesting editorial project. The book “smelled” good even before reading it. In fact, after reading a few lines of the proposal, I was fully convinced of the relevance of Roth’s line of argumentation. There was something intriguing. Hereafter, the book went through the long procedure of double-blind review, which allows this book series to be indexed in Scopus. Roth received many good feedbacks and some criticisms that helped him to develop his ideas even further. The volume, eventually ready, kept the initial promise and offers the reader a refined synthesis of theoretical and empirical aspects of inquiry into education. Transactional Psychology of Education indeed combines the historical roots with the contemporary educational practice. Wolff-Michael Roth acknowledges the great legacy of Vygotsky, but he goes beyond it in search of what has been not fully developed among the ideas of the Russian thinker. He suggests how these embryonic theorizations can benefit by the dialogue with other figures like Whitehead, Mead, Dewey, Mikhailov, and Ilyenkov. Roth’s book aims at presenting the foundations of the transactional psychology of education. As the author himself says: Transaction means that there is a unity/identity of organism and environment, which leads to the fact that neither one can be understood independently of the other. (Roth, this vol- ume, p 23) v vi Preface of the Series Editor It means that if we want to reach an in-depth understanding of human conduct, we must keep together the individual and the environment. Dichotomic oppositions, such as inside and outside, individual and context, are poor and misleading theoreti- cal tools when it comes to understand human development and educational processes. Recalling Mead and Vygotsky, Wolff-Michael Roth proposes to overcome this dichotomy by adopting the transaction as the inherent characteristic of person- environment relationship. Transaction would be expressed in a way similar to what chemistry does: …is not so different from what chemists do when, for example, they write carbon dioxide (CO) in the form of O = C = O, where each line represents a pair of electrons. Instead, we 2 have to think about person and environment as irreducible intertwined when we think them as ingredient of events. What we need to do instead is to think {person | environment} as unity/identity, which means, there is both unity and identity of the two phases (person, envi- ronment) of the overall event. (Roth, this volume, 2019, p. 24) I could add that interesting examples of what Roth defines as a “transactional framework” of analysis have been provided also by modern biology. In Waddington’s epigenetic approach (1940, 1957), the plasticity is related to the different possible responses (more or less adaptive, active, predictable, or reversible) of one organism to the various environmental conditions. Such fluid and open-ended plasticity is a relevant feature of border-crossing conditions (Marsico 2011, 2016) that are at the stake in any transaction. Another example borrowed from contemporary theoretical biology is the Rayner’s logic of natural inclusionality (2017), where natural inclusion is meant as co-creative, fluid dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial con- text. It implies a mutual adaptation between the living systems and the environ- ments to which they contribute in return. The transactional view could be found also in the cultural psychology of semi- otic dynamics, proposed in the last decades by Jaan Valsiner (2014), and particu- larly in the notion of inclusive separation (Valsiner 1987). This idea of a functional relationship between person and environment, in which the organism creates the context and the context creates the organism in return (even if they are not melted into one entity), shows an intriguing similarity with Roth’s transactional proposal. As the author points out in this volume, the transactional perspective has been already outlined by Vygotsky himself in his notion of perezhivanie and in his reflec- tion upon thinking and speech (Vygotsky 2010). This also reverberates in the more recent reconceptualization of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (Moll 1990; Smagorinsky 2018) as a social system mutually created by teachers and stu- dents in the school setting. Life is transactional and so are the educational processes that indeed work in the locus of transition, in the fuzzy “border zones,” between the previous state “A” and the not-yet-reached state B (Marsico and Tateo 2018). This is the core issue of Preface of the Series Editor vii Wolff-Michael Roth in this book. Transactional Psychology of Education will pro- vide the reader with a renewed way of thinking the interface between the individual and the environment: something that is desperately needed today by educational psychologists. Salerno, Italy Giuseppina Marsico October 2018 References Marsico, G. (2011). The “non-cuttable” space in between: Context, boundaries and their natural fluidity. IPBS: Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 45(2), 185–193. https://doi. org/10.1007/s12124-011-9164-9. Marsico, G. (2016). The Borderland. Culture & Psychology, 22(2), 206–215. https://doi.org/10.1 177/1354067X15601199. Marsico, G., & Tateo, L. (Eds.). (2018). The emergence of self in the educational contexts (Cultural Psychology of Education, 8). Cham: Springer. Moll, L. C. (1990). Introduction. In L. C. Moll (Ed.), Vygotsky and education: Instructional impli- cations and applications of sociohistorical psychology (pp. 1–27). New York: Cambridge University Press. Rayner, A. (2017). The origin of life patterns – In the natural inclusion of space in flux (pp. vii– vix). New York: Springer. Roth, W.-M., & Jornet, A. (2016). Understanding Educational psychology. A late Vygotskian, Spinozist approach (Cultural Psychology of Education, 3). Cham: Springer. Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Deconflating the ZPD and instructional scaffolding: Retranslating and reconceiving the zone of proximal development as the zone of next development. Learning, Culture, and Social Interaction, 16(2018), 70–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2017.10.009. Valsiner, J. (1987). Culture and the development of children’s action. Chichester: Wiley. Valsiner, J. (2014). An invitation to cultural psychology. London: Sage. Vygotsky, L. S. (2010). Two fragments of personal notes by L. S. Vygotsky from the Vygotsky family archive. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 48(1), 91–96. Waddington, C. H. (1940). Organisers and genes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waddinghton, C. H. (1957). The strategies of the genes. London: Allen & Unwin. Preface If change, which evidently is constitutive of all our experience, is the fleeting and elusive thing about which most philosophers have talked and if tone does not see in it more than the dust of states that replace other states, we are forced to re-establish this continuity between the states by means of artificial links. But this immobile substrate of mobility retreats to the same extent as we try approaching it because it cannot have any known attributes. (Bergson 1911, 34) All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the world in terms of sub- ject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. The result always does violence to that immediate experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our sympathies, our purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of phrases for its verbal analysis. (Whitehead 1929/1978, 49) Educational psychology traditionally has provided individualistic theories of learning and development, which have their origins, among others, in Piagetian constructivism and information processing. This is also the case for those forms of educational psychology that avow a heritage in sociocultural and cultural-histori- cal traditions but focus on the individualization (internalization) of knowledge and norms of the community. Indeed, these theories are based in orthodox philosophi- cal systems that are conceived with solitary substances (individuals, objects) as their ontological presuppositions. The resulting individualism is the product of thinking the world generally and human behavior specifically in terms of material substances, things, distributed in space. Because each point in space is independent of another point (i.e., the philosophical concept of partes extra partes), they are not inherently related. Thus, the Cartesian identification of the body and (geometrical) space splits the world into bodies inherently outside other bodies (Bergson 1911). The mind becomes a substantive subject, and its contents are its predicates (Whitehead 1929/1978). For Kant, that geometrical space would be an a priori of experience and cognition, whereas for the process-oriented approach developed in this book, “space, like time, would appear to be an abstraction from events” (Whitehead 1920, 37). The geometrical approach to the body also splits the occu- pants of bodies, minds, leading to the isolation of individuals into separate subjec- tivities. Descartes does not question the subject-predicate approach, whereby ix x Preface bodies are separate substances which have special qualities; and this led him into theorizing perception in terms of representation. Typically, then, intersubjectivity is a main problem of all epistemologies that are grounded on ontologies of geo- metrical bodies as things. When the social enters the theoretical framework, then it tends to be in a weak form: as a constraint or condition of individual learning. Thus, “while the cognitive perspective has been identified mainly with individual forms of learning, it is not inconsistent with the notions of group learning” (Vosniadou 2007, 56). What happens in the group is essentially individual learning that occurs in, and is shaped by, the social nature of the setting – but it is not social from the beginning. In the transactional approach developed in this book, however, every actual entity (theorized in evental terms) “is present in every other actual entity” so that our main task is one of “making clear the notion of ‘being present in another entity’” (Whitehead 1929/1978, 50). Being present in another entity means sociality before any form of construction or thought has set in: the world generally and the human world specifically thus are social in a strong sense of the word. Classical approaches, psychological takes based on classical philosophical con- ceptions, cannot solve the problem of intersubjectivity because the relations between entities – for example, substances, individuals, body and mind, universals and particulars – are external rather than internal. As a resource for making the case for the social nature of things (generally the social as a contingency), educational psychologists often draw on (an Anglo-Saxon reading of) the works of Lev S. Vygotsky (1896–1934), who is the main and often only representative of social and cultural psychology in the field. It is in and with his works that a cultural approach to psychology generally and to educational psychol- ogy particularly was born. Felix T. Mikhailov (2001), an important Russian philoso- pher of psychology, suggested that even the most eminent of the cultural approaches to the mind – he names Michael Cole and James Wertsch – emphasize internaliza- tion and thus the individual as a theoretical element even though these American scholars simultaneously emphasize the primacy of the cultural-historical determina- tion of the mind. Other more recent evaluations of the ways in which the work of Vygotsky was taken up – and falsified – in the West are concordant with this assess- ment (e.g., Yasnitsky 2019). What remains in their work are all those features that are typical of Cartesianism, the psychophysical or body-mind problem (typified in the focus on meaning as separate from the sound), language and other signs as mediators between the separate individuals, and so on. Interestingly, Vygotsky’s recently published personal notes suggest that he had become aware of his intel- lectualism (individualism) and the remnants of Cartesianism in his own earlier work. He describes his own work as deficient, and its main problem is “the unten- ability of the theory” (Vygotsky, in Zavershneva 2010, 54). He was on the verge of a significant breakthrough, though, when he was beginning to think that he needed to focus on “the movement of senses = their variation” (55). This meant he had to “develop a unified perspective: because dynamics of the flüssig type” (49, original underline and emphasis). He was on the verge of a solution to the perennial prob- lems of psychology, one in which his basic ontology changed things to movement and flow – flüssig is German for liquid, in flow. He did not have time to work out
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