(Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6) Anne Edwards, Marilyn Fleer, Louise Bøttcher - Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning and Development_ Societal, Institutional and Persona

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Cultural-Historical 
Approaches to 
Studying Learning 
and Development
Anne Edwards
Marilyn Fleer
Louise Bøttcher Editors
Societal, Institutional 
and Personal Perspectives
Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6
Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research
Volume 6
Series Editors
Marilyn Fleer, Peninsula Campus, Monash University, Frankston, Australia
Fernando González Rey, Department of Psychology, University of Brasilia,
Brasília - DF, Brazil
Elena Kravtsova, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia
Nikolai Veresov, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Frankston, Australia
There is growing interest in the work of LS Vygotsky internationally, but also in
finding new ways and perspectives for advancing cultural-historical theory for
solving contemporary problems. Although Vygotsky has become one of the most
influential scholars in education and psychology today, there is still a need for
serious studies of his work because so much remains unexamined.
The books in this series draw on the collected works of Vygotsky as a primary
source of authority. They go beyond secondary sources and discuss Vygotsky’s
original ideas in the context of a system of concepts or through the elaboration and
theorisation of research findings so that contemporary problems can be addressed in
new ways.
This series collectively brings together under one umbrella a more equal
representation of works from scholars across both the Northern and Southern
continents. In the context of a large volume of contributions to cultural-historical
theorisation and the empirical work from North America, there is an urgent need for
making visible the works of scholars from countries who reside in countries other
than North America.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13559
http://www.springer.com/series/13559
Anne Edwards • Marilyn Fleer •
Louise Bøttcher
Editors
Cultural-Historical
Approaches to Studying
Learning and Development
Societal, Institutional and Personal
Perspectives
123
Editors
Anne Edwards
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
Marilyn Fleer
Monash University
Frankston, Australia
Louise Bøttcher
Aarhus University
Copenhagen, Denmark
ISSN 2520-1530 ISSN 2520-1549 (electronic)
Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research
ISBN 978-981-13-6825-7 ISBN 978-981-13-6826-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932617
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Singapore
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4
This collection of chapters has been put
together in recognition of the contribution of
Mariane Hedegaard to cultural-historical
research, the lives of children and young
people and the families and professions who
support them.
Contents
1 Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning and
Development: Societal, Institutional and Personal Perspectives . . . . 1
Anne Edwards, Marilyn Fleer and Louise Bøttcher
Part I Studies of Child Development from a Wholistic Perspective
2 Children’s Perspectives and Institutional Practices as Keys
in a Wholeness Approach to Children’s Social Situations
of Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Mariane Hedegaard
3 Psychological Content of Developmental Education
in the Cultural-Historical Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
G. G. Kravtsov and E. E. Kravtsova
4 A Collective Social Situation of Development for Understanding
Play in Families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Marilyn Fleer
5 The Cultural Nature of the Zone of Proximal Development:
Young People with Severe Disabilities and Their Development
of Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Louise Bøttcher
6 Supporting Heritage Language Development Through
Adults’ Participation in Activity Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Liang Li
7 Motives and Demands in Parenting Young Children:
A Cultural-Historical Account of Productive Entanglement
in Early Intervention Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Nick Hopwood
vii
Part II Life in Schools
8 The Double Move in Meaningful Teaching Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Bert van Oers
9 Vygotsky’s Developmental Pedagogy Recontextualised as
Hedegaard’s Double-Move: Science Teaching in Grades
1 and 2 in a Disadvantaged School in South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Joanne Hardman and Natasha Teschmacher
10 Building and Using Common Knowledge as a Tool for Pedagogic
Action: A Dialectical Interactive Approach for Researching
Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Prabhat Chandra Rai
11 Am I Doing It Right? Normative Performativity
in the Emergence of Learning as a Leading Activity . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Paula Cavada-Hrepich
12 Motive-Demand Dynamics Creating a Social Context
for Students’ Learning Experiences in a Making
and Design Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Kristiina Kumpulainen, Anu Kajamaa and Antti Rajala
13 Motive Orientation and the Exercise of Agency: Responding
to Recurrent Demands in Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Anne Edwards, Jessica Chan and Desmond Tan
14 The Work of Learning from Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Ray McDermott, Sara Rutherford-Quach and Daniel Steinbock
Part III Methodological Approaches and Philosophical
Considerations
15 Social Practice Theory and the Historical Production
of Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave
16 Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Meets Developmental
Systems Perspective: Transformative Activist Stance
and Natureculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
Anna Stetsenko
17 Units and Wholes in the Cultural-Historical Theory
of Child Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Seth Chaiklin
18 Studying Children’s Friendship Activities Ethically Using
the Interaction-Based Observation Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
Hanne Værum Sørensen
viii Contents
19 Reading and Writing as a Cultural Praxis of Youth . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Bernd Fichtner
20 Re-covering the Idea of a Tertiary Artifact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Mike Cole
21 Mariane Hedegaard’s Contribution to DevelopmentalDidactics
and to Pedagogical Research in the Brazilian Context . . . . . . . . . . 323
José Carlos Libâneo and Raquel A. Marra da Madeira Freitas
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
Contents ix
About the Editors
Anne Edwards is Professor Emerita at the Department of Education, University of
Oxford. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Helsinki and Oslo.
Her research and writing focus mainly on professional learning within a
cultural-historical framing. Her most recent book is Working relationally in and
across practices: a cultural-historical approach to collaboration, published by
Cambridge University Press in 2017. e-mail: anne.edwards@education.ox.ac.uk
Laureate Professor Marilyn Fleer holds the Foundation Chair of Early
Childhood Education and Development at Monash University, Australia. She was
awarded the 2018 Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellowship by the Australian
Research Council and was a former President of the International Society of
Cultural-historical Activity Research (ISCAR). Additionally, she holds the posi-
tions of an honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education, University of
Oxford, and a second professor position in the KINDKNOW Centre, Western
Norway University of Applied Sciences. Significant publication is: Fleer, M.
(2014). Theorising play in the early years. Cambridge University Press: New York.
e-mail: marilyn.fleer@monash.edu
Assoc. Prof. Louise Bøttcher is a member of the research programme Future
technology, Culture and Learning. Her research interest has focused on the inter-
play between neurobiological and social and cultural conditions for development
and takes its point of departure in Vygotsky’s idea about disability and is aimed at
the investigation and further theoretical understanding of children with disabilities
and neurobiologically based impairments. A key publication is Bøttcher &
Dammeyer (2016). Development and learning of young children with disabilities.
A Vygotskian perspective. Springer: New York. Associate Professor Louise
Bøttcher has received a textbook award and a research award. e-mail: boettch-
er@edu.au.dk
xi
mailto:anne.edwards@education.ox.ac.uk
mailto:marilyn.<LIG>fl</LIG>eer@monash.edu
mailto:boettcher@edu.au.dk
mailto:boettcher@edu.au.dk
Chapter 1
Cultural–Historical Approaches
to Studying Learning and Development:
Societal, Institutional and Personal
Perspectives
Anne Edwards, Marilyn Fleer and Louise Bøttcher
Abstract This chapter contributes to the advancement of scholarly knowledge in
the context of the longstanding innovative work of Mariane Hedegaard.
Specifically, we draw together the major themes that have emerged as members of
the cultural–historical research community has engaged with Hedegaard’s whole-
ness approach to researching child development and promoting learning. The key
concepts that make up the approach, and the methods she developed, are brought
together in the chapters in relation to how others have used and further theorised her
work. The collection of chapters, therefore, also reveals new concepts and ways of
researching learning and development. We discuss the content and concepts of a
wholeness approach, through the lenses of: studies of child development from a
wholistic perspective; life in schools; and methodological approaches and philo-
sophical considerations. What is unique about this book, is that all contributors
have been engaged in conversations with Hedegaard and her work over many
decades. The present chapter captures and advances the mutual connections of
cultural–historical theory, practice and research methodology that are elaborated in
the individual chapters.
The editors of this volume are grateful to Elsevier publishers and Prof. Mariane Hedegaard for
permission to reproduce Chap. 2, which was first published in Learning Culture and Social
Interaction: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2018.04.008.
A. Edwards (&)
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: anne.edwards@education.ox.ac.uk
M. Fleer
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: marilyn.fleer@monash.edu
L. Bøttcher
Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
e-mail: boettcher@edu.au.dk
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
A. Edwards et al. (eds.), Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning
and Development, Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_1
1
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_1&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_1&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_1&amp;domain=pdf
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2018.04.008
mailto:anne.edwards@education.ox.ac.uk
mailto:marilyn.<LIG>fl</LIG>eer@monash.edu
mailto:boettcher@edu.au.dk
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_1
Keywords Child development � Learning � Cultural–historical �
Wholeness approach � Motives � Practices
1.1 Introduction
This collection of chapters is in recognition of the many contributions that Mariane
Hedegaard has made to our understandings of children’s learning and development,
in and out of school settings. The book’s title is quite a mouthful, but it signals the
wholeness approach to studying children’s lives that marks Hedegaard’s distinctive
contribution. This approach encourages us to try to understand the child as she or he
engages with the demands and opportunities for action in activities that occur
within institutional practices, which are themselves embedded in local and national
histories and societal expectations.
The content of the book is organised into three conceptually led sections: studies
of child development from a wholistic perspective; life in schools; and method-
ological approaches and philosophical considerations. Each chapter is in conver-
sation with Hedegaard’s work, demonstrating both how the authors, from across the
globe, have been influenced by her ideas and how they have used her concepts as
springboards for developing their own research. Hedegaard’s opus is clearly located
within the Vygotskian, cultural–historical approach to learning and development,
making it entirely appropriate that her ideas have not been blindly applied in
different settings; rather they have been nuanced and developed by the authors as
they have used her work in their research. One of the most important elements in
Vygotsky’s legacy is his recognition that concepts are tools that enable us to work
in and on the world and engage with societal problems: they help us explain
phenomena and in doing so may be refined to address new problems.
Hedegaard’s own ideas have been shaped in a dynamic relationship between the
concepts she brings to her research and what she observes through her active
engagement in and with the field. She combines theoretical rigour with an insightful
sensitivity and a continuous focus on how children are attempting to make sense of
their worlds. This kind of work, as we shall see, calls for sensitive immersion in the
life worlds of children alongside the researcher’s intellectual acuity—hers is not an
easy form of research.
The chapter authors all recognise this methodological debt to Hedegaard; but not
all focus on childhood. Rather, it is the testament to the strength of the concepts and
approaches she has developed that they are also resources for studying how adults
recognise and respond to demands, and for critically examining different approa-
ches to researching learning and development. Hedegaard has worked conversa-
tionally with all the contributors over decades and this collection is intended to
make these conversations public in the hope that they continue.
2 A. Edwards et al.
1.1.1 Key Concepts in Hedegaard’s Research Methodology
At the centre of Hedegaard’s contribution to research on learning and development
is what she terms a wholeness approach (Hedegaard, 2008a; Chaiklin, this volume).
Bythis, she means that we cannot understand how a child is making sense of his or
her world without attending to how the child is positioned within practices, such as
family life or pre-school. In taking this point of departure Hedegaard is working
within the cultural–historical framing of development as a dialectical process, a
recursive intertwining of person and society (see Stetsenko, this volume for an
extension of this concept). Importantly, Hedegaard’s wholeness approach is in
contrast to the interactionist stance so roundly criticised by Stetsenko. Instead, the
approach is based in and exemplifies the dialectic of person and society, and at the
same time refines it.
Leont’ev had explained this dialectical relationship as: ‘society produces the
activity of the individuals forming it’ (Leont’ev, 1978, p. 7). Hedegaard’s major
contribution has been to show how institutional practices, such as family life,
mediate societal priorities. In some families, for example the everyday activity of
homework is a priority; while in others, it is seen as less important than caring for
siblings or looking after the family’s animals.
The wholeness approach, therefore, requires us to analyse historically accumu-
lated institutional practices as part of our efforts at understanding people’s moti-
vated actions within their everyday activities. She explains her intention in relation
to Leont’ev as follows:
Leontiev in his theory conceptualizes the process of the transformation primary biological
needs into culturally valued motives as a straightforward process of collective activity.
What is missing in this theory is the conceptualization of the historical institutionalized
demands that mediate this process. (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013, p. 200)
In order to explain the dynamic relationships that connect a person’s actions in
activities with societal expectations, and of course, the potential impact of those
actions on society, Hedegaard has produced a series of models that indicate how
they interconnect.
One feature of Hedegaard’s work is her use of models as resources for taking
forward her conceptualisations into the design and execution of her research. Cole
(this volume) discusses the debt that both he and Hedegaard owe to the work of
Wartofsky (1979), who sees models as tertiary artifacts, modes of future-oriented
action. In Figs. 1.1 and 1.2, we offer two very closely connected models that both
demonstrate the development of Hedegaard’s thinking about the dialectic of person
and society and show clearly how she has refined previous cultural–historical
understandings of the relationship.
Figure 1.1 was used by Hedegaard to explain what she meant by a wholeness
approach and also to show how children may participate in several institutional
settings such as home and daycare. Hedegaard uses the term ‘perspective’ in
relation to this model and asks us to see how ideas about children’s development
unfold in relation to three different perspectives: societal, institutional and personal.
1 Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning … 3
She goes on to state ‘A wholeness approach to studying children should encompass
daily life across different institutional settings and arenas from all three perspec-
tives’ (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2008a, b: 11). Instead of seeing these moves as tra-
jectories Hedegaard explains that she prefers the idea of pathways as it allows a
stronger focus on what happens in activities. In the 2008 book, Fig. 1.1 was
Fig. 1.1 A model of children’s learning and development through participation in institutional
practice, where different perspectives are depicted: A societal, and institutional, and an individual
perspective (after Hedegaard, 2008)
Entity Process Dynamic
Society Political economy Societal needs/conditions 
Institution Practice Values/motives /objectives 
Activity setting Activity/situation (with potential 
for individual learning)
Motivation/demands
Person Actions (learning arising from 
individual engagement in the 
activity)
Motive/intentions 
Fig. 1.2 Planes of Analysis (adapted from Hedegaard, 2012, p. 19)
4 A. Edwards et al.
augmented by the first iteration of what later became Fig. 1.2. In 2008 Hedegaard
wrote of four different levels of analysis; but by 2012 this had developed into a
model of linked analytic planes, thus dispelling any thought that these are separate
and disconnected levels. We offer the more recent version of the model in Fig. 1.2.
This version speaks directly to research design and identifying the focus of the
study within a wholeness approach.
Figure 1.2 presents different interlinked planes of analysis. We stress that they
are analytic planes, entry points for a researcher when designing a study. Each plane
should be read horizontally to ensure a consistent focus on, for example the person
or the institutional practice. But they also need to be read vertically to examine the
interrelationships between each analytic plane. It is very helpful to be able to note
whether children’s motivated actions in activities reflect the institutional level
priorities and values, or how institutions are mediating national policies or
priorities.
Researchers frequently select two analytic planes for focused study, but also
attend to the vertical relationships. For example, a study of group work in Hong
Kong schools (the activity setting and person planes of analysis) needs to be located
within societal and institutional expectations arising from the high-stakes testing
found in that education system (Edwards, Chan & Tan, this volume). The entry
point will determine the research methods and analytic processes. Hedegaard, as we
shall see, has encouraged researchers to take the child’s perspective when
researching their learning. Doing so involves following the person and capturing
their motivated actions in activity settings within institutional practices, the focus
becomes what the person recognises and responds to and what material and con-
ceptual resources they use in their responses, but also how they use these to shape
these activity settings.
We will briefly outline each analytic plane shown in Fig. 1.2 in turn. Entering a
study at the societal plane of analysis involves examining national or regional
policies in relation to the institutions and activities being studied. The researcher’s
intention is to identify the purposes of the policies and the expectations they reflect.
However, it is also possible to go beyond what is visible in policy statements to
consider the historical formation of societal expectations, such as when children are
18 they should no longer rely on parental support for their general well-being.
These purposes and expectations are mediated by institutions, for example some
families keep their children close to them for several decades after their 18th
birthdays; and practices in some schools may reflect the importance they place on
high-stakes testing; while others may play down their relevance.
When studying institutional practices the researcher may examine routines,
communication networks, position papers, and so on as well as interviewing key
stakeholders. The model in Fig. 1.2 uses the cultural–historical idea of a practice as
a complex interweaving of the concrete and the ideal, with histories and purposes
and which are inhabited by those who act in and shape them. Cole tackled the
concept of practice in relation to cultural–historical approaches in his 1996 book
Cultural Psychology, where he was making the case that context is not simply ‘that
which surrounds’ (p. 134) and we should, therefore, examine the interweaving of
1 Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning … 5
practices and activities as it creates the culture which we are both shaped by and
shape. More recently Edwards provided a definition of practice, which more
directly reflects Hedegaard’s framing, while also acknowledging Cole’s attention to
culture: ‘…practices are knowledge-laden, imbued with cultural values, and emo-
tionallyfreighted by the motives of those who already act in them’ (Edwards, 2010,
p. 5). Hedegaard encourages us to understand child development through studying
the child’s participation in the practice traditions of the different institutions that
society has set up in support of children’s good life, such as the family unit, school,
child care and pre-school.
Here, we come to the activity settings that comprise institutional practices and
are where the child meets the demands and opportunities arising in the different
institutional practices. This analytic plane in Hedegaard’s work, therefore, focuses
our attention on the activities the child engages in, within particular settings, within
practices. Examples of activity settings include breakfast time or homework within
the family, or tackling a mathematics task in a school lesson. It is at this plane of
analysis that we can work with Hedegaard’s view of development as a qualitative
change in children’s motives and competences, which become visible through how
a child engages in activities within institutional practices. These motives and
competences are revealed in the motivated actions of the person that are taken
during an activity. For example, does the child engage in group discussion or does
she work alone with her arm around her book? Does he listen to his mother or does
he assert independence by ignoring her advice?
Motives are an important aspect of each analytic plane and reflect Hedegaard’s
debt to both El’konin (1999) and Leont’ev (1978), who argued for the importance
of motive in human development. Motives as analytic foci are most obviously
apparent when examining how someone takes part in an activity setting, approaches
the different activities within the setting and takes particular actions when tackling
the activities. As always, Hedegaard is concerned with the sense-making child and
the dialectical nature of motive development is a central concept in her recent work.
She explains it as follows: ‘Motive development can then be seen as a movement
initiated by the learner’s emotional experience related to the activity setting’
(Hedegaard, 2012, p. 21).
Activity settings are, therefore, not neutral spaces, they are where the demands in
institutional practices meet the actions of those who inhabit the practices.
Hedegaard encourages researchers to recognise and describe recurrent demands in
practices, such as ‘do your homework before watching television’. Capturing how
these demands are recognised and responded to allows researchers to access peo-
ple’s motive orientations. Her research has shown that by learning to recognise and
respond to recurring demands in activities, such as finishing breakfast quickly to get
to school or doing homework before television in family life, learners develop
motive orientations. These motive orientations enable them to work with the
expectations or embedded motives in the practices they inhabit.
Of course, people inhabit more than one practice and therefore need to develop
motive orientations that allow them to function in line with the priorities in these
different practices. Hedegaard has tackled this phenomenon through her extensive
6 A. Edwards et al.
work on transitions (Hedegaard, 2014). Her particular focus has been on the
transition between home and school for young children and the challenges faced by
some children in developing the motive orientations that will help them become
pupils who engage with schools (Hedegaard & Fleer 2013).
Another important concept within Hedegaard’s framing of development is the
social situation of development (Chaiklin, this volume). Drawing on Vygotsky’s
(1987) discussion of development Hedegaard regards the social situation of
development as always potential and created by the child as they propel themselves
forward to tackle the demands they recognise and are oriented to respond to. The
social situation of development is, therefore, observed at the person and activity
setting planes of analysis. It is where the agency of the child meets the demands of
the activity. However, it requires a broader focus than simply the actions of the
child. Equally, it is more than an array of resources that might support the child’s
learning and development. Instead, it captures the child’s engagement in and with
developmental niche within which they are taking action. Analytic attention,
therefore, needs to be paid to relationships, both social and material, through which
the learner moves themselves forward and repositions themselves within the ac-
tivity setting and therefore the practice.
This concept has been particularly helpful in Hedegaard’s work because it draws
attention to an analysis of the developmental conditions of the different institutional
practices that children enter and participate in. In addition, individual children bring
with them different motive orientations and each may make sense of the same
activity setting differently. For instance, a child with a motive orientation to play
may experience a free play setting in a preschool differently from a child whose
motive orientation is to learning. By drawing upon the concept of the social situ-
ation of development, together with Hedegaard’s conception of demands and
motives, the complexity of the developmental conditions of families and educa-
tional institutions can be better understood. One consequence of these insights is
that it is not enough to simply follow one child’s intentional actions; research must
also examine the social situations of development of other participating children
(Fleer, this volume).
Student engagement with school, their motives as learners and the opportunities
schooling offers is also at the heart of another area of work developed by
Hedegaard. She argues that Vygotsky’s contribution to understanding learning was
useful as it called attention to the connections between everyday understandings
and more powerful scientific concepts, however, it didn’t address sufficiently well
how knowledge is related to where children are positioned in society and the
everyday knowledge that is therefore available to them. This critique led to her
work with Chaiklin on a radical–local approach to teaching and learning, which
owes a considerable debt to the pedagogic research of Davydov (see Libâneo &
Freitas, this volume). The intervention they led is based on what they term the
double move in teaching (Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005) (see Hardman &
Teschmacher and Van Oers, this volume). Hedegaard and Chaiklin describe the
double move as follows: ‘… the teacher’s planning of the instruction must advance
from the abstract characteristics and general laws of a subject-matter area to the
1 Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning … 7
concrete reality in all its complexity. Conversely, the pupils’ learning must extend
from their personal everyday knowledge to the general laws and abstract concepts
of a subject-matter area’ (Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005: 70).
Our conceptualisation of Hedegaard’s contributions to scholarship, and how her
concepts have evolved over time, is the first methodological tracing of her work that
has been done. It is through this analytical process, particularly in the context of the
chapters of this book which concretely show her concepts at work, that it becomes
possible to see the reach of her ideas. In so doing, we collectively build on and take
forward her models (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2), and as is shown in the next section, show
the power of her methods for studying children.
1.2 Cultural–Historical Methods for Studying Children
In her approach to studying children, Hedegaard (2008a) has provided a guide to
conceptualising and using cultural–historical research methods. From early in her
career, she was concerned about how the then current psychological assessment
methods evaluated the child in isolation from his or her environment (Hedegaard,
this volume). The concern gave rise to her development of a new approach to child
assessment which she sharedin a Danish book about how to analyse the child’s
intentions, problems and capacities in relation to their everyday life and in relation
to other people (Hedegaard, 1994; Sørensen, this volume). However, prior to her
2008 book with Fleer Studying Children, little material was available in English to
help researchers with how to design a cultural–historical study of children and their
development.
Her guidance in Studying Children includes how researchers can prepare
observational protocols, where the aim is to take the child’s perspective as she or he
engages in actions, in activities in practices; and where the protocols are created as
the actions are taken by the child. Hedegaard also sets out a detailed analytic
process: her intention is deep analysis of these protocols as three interpretations that
become more distanced from the activity setting during the process of analysis. The
first is a common-sense interpretation of the observations that have been made; next
the researcher makes a situated practice interpretation, and finally undertakes a
thematic interpretation, where the research questions are directly addressed. The
third interpretation involves using theoretical concepts and looking across a number
of observations and their analyses.
Kravtsov and Kravtsova (this volume) have called this way of conceptualising
research and analysing observations of children as non-classical. In using terms
such as ‘protocols’ rather than ‘data’ Hedegaard pushes against traditional con-
ceptions of research. The aim is to capture children’s developmental pathways and
discuss the cultural rather than biological age of the child. In this way, Hedegaard’s
writing on researching children offers a much needed conceptualisation and con-
crete approach for undertaking research following a cultural–historical perspective.
8 A. Edwards et al.
This contribution is particularly clear in her advice that the researcher should
take the child’s perspective (Hedegaard, 2008a). In Hedegaard’s definition, the
child’s perspective is used as an analytical concept for following the child in
everyday practices of the home, school, preschool and community organisations,
events or clubs. By this, she means that the researcher should endeavour to follow
the child’s intentions within an activity setting, paying attention to a child’s motives
and the demands they recognise and respond to, and how they contribute to shaping
the practices they inhabit. The researcher should follow how the child enters into
the activity setting, meets the demands of the activity setting, drawing on available
resources, whilst also making demands upon the setting. This focus on the child’s
everyday life captures how the child is shaped by and shapes the activity setting.
The power of taking the perspective of the actor, whether child or adult, is
revealed in many of the chapters in this book. These include Bøttcher’s (this
volume) research with young people with cerebral palsy and their families as they
are considering their future. The incongruence between the young person’s psy-
chological structure and the structure of cultural forms become evident when the
researcher follows the young person’s intentions. The incongruence describes a
dialectical relation between the person with a disability and the surrounding society
and this becomes most pronounced during the projected and actual transitions
experienced by young people. Following the young person or child at home was
also foregrounded in the research of Fleer (this volume) who caught, in everyday
family practices, how a 3-year-old child enters into play. The unique relationship
and attunement between family members created in everyday life gave rise to
specific developmental conditions for the youngest child, where higher forms of
play within and across the activity settings of the home were featured.
Each of the empirical chapters in this volume has drawn upon Hedegaard’s
unique contribution to making explicit a cultural–historical perspective on
researching children’s development. But some have also explicitly extended the
analytical power of her research approach in their chapters. While Bøttcher focused
on young adults, two other chapters in this collection have studied the development
of adults. Edwards, Chan and Tan focus on teachers; and Hopwood discusses the
work of practitioners undertaking early intervention work to support vulnerable
parents. In so doing, these contributors comfortably move from Hedegaard’s con-
ception of studying children to adults’ actions in activities.
But Hedegaard’s focus is not limited to actions, in activities in practices. There is
also attention to societal expectations (see Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). Her wholeness
approach captures how children’s development takes place in institutions which
mediate what a particular society values and expects of a good life for their citizens.
Li (this volume) shows the dynamics of how societal values are realised in family
practices in her study of how Chinese-Australian families grapple with maintaining
their heritage language when living in a new country.
Another key aspect of Hedegaard’s methodology is the attention she gives to the
role of the researcher. Hedegaard (2008b; this volume) has made explicit in her own
work what it means to be a researcher following a cultural–historical approach. She
is clear that researchers are not flies on the wall and absent from the research
1 Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning … 9
context, nor are they play partners or members of the institution being researched;
rather the researcher always holds the position of a researcher and is always in this
particular role. This means they can engage with the participants, not ignoring them,
but also not getting in the way or unnecessarily interrupting the practices being
researched (Sørensen, this volume). How the researcher enters into the research site
and when the researcher engages with the participants, is always documented in the
research protocols. This means that when a child falls or maybe is in danger, the
researcher can deal with these problems by including in the observation protocols
what the researcher does and the position they take, linking how and when these
moments occurred in the observations being made.
Sørensen (this volume) in drawing upon Hedegaard’s methodology interestingly
shows how the concepts of motives and demands also matter in relation to the role
of the researcher. Sørensen argues that the motives and demands of the researcher
must be explicit when designing research because there are always demands placed
upon researchers, such as when dealing with ethical dilemmas that present them-
selves during the process of researching with children, or when the researcher must
deal with an incident of safety or well-being.
In brief, Hedegaard’s methodological advice encourages researchers to combine
attention to individual sense-making in activities with analyses of how this process
is intertwined with the purposes and affordances of the institutions in which the
activity is taking place. We now turn to advancing these concepts in relation to the
content of the chapters that make up each section of the book.
1.3 Studies of Child Development from a Wholistic
Perspective
This section opens with a chapter by Hedegaard who outlines, through a narrative
of her own development as a researcher, many of the points we have just elabo-
rated. Importantly, she exemplifies research as a quest where researchers work with
concepts in concrete settings, refining or extending them within a broad framing of
an ethical approach to studying children. In this rest of this section, the authors
build on her wholeness approach and discuss how the model shown in Fig. 1.2 can
be used for investigating child development and practices for supporting devel-
opment. The key to the wholeness approach is ‘[b]y paying attention to motives and
demands, it becomes possible to capture holistically how children graduallyenter
into the activity settings, how each child participates, and how each child shows
their own initiative in relation to the demands made upon them by the family’ (Fleer
this volume). This embeddedness of child development in its everyday activity
settings is employed and developed in all the chapters in the section.
Kravtsov and Kravtsova consider the relation between learning and development
through the Vygotskian concept of developmental education that has also engaged
Hedegaard. As a start, they consider the difference between the concepts of the zone
10 A. Edwards et al.
of proximal development and the zone of potential development. The zone of
proximal development denotes abilities and skills present in the child, although not
available to the child without help from others. In contrast, the zone of potential
development is a source of development, from which different zones of proximal
development might grow. Developmental education addresses this source of po-
tential development and thus widens the zone of proximal development for the
participating children. Kravtsov and Kravtsova go on to investigate developmental
education through the dual concepts of spontaneous and reactive education.
Through their examples from pedagogical activity settings with preschoolers, they
discuss the need for the adults to transform reactive education into spontaneous
education by presenting the tasks in such a way that the children form their own
motives in relation to the educational content. Their analyses of pedagogical situ-
ations demonstrate a wholeness approach to child development as the result of the
child’s (and the pedagogue’s) motivated activity in everyday activity settings.
The centrality of children’s motivated activity to an understanding of their de-
velopment continues in the next chapter by Fleer. She investigates cultural condi-
tions for children’s development and how play practices are actively learned. The
chapter builds on empirical work from a shared research project with Hedegaard,
anchored in the wholeness approach and aimed at understanding how the child’s
development is embedded in everyday practices (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013). Fleer
bases her approach in Hedegaard’s theoretical frame of personal, institutional and
societal perspectives in her analysis of play situations in a particular Australian
family. By following the motives and intentions of the four different children in the
family, she reveals how each child has a unique perspective on the same play
activity and how the parents, through their sensitivity to the different perspectives,
are able to tailor the demands in the shared activity to the motives and capabilities
of each child. Fleer conceptualises the sensitive tailoring of the parents in the play
activities as the creation of a collective social situation of development. The concept
of a collective social situation of development builds on Vygotsky’s original
concept of the social situation of development. However, in combination with
Hedegaard’s concepts of motives and demands, Fleer’s research in play practices
leads her to the development of this new concept. Thus, her chapter presents a
strong example of the social embeddedness of child development that is at the heart
of the wholeness approach.
Bøttcher, in her study of the development of independence in young people with
severe disabilities, also takes the analytic planes as a point of departure. The
concern in this chapter is how to understand the development of independence in
young people with severe disabilities, who will never become able to take care of
their basic needs by themselves. Nevertheless, the idea of an independent life is
expressed as a societal value, as embedded in institutional values and as personal
motive orientations. Through a case study of eight young people with severe dis-
abilities, Bøttcher analyses how the socio-cultural value of independence at the
societal level (at least in Western heritage cultures) becomes expressed as motives
in concrete institutionalised practices and activity settings. She concludes that the
development of independence needs to be understood as development in systems of
1 Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning … 11
relations that takes place in concrete institutional practices and activity settings,
based in the developmental crises and motivated activity of the young people at the
individual plane of analysis. Following the wholeness approach and the idea that all
human development is socially embedded, independence is better understood as
interdependence regardless of the level of ability.
The planes of analysis are also central in Li’s study of heritage language de-
velopment in Chinese-Australian families. She is concerned with how to concep-
tualise bilingual language development within the child’s everyday life and how to
conceptualise effective family pedagogies in parents’ support of their child’s her-
itage language learning. Like Fleer and Bøttcher, she gives the concept of motives a
central position and analyses how parents’ motive to pass on their heritage language
is enacted in a family activity centred on baking. Her analyses, like Fleer’s, also
include the need to consider the child’s perspective. Through taking the child’s
perspective, she is able to show how the two parents work with the motive ori-
entation of their child differently and how this impacts on the child’s opportunities
for participating in the conversation in Chinese that takes place as part of the
activity. The mother uses direct speech and closed questions which are similar to
those found in traditional Chinese educational practices and requests her daughter
to follow her instructions. The father, while from the same cultural background but
with more educational experience from Australia, applies a more interactive pattern
of conversation that opens a wider space for the child’s active conversational
contributions. The conclusion is that supporting heritage language development
requires the collective engagement of parents and child.
The last chapter in the section is from Hopwood, who is concerned with pro-
fessionals in early intervention practices for vulnerable children and families.
Reflecting a vertical reading of the model of planes of analysis, he examines how
societal values of good childcare become expressed in the motivated actions of
professionals working with vulnerable families. The professionals’ actions in
reformulating the demands and motives of small children, so that their parents may
understand the children’s needs, provide the parents with a new sense of the situ-
ation and their child. These reformulations guide the parents to more child-sensitive
care practices. In this chapter, Hopwood combines the insights gathered from a
plane of analysis approach with Edwards’ concepts of relational expertise, common
knowledge and relational agency (Edwards, 2010, 2017). From this combination,
he creates a new understanding of partnership. In this understanding, building
partnerships between professionals and vulnerable families is conceptualised as
concrete actions of noticing, attaching significance and attributing agency to parents
in a productive entanglement. Hopwood presents his creative theoretical work as a
Hedegaardian approach: ‘one that takes up key principles and concepts from
Hedegaard’s work […], but which adapts and appropriates them in working on
specific analytical problems’ (Hopwood, this volume). For Hopwood, a
Hedegaardian approach includes encouraging creative theoretical thinking in rela-
tion to concrete problems.
As a whole, the section conveys the scholarly potential of the wholeness
approach to understanding child development. The approach, demonstrated by the
12 A. Edwards et al.
planes of analysis we discussed earlier, has allowed new insights into the complex
interrelationships between societal and cultural values, practices and children and
young people’s developmental conditions and actions. Thethematic diversity
across the chapters highlights the versatility of the approach. They also reveal, as
Hopwood has observed, that the approach encourages theoretical developments,
including Bøttcher (this volume) who analyses the development of independence in
a cultural–historical framing as interdependence and Fleer (this volume), who
conceptualises the sensitive tailoring of the parents in the play activities as the
creation of a collective social situation of development.
1.4 Life in Schools
In this section, the contributors have each discussed how the concepts developed by
Hedegaard have informed their work, offering new insights, and giving new ana-
lytical possibilities for their own work. Van Oers and Hardman and Teschmacher
specifically discuss the concept of a double move. Involving teachers in creating
‘learning tasks that can integrate local knowledge with core conceptual relations of
subject-matter areas so that a person can acquire theoretical knowledge that can be
used in the persons’s local practice’ (Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005, p. 69). The
double move is a powerful pedagogical concept. The theoretical foundations of
Hedegaard’s concepts are traced by van Oers, who has himself introduced new
pedagogical practices in primary schools in the Netherlands. Van Oers engages with
the theoretical foundations and Hedegaard’s concept of a double move in ways that
draw out what is unique about this concept. Specifically, it speaks to the need for
determining the essence of disciplinary knowledge, at the same time as recognising
the historical and societal conditions that brought about the need for the develop-
ment of a particular body of knowledge. In schools, these knowledge have tradi-
tionally been transformed into school curricula, where sequences of concepts are
introduced through teaching programmes. But rarely is there an analysis of the
historical or societal need for the initial development of a particular discipline
concept. That is, the historical evolution of the concept and the need for capturing
this in some way in the practice traditions of the school, is usually missing. Thus,
the sense and meaning of the concept as initially developed and understood for
solving a particular need in society is lost. The concept of a double move fore-
grounds the importance of both the personal meaning of the concept for the learner
as well as the historically developed knowledge forms.
Employing the concept of the double move, Hardman and Teschmacher are able
to show the importance of personal meaning and a sense of the school discipline
knowledge in South Africa, where children are working with both traditional local
knowledge and school knowledge of science for explaining the world around them.
Through bringing together the concept of a double move, with Vygotsky’s (1987)
dialectical conception of everyday and scientific concept formation, they analyse
1 Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning … 13
how teachers work with school science in the South African context and point to
where there is more work to be done.
School discipline knowledge is also the focus of attention by Rai, this time in the
context of Rajasthan in India. In analysing how a teacher in a successful rural
school introduced the mathematical concept of area to children, Rai drew on
Hedegaard’s work on planes of analyses and demands in practices together with
Derry’s pedagogic interpretations of the space of reasons (Derry, 2008) and
Edwards’ concept of common knowledge (Edwards, 2010, 2017) to explain the
pedagogy he observed. The engagement of the children aged 6–9 is evident in the
excerpts of classroom interaction that he shares and is much enhanced by the
conversations that the teacher asks the children to have with family members about
local approaches to measuring area. Rai notes how the teacher, echoing Hedegaard
and Chaiklin (2005), is not simply culturally sensitive in his teaching, but offers a
nuanced approach where subject-matter knowledge is related to children’s everyday
life. In doing so, his connecting of common knowledge, and demands in different
practices within a pedagogic context is an important step forward in understanding
pedagogy within a cultural–historical framing.
When school knowledge has no sense or meaning for children, learning becomes
decontextualized and the experience of everyday life in schools becomes difficult.
Cavada has studied how children in the transition year into primary school in Chile,
try to make sense of literacy practices through drawing upon their motive orien-
tation to play with others, in order to make formal literacy more motivating to learn.
Through adopting Hedegaard’s wholeness approach, Cavada showed how literacy
activities are individually oriented and frequently decontextualised, thus making
little sense or holding limited meaning for the children. Her study of how children
meet these new demands in the literacy activity settings suggested that, within the
transition into school, there are quite challenging transitions into literacy school
knowledge, shown through the children’s initiative to turn the literacy activity
settings into socially playful situations.
Social activity was also found to be key for student learning in makerspaces by
Kumpulainen, Kajamaa and Rajala. Makerspaces captures the pedagogical spaces
and digital artefacts that support interest-driven projects, where students design and
make products, such as 3-D spaghetti making machines. Like Cavada,
Kumpulainen et al. draw upon Hedegaard’s (2014) concepts of motives and de-
mands within the methodology of a wholeness approach. By introducing the Arts
into the makerspaces projects where the learning of school science, technology,
engineering and mathematics is foregrounded, powerful analytical concepts are
needed for understanding the tensions and relations between knowledge forms. In
using Hedegaard’s (2012) concepts of motives and demands, Kumpulainen et al.
found that it becomes possible to make visible the motive orientation of social
relations of students, as they come into conflict with the established ways of being
at school. Like Hedegaard (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013), they argue that the tensions
found between students’ motives and demands of schooling appeared as a pro-
ductive force for learning.
14 A. Edwards et al.
The tension between motives and demands found within the practice traditions
of schooling, has also been the focus of research by Edwards et al. In two studies,
they examined the professional learning of pre-service student teachers and teachers
who had been working for several years. Using Hedegaard’s concepts of motives
and demands, they analysed the recurrent demands in school practices in both
studies and how student teachers and established teachers negotiated these de-
mands. Drawing on the two studies, they illustrate the analytical power of bringing
together Hedegaard’s (2014) concept of motive orientation with the notion of
human agency. Agency is conceptualised as intentions and commitments, which
may or may not unfold in the process of student teachers and teachers meeting the
demands of teaching. Importantly, the chapter shows how the concept of agency
together with Hedegaard’s (2014) conception of motives and demands, brings to
researchers’ attention the nature of teachers’ development, both early in their
learning and as more experienced teachers. These studies extend the original work
of Hedegaard to the sphere of the professional development of teachers and argue
for attention to connections between agency and motive orientation.
In the two studies reported by McDermott, Rutherford-Quach and Steinbock,
silence is presented as a social achievement. One study is focused on a Quaker
meeting where five categories of silence are observed by the adults, and the other
examines silence in schools in which 16 forms of silence were found to be used by
teachers. When viewed within Hedegaard’s wholistic research methodology,
McDermott et al. revealthat regulation in classrooms, when framed through dif-
ferent forms of silence, supports the finding that silence can act as a productive
force in education. This chapter contributes to studies of children’s development
because, like Hedegaard’s work, the authors examine key areas that are not usually
explored in the everyday life in school. Hedegaard has consistently shown how
crises during transitions are also productive forces, and McDermott et al. add to this
by showing how silence is also a productive force in children’s development
because it is seen as a social achievement—something valued in different ways in
different institutions.
Taken together, the chapters in the section on Life in Schools both celebrate the
analytical power of Hedegaard’s concepts and deploy the ideas as springboards for
further conceptual developments. The chapters all also recognise that personal
sense-making and an understanding of the purposes of schooling is central for a
successful or good life in school. Yet research into schooling has traditionally
missed this dimension, because researching school practices has tended to fore-
ground academic achievement in relation to pedagogical practices. The argument
across the chapters is that motives of those acting in schooling practices have to be
seen as central for research.
1 Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning … 15
1.5 Methodological Approaches and Philosophical
Considerations
So far, in this chapter, we offered an overview of Hedegaard’s work, which has
arisen from the conversations that we and the other contributors have enjoyed with
her and with her work. In presenting the overview, we have done scant justice to
some aspects of the philosophical underpinning of her work and some of their
implications for methodology. We address some of that gap in the seven chapters
that comprise the third section of the book.
One of Hedegaard’s many strengths is that her trajectory as a researcher mirrors
her pedagogic concern with the recursive relationship between abstract and con-
crete. Starting with concrete problems, such as transitions between practices, or the
social and intellectual exclusion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds,
she draws on some foundational concepts to guide how she addresses the problem;
while also incorporating the essence of these concepts into the conceptual resources
she offers others. We have already mentioned, for example, how she has developed
Leont’ev’s notion of the dialectical interrelationship of individual and society, her
use of models drawing on Wartofsky and how she has developed the idea of social
situation of development from the original conception offered by Vygotsky. The
chapters in this section, in their different ways, speak to some of the major concepts
that Hedegaard has worked with over her career and how her work informs and
reflects their own concerns.
All seven chapters connect the ideas they use with real-world events and con-
cerns and draw on foundational concepts to offer explanations rather than mere
descriptions. Two chapters: by Holland and Lave1 and by Stetsenko, in their dif-
ferent ways, critically examine the processes of people-making as self-authoring,
echoing our earlier discussion of the learner as active agent in the social situation of
development in Hedegaard’s work.
Holland and Lave offer the anthropological lens of social practice theory to
explain the historical production of people in practices as an integration of ‘emo-
tion, motivation, and agency’. The commonality with Hedegaard’s work is striking
as this statement connects both with Hedegaard on motive orientation and with
points made on agency, in relation to Hedegaard’s theorisations, by Edwards et al.
(this volume). Another similarity arises in their exemplar ethnographic work on
environmental groups in the US and old port merchant families in Porto. Holland
and Lave explain their methods as follows: ‘the simultaneous foregrounding of the
subjects or actors—persons—in activities and the historical struggles that engage
them…’, revealing just how closely Hedegaard’s research methods reflect the
anthropological cast of mind that marks social practice theory.
1The editors of this volume are grateful to Prof. Katsuhiro Yamazumi for permission to reproduce
‘Social Practice Theory and the Historical Production of Persons’, which was first published in
Actio: An International Journal of Human Activity Theory No. 2 2009 pp. 1–15—by The Center
for Human Activity Theory, Kansai University.
16 A. Edwards et al.
In explaining her Transformative Activist Stance (TAS), Stetsenko tackles
dualism more directly. Positioning TAS in relation to the still continuing dualistic
interactionist account of development, she recognises how clearly Hedegaard’s
wholeness approach has countered interactionism. Echoing Hedegaard’s concern
with the direction that psychology as a discipline was taking while she developed
her research programme (Hedegaard, this volume), Stetsenko points to how an
interactionist view of development allows a form of ‘genetic reductionism’, which
is signalled by the current growth of the brain and genetic research within psy-
chology. Stetsenko’s response is natureculture, which recognises development as a
self-organising process arising through what she terms ‘productive social relations’.
Stetsenko’s description of development ‘as activity-dependent, emergent co-con-
struction of developmental outcomes by human beings co-acting with others in joint
pursuits and in relying on available cultural resources’ [emphasis in the original],
explains succinctly the raison d’être for the methodological approaches pioneered
by Hedegaard in her work.
Chaiklin in his chapter also discusses the whole that is the focus of enquiry when
examining human psychological development. Taking us from Hedgaard’s
wholeness approach to some of the most vexing questions facing us when trying to
research development, he argues that the researcher’s role is to grasp the essence of
what is happening, to move beyond description to explanation. He explains why,
when examining the child in their social situation of development, we need to
explain appearance, what is happening, by analysing the development arising
dynamically ‘among the essential units of a whole’. Making it very clear that we
can all too easily and mistakenly confuse these essential units with units of analysis,
he shows the importance of trying to capture the unfolding and shifting interrela-
tionships of these units as learners make sense and take actions in activities.
In the chapter that follows, Sørensen reflects on the methodological and ethical
implications of Hedegaard’s work while discussing some of the challenges involved
in researching children’s friendships in the pre-school and school. Her focus is not
simply a child as she or he takes actions in the activities offered by these institu-
tions. Instead her work, employing Hedegaard’s Interaction Based Observation
Method, captures the mutuality between young children that denotes caring and
friendship. This research method, she notes, requires the researcher to enter into
children’s worlds, raising important ethical questions which are relevant both for
researchers and the pedagogues who work directly with young children. Her con-
clusion is that researchers should ethically consider children and pedagogues as
people and partners, who deserve respect and recognition, in the research situation.
Fichtner in his contribution takes our gaze to culture and cultural discourses to
observe their impact on the kinds of actions that young people can take in what
might at first glance appear to be similar activities, in this case reading and writing.
His is a comparative study undertaken in Brazil and Germany in the late 1990s and
therefore preceding the widespread use of social media and its effects on the pur-
poses and types of young people’s reading and writing. Drawing on Spinoza’s
1 Cultural–Historical Approachesto Studying Learning … 17
Ethics and Theological-Political Treatise, Fichtner distinguishes between cultural
discourses that allow people to be characterised as either free or unfree. The free
person exhibits emotions of pleasure as they are free to do what they are capable of;
while the unfree are characterised by emotions of pain which reflect low levels of
capacity for actions in activities. The categorisation he takes from Spinoza raises
quite fundamental questions about how cultures produce free or unfree actors,
which are of course relevant to comparative methodologies. It is suggested that
Hedegaard’s attention to institutional mediation of societal norms and attention to
motive orientation maybe productive ways forward for cross-cultural studies.
The next two chapters by Cole and by Libâneo and Freitas take us to the impact
of cultural–historical ideas on children’s lives. Cole starts his chapter by recalling
how both he and Hedegaard have taken seriously Wartofsky’s 1979 notion of
models, specifically tertiary artifacts, and their use as resources for taking forward
future action. We have already seen how two of Hedegaard’s models (Figs. 1.1 and
1.2) both explain her thinking at different points in time and capture the intricacies
of the wholeness approach, the challenges of transitions and the development of
motive orientations. The explanatory model or tertiary artifact that Cole discusses is
the 5th Dimension (5th D), his work with children and undergraduates at the
after-school Boys and Girls Club not far from the University where he was based.
Through four case examples, he shows how 5th D processes guide the children’s
engagement as they play in the imagined world constructed by and with The
Wizard. Echoing what is so evident in Hedegaard’s own detailed observations of
children, he concludes that ‘in play we imagine new possibilities’.
The opening up of new possibilities, this time for Brazilian school students,
permeates the final contribution from Libâneo and Freitas. They ground their
argument in the inequality that characterises the Brazilian school system and pro-
ceed to discuss first Davydov’s theory of developmental teaching and then
Hedegaard and Chaiklin’s Davydov-inspired radical–local initiative (Hedegaard &
Chaiklin, 2005). Arguing for an approach in Brazil, which foregrounds connections
between the material and the symbolic, while rooted within a specific culture, they
are heartened by the evidence they have gathered of the growing influence of
Hedegaard’s work among Brazilian teachers undertaking research degrees.
We started this introductory chapter by stating that Hedegaard’s approach to
researching development and learning was not an easy option. The seven chapters
in this section point to the recurring demands that she has addressed and the
resources she has deployed while tackling them. They also remind us of the extent
to which her work starts with real-world problems of children’s learning and de-
velopment and her own motivation to find ways of resolving them, while also
refining the conceptual and methodological resources she shares with us.
18 A. Edwards et al.
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children: A cultural–historical approach (pp. 202–207). Berkshire: Open University Press.
Hedegaard, M. (2012). The dynamic aspects in children’s learning and development. In M.
Hedegaard, A. Edwards, & M. Fleer (Eds.), Motives in children’s development:
Cultural-historical approaches (pp. 9–27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hedegaard, M. (2014). The significance of demands and motives across practices in children’s
learning and development. An analysis of Learning in Home and School, Learning, Culture
and Social Interaction, 3, 188–194.
Hedegaard, M., & Chaiklin, S. (2005). Radical-local teaching and learning: A cultural-historical
approach. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press.
Hedegaard, M., & Fleer, M. (2008a). (with contributions from Bang, J & Hviid P.) Studying
children. A cultural-historical approach, Open University Press. Berkshire England.
Hedegaard, M., & Fleer, M. (2008b). Studying children. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Hedegaard, M., & Fleer, M. (2013). Play, leaning and Children’s development: Everyday life in
families and transition to school. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Leont’ev, A. N. (1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality (MJ Hall Trans) Englewood
Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech (N. Minick, Trans.). In R. W. Rieber & A. S. Carton
(Eds.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 1. New York: Plenum. (Original work
published 1934).
Wartofsky, M. (1979).Models: representation and the scientific understanding. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Anne Edwards is Professor Emerita at the Department of Education, University of Oxford. She
holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Helsinki and Oslo. Her research and writing
focuses mainly on professional learning within a cultural–historical framing. Her most recent book
is Working relationally in and across practices: a cultural–historical approach to collaboration,
published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.
Laureate Professor Marilyn Fleer holds the Foundation Chair of Early Childhood Education and
Development at Monash University, Australia. She was awarded the 2018 Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Laureate Fellowship by the Australian Research Council and was a former President of the
International Society of Cultural-historical Activity Research (ISCAR). Additionally, she holds the
positions of an honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education, University of Oxford,
and a second professor position in the KINDKNOW Centre, Western Norway University of
Applied Sciences. Significant publication is: Fleer, M. (2014). Theorising play in the early years.
Cambridge University Press: New York.
1 Cultural–Historical Approaches to Studying Learning … 19
Associate Professor Louise Bøttcher is a member of the research programme Future technology,
Culture and Learning. Her research interest has focused on the interplay between neurobiological
and social and cultural conditions for development and takes its point of departure in Vygotsky’s
idea about disability and is aimed at the investigation and further theoretical understanding of
children with disabilities and neurobiologically based impairments. A key publication is Bøttcher
& Dammeyer (2016). Development and learning of young children with disabilities. A Vygotskian
perspective. Springer: New York. Associate Professor Louise Bøttcher has received a textbook
award and a research award.
20 A. Edwards et al.
Part I
Studies of Child Development
from a Wholistic Perspective
Chapter 2
Children’s Perspectives and Institutional
Practices as Keys in a Wholeness
Approach to Children’s Social Situations
of Development
Mariane Hedegaard
Abstract This article addresses a dilemma in relation to researching children’s
thinking and concept formation as an intentional process of competence acquisition
and at the same time seeing children as personsin their life contexts, where the
researcher also is a participant. Davydov’s concept of theoretical knowledge and
thinking helped me to tackle this dilemma as a dialectical process of moving from
the general to the particular and back again by analysing children’s concrete social
situations starting from the societal conditions, then examining institutional
objectives, and children’s motive orientations in activity settings—in order to gain
an understanding of children’s social situations in their everyday activity settings.
In this article, I illustrate the problems of getting knowledge of children’s con-
ceptual and motivation development, by drawing on several of my research projects
to illustrate, through my own biographic development, the dilemmas that psy-
chology has to overcome in studying children’s activities in their different social
situations. The discussion particularly relates to the potential demands of the sit-
uation and children’s motive orientations in these situations.
Keywords Motives � Demands � Practices � Activity setting �
Wholeness approach � Social situation of development
This chapter first appeared as an article in Learning Culture and Social Interaction and appeared
online in 2018. The editors are grateful to the editors of the journal and to Elsevier for
permission to reproduce it here.
M. Hedegaard (&)
Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
e-mail: mariane.hedegaard@psy.ku.dk
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
A. Edwards et al. (eds.), Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning
and Development, Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_2
23
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mailto:mariane.hedegaard@psy.ku.dk
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_2
2.1 Introduction
When I started my research career, my focus was on children’s thinking and
concept formation. Today, I have come to an understanding that one cannot re-
search the development of thinking and concept formation directly, what one can
research is children’s participation in activities that take place, for instance, at the
dinner table in family practice, and through analysing motives and demands in these
activity settings, making interpretations about children’s thinking and concept
learning. This way of doing research always has to focus on both the contents of the
activity where the thinking takes place and the tradition around this activity.
Thinking and concept formation has to be studied from an activity approach where
cultural content is seen as central. To gain knowledge of children’s understandings
of the world, one also has to take the child’s perspective, for example, his or her
intentional orientation to the world.
Drawing on several of my research projects, I will illustrate, through my own
research development, dilemmas that psychology has to overcome in studying
children’s thinking and concept formation as part of their formation as persons
through different life periods. Children’s formation as persons is connected to their
social situations that change through their life course, depending on the institutional
practices they participate in, and thereby their opportunities to acquire motives,
social competence, thinking and conceptual skills.
The philosopher Marx Wartofsky (1983) pointed out that in general new qual-
ities cannot come into existence without a revolution in what already exists. Lev
Vygotsky (1998) put forward the same point for children’s development, describing
how new developmental periods come to life through children’s experience of
conflicting intentions leading to crises. A crisis may, for instance, be noticed when
an infant starts to walk and becomes able to move independently, putting new
demands on his caregivers for his safety. At this point, both the caregivers and the
child may enter into a conflict between obeying the caregivers and allowing the
child to explore the environment. The challenge for caregivers in these types of
crises is to accept these conflictual changes and not to fix the child.
Crises in children’s different life periods have been identified by others (Piaget,
1968; Erikson, 1950). The crises in these theories were connected to conceptions of
transition from stages that were seen as biologically fixed, though they also
accepted environmental factors could influence how successfully a stage was
reached. The problem with a fixed sequence of developmental stages is catching the
diversity that is connected with cultural traditions in different societal institutions.
My argument is that crises in children’s development have to be related to cultural
demands both from society and from specific institutions in order to understand
how biological functions are regulated and what are the demands for the compe-
tences needed: these demands include demands on families to send their children to
school, and schools’ demands on children for both subject matter learning and how
to orient to people they meet.
24 M. Hedegaard
Vygotsky’s theory has helped me to conceptualise the diversity of the cultural
aspects of development and I have also felt a need to orient to sociological theory
and research in order to take a step further and consider institutional practice in
relation to culture (Douglas, 1986; Smith, 2005; Ramirez & Boli, 1987). Culture
can be conceptualised from different perspectives in relation to children’s devel-
opment (Scribner, 1985; Hedegaard, 2002). It is anchored in the diversity of
institutions in a society, the traditions for practice in these institutions, that create
the activity settings in different practices and the way people are allowed to par-
ticipate in the activities and thereby acquire motives and competence to relate to the
world. Different societies have different institutions that organise people’s lives. In
Western traditions, day-care institutions and schools together with the family have
become important cultural organisations of children’s lives, shaping how motives
tools and symbols transcend generations. Cultural practices in the specific institu-
tions offer ways of interacting that become reflected in children’s development, so,
for instance, school becomes the foundation for a school-age period that charac-
terises children’s development in societies, where schools are central.
2.2 Experimental Research Falls Short on Explaining
Children’s Thinking
I started my research career with hard-core experimental research with the aim of
exploring children’s thinking. The opportunity came as a research assistant at the
Danish Institute of Education.1 Here I was given the task of examining Jean
Piaget’s unidimensional theory about children’s development of thinking as stages
towards formal logic. One of Piaget’s central research findings showed that children
aged 5 to 6 years had difficulty in taking another person’s perspective into their
reasoning (Piaget, 1968; Piaget & Inhelder, 1963). Piaget interpreted the finding to
be that children were egocentric and asocial, bound by their own perspectives. This
interpretation was questioned in my research.
Piaget and Inhelder had constructed an experimental scenario with small models
of three different mountains placed on a table a child could walk around. The
researcher placed a doll (to represent another person) in different positions. He then
asked a child what the doll could see when placed in another position than the child.
The child also got a set of pictures taken from different perspectives, and should
then choose what s/he thought the doll could see. In the Danish research, the
arrangement was a scenario where a house, a tower and a tree built with LEGO
blocks were placed on a table, also with photos taken from different angles. This
wasa variation that was more familiar to Danish children than Piaget and Inhelder’s
Swiss-inspired setting with mountains.
1This institution was a research institute directly connected to the Ministry of Education. It does
not exist any longer.
2 Children’s Perspectives and Institutional Practices as Keys … 25
I turned the experiment into a test-treatment-test experiment with blind testing
and a control group.2 There were four groups of children where three groups
received one hour of training before being retested. The three different training
programmes were inspired by Jerome Bruner’s theory of different forms of repre-
sentations that dominate different periods in children’s development: enactive;
iconic, which dominated in preschool; and symbolic representation, which became
dominant when children entered school (Bruner, Olver & Greenfield, 1966). All
three forms of training were effective in comparison with the control group, but
there was no significant difference between the three training groups (i.e., the
children who were trained to decentre using active exploration, imagination or
language). The results demonstrated that the ability to take another person’s per-
spective can be trained in 6- and 7-year-old children (Stenild, 1970). What seems
important for the three trained groups was that an adult helped the children to
become able to orient to the relations between the objects and got them to orient to
how their relations changed when they were seen from different positions.
Other research projects have questioned Piaget’s research about young chil-
dren’s thinking as egocentric, showing that to take another’s perspective could be
pushed to an earlier age than Piaget and Inhelder’s research demonstrated. The most
well-known is Margaret Donaldson’s (1978) work 10 years later, which rejected
Piaget’s characteristic of 5- to 6-year-old children’s egocentrism and argued that, if
the task is meaningful for the child, it is possible for much younger children to take
another person’s perspective. In her variation of the three mountains’ study, the
children had to figure out where a thief was hiding in a setting where a police doll
had to find him. The explanation, however, that younger children can decentre
earlier, if the tasks are made meaningful for them, does not address my main point.
The problem is not to re-asses the age period for children to be able to do the task,
but to understand that this task cannot illustrate children’s development of thinking.
To take another person’s perspective is a competence that children acquire in social
settings and should not be conceptualised as a natural aspect of young children’s
being self-centred, as Piaget had argued.
That spatial perspective is not an age-related problem but a problem of com-
petence can be demonstrated by showing that older children can have the same
difficulties as children in early childhood. I undertook a follow-up test-training-test
experiment with a more complex scenario also built with LEGO blocks that showed
that 10–11-year-old children also have difficulties in taking another person’s per-
spective and that an hour of training also had a positive effect on their
problem-solving (Stenild, 1979). Taking another person’s perspective, I therefore
see as a competence problem and not an indicator of an ability that matures. Small
children show from when they are a few weeks old that there is reciprocity in their
relation to other people, as in the smile (Wolf, 1963; Bruner 1972). The problem of
taking another person’s perspective is a problem that is connected to the activity
2In this first experiment, 100 children participated, and the same number in the following
experiment.
26 M. Hedegaard
that the child is part of and is therefore a social problem before it is a problem of
thinking. What I learned from the experiments is how important adults (the
researchers) are to making children aware of perspective-taking and to support their
competence in imagining another person’s perspective. This is a cultural compe-
tence that children have to learn.
I did other experiments at the same time, focusing on the importance of chil-
dren’s intentional orientation to learning as against unconscious learning (Stenild,
1972a, b, 1974, Stenild 1977a, b). My conclusion from this research was that
children learn what they become intentionally oriented to, guided by the educator’s
way of building the task. This led me to an understanding of the importance, as a
researcher and educator, of being aware of children’s perspectives. Children’s
intentional orientation, therefore, became central in my further research, together
with a focus on social interactions.
2.3 An Incident That Had Consequences for My Research
Approach
I had my first child in 1973 and at that point decided that I would follow his
development. Together with my professor colleague at that time, I decided to take
videos of his development to follow how his competences developed. We decided
to use Cattel’s Infant Intelligence Test just to have some tasks for the child and
because my colleague was very experienced with using this test with infants. We
started when my son was 6 weeks old. At that time, taking videos was not an easy
thing to do; we had our video-laboratory setup with lights and two people taking the
video. It took more than half an hour before they were ready to start and the child
started to become a bit restless. When we started, I held the baby and my colleagues
presented the task. She succeeded in making the tasks work for the first 2 months,
tasks like turning the head to a rattle; focusing on something she rolled, waving his
hands when a rattle was moved towards him. But what also happened was that the
baby looked for his mother, turned his head towards her, looked for the bright light
that they had to use for video recording at that time, looked for the other persons in
the room. The baby seemed more interested in what was around him, than in the
task given and he did not concentrate all the time on these tasks, this was easy to
follow on the video afterwards.
When my colleagues came the next day and presented his IQ score, I was upset,
because that was not what I had expected we wanted to do; instead, I thought the
aim was to use tasks so we could follow the development of his new capacities. We
continued our cooperation testing the child over the next one and half years, every
second month. But my motivation for analysing the material disappeared, because
the tasks seemed meaningless in relation to finding out what was important for the
child. This incident led me to understand that it was important to see the child in his
or her everyday activities for evaluating the child’s competences and not only in test
2 Children’s Perspectives and Institutional Practices as Keys … 27
situations. I wanted to study children in their everyday settings as social beings,
starting to orient themselves intentionally to the world in interaction with other
persons from the moment they are born; and how this orientation in interactions
with the demands a child meets creates conditions for his or her development.
The incident with the IQ test led to my forming, in 1976, together with a group
of like-minded students, a weekly play group for research at the Department of
Psychology at Aarhus University. Half of the children came from the neighbour-
hood and half from students. We wanted to study young children’s development of
competence in natural settings. The aim was to formulate theoretical tools to
analyse a child’s social situation and to see how children’s learning of motives and
competences is influenced by different demands in concrete settings. I searched for
a way to see the demands a child meets from the child’s perspective and thereby be
able to interpret what the child is oriented towards.
2.4 Studying Children’s Activities in Everyday Social
Situations
The play group research could be seen as a step towards creating an institutionalised
practice,where one could study children’s social situations. In parallel with the play
group research, I cooperated with a nursery and a kindergarten together with
psychology students studying the practice in these institutions. The play group
research was supported financially by the Department of Psychology as a recurrent
weekly practice, inspired by the caring traditions that characterise kindergarten,
with furniture and play materials for children. A professional pedagogue was hired
to lead the playgroup over the 5-year period it lasted.
In the nursery, kindergarten and play group research, I was able to move from
studying the development of children’s functions and capacities as elements in
isolation and move on to a wholeness approach to the study of children’s devel-
opment in concrete social situations.
2.4.1 The Interaction-Based Observation Method
The play group research started with the aim of finding methods to study children’s
intellectual development (thinking and concept formation) in their everyday
activities; but over the 5 years, it became more encompassing, conceptualising
children’s development in general including their intentional orientations and social
interactions.
28 M. Hedegaard
I have called the method developed from this project interaction-based partic-
ipant observations Hedegaard (1984, 1992). The main ideas have been to catch the
reciprocity in children’s relations to other people and specially to get the child’s
perspective.
The method to get the child’s perspective is to enter into the institutional practice
where a child spends his or her daily life and, by thoroughly participating in the
child’s activity settings, making records about the child’s interaction with other
participants, focusing especially on the child’s intentional acts.
A way to understand a child’s intention is to interpret the situations where he or
she shows opposition or is in conflict, where the child cannot do what they want to
do and cannot realise the projects they are engaged in. It is important not to evaluate
opposition and conflicts negatively, but to see these as a way of becoming able to
understand what the child’s motives are directed towards.
To take the child’s perspective is, however, not the same as to hear the child’s
voice, a key feature of the sociological approaches of Bill Corsaro (Corsaro 1997;
Corsaro & Molinari, 1999) and Alison James, Richard Jenks & Allan Prout (1999).
2.4.2 Play as Central in Children Concept Formation
and Thinking in Early Childhood
Besides finding methods to follow children’s development of concepts and thinking
in everyday activities, another aim connected to the play group project was to
research what could be valued as pedagogical material for preschool children.
I contacted all the Danish companies I could find (around 50) that produced ped-
agogical play material.
There was a diversity of material across well-known categories such as puzzles,
picture lotto, dominoes, books with concept learning tasks, and self-regulating
learning material to support young children’s intellectual development. Analysing
children’s play with these materials revealed that most of these pedagogical
materials were not supporting children’s exploration. Most of these materials were
(and, as I see it, still are (Hedegaard, 2018)) constructed to train children in specific
abilities such as to discriminate form, sizes, part-whole relations, without taking the
content seriously, like tasks that often are found in intelligence tests. We very
seldom found material, which had a theme coordinating the task in the educational
material in order to give children insights into a thematic area that could extend
children’s everyday knowledge. There were exceptions, such as a picture lotto
depicting different professions such as firemen, dentists, fishermen, etc. This
material was constructed so that children’s attention could be directed to central
aspects in these professions and thereby gave both children and the pedagogues’
opportunities to talk about features of the different professions. Another was a
puzzle that showed nature in a forest and the life under the ground. This play group
research showed that children’s cooperation in playing with meaningful material
2 Children’s Perspectives and Institutional Practices as Keys … 29
together with adults and other children led to their engagement in exploring
learning material, thereby developing their concepts (Hedegaard, 1984).
These findings contributed to the argument that children learn through explo-
ration in play. Exploratory play may prepare them for school activities, since it
gives the opportunity to experiment with meanings detached from specific objects,
actions or feelings, which is the foundation for children’s understanding of literal
meaning in the different school subjects (Hedegaard, 2007, 2016).
2.5 Differences Between Institutional Practice and What
This Means for Children’s Development
In early 1980s my, research took a new direction. I met Vasilivitz Davydov and
became fascinated with his work on theoretical thinking and developmental
teaching and learning (Davydov, 1982, 1990, 1999). From reading Vygotsky
(1982), I acquired the insight that in early childhood care, the ideal is that the carers
and the pedagogues create activity settings where they follow the child’s initiatives,
supporting the child’s exploration. In school, the child should follow the logic that
the teachers promote through subject matter teaching. It made me understand that
learning in the home, kindergarten and school are different, relating to differences in
practice traditions in each institution. When I turned to children’s learning in
school, I therefore accepted that institutional practice in early childhood care is
quite different from school practice. Davydov’s ideas on knowledge and thinking
gave me a tool to understand how a school teacher could combine theoretical
knowledge with children’s concrete experiences by ‘ascending to the concrete’
(Davydov, 1982, 1999; Hedegaard, 1999; Lompscher, 1999). I got access to a way
of conceptualising children’s learning activity in relation to how teaching could
combine central features of subject matter content with children’s exploration.
2.6 The Double Move in Teaching Evolves into Radical
Local Teaching and Learning
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, both in Denmark and United States, there was a
critique of school teaching as promoting skill acquisition and memorising facts and
arguments were made for the importance of children’s exploration and engagement
for their learning in school. In a Danish school project based on these arguments,
activities came into focus as central for children’s learning in school (U 90, 1978;
Projekt skolesprog, 1979). The ideas in the Danish initiative were close to the ideas
about authenticity in learning that were later advanced in the US by Brown, Collins,
and Duguid (1989a, b) and Collins, Brown, and Newman (1989), though their
project focused much more on science and competences. The initiative in Denmark
30 M. Hedegaard
was oriented towards children’s knowledge from outside school, with the idea that
project work should be meaningful for children, but the Danish Ministerial
approach did not advise on how to realise the teaching that created general
knowledge.
In the US project, the researchers went a step further. They formulated the idea
that school activities should include the ordinary practice of different science cul-
tures. School teaching in Brown et al.s research was modelled on apprenticeship
learning: the teacher was seen as the master or practitioner, and the students were
apprentices. The teacher’s task, as master, was to confront the apprentices with
effective strategies that can be used to solve everyday problems, for example,
everyday mathematical problems. To accomplish this goal, different teaching
techniques were used, such as modelling, coaching, scaffolding, fading and artic-
ulation. The ideas behind the programmewere that conceptual knowledge can be
compared to a set of tools and that children’s activities using intellectual tools
would promote their cognition. What was missing in both the Danish approach and
American approaches were analyses of and decisions about what should be the core
concepts within a subject in school.
Inspired by Davydov’s ideas on theoretical knowledge and before Brown et al.
projects were published, I developed an approach in which there were two tasks for
the teachers: (1) to find the central concept in a subject area and (2) to find a way for
the child to explore themes in the subject area, guided by these concepts.
The intention was that central concepts in the different subjects should be visible
and the teachers should create tasks that used the methods of the science to enable
children’s thorough exploration of problems that the teachers brought into the
classroom. The teaching goals were that children should acquire conceptual
understanding of core relations and procedures by analysing and exploring prob-
lems within the subject matter area so they could use these in analysing other
contexts outside the classroom.
2.6.1 The Double Move in Teaching
I started a series of intervention projects in schools, based on Davydov’s ideas on
theoretical knowledge and thinking, with the idea that central concepts and their
core relations should guide teachers in creating tasks for students. These projects
led to more than 10 years of experimental teaching in public schools in cooperation
with different teachers and professionals within the subject matter areas of biology,
geography and history.
The first version of experimental teaching research started in 1983 and lasted
until 1990 and was named the double move in teaching; a movement from chil-
dren’s exploration using their everyday concepts, to being guided by the teacher’s
task, and being led back to their everyday concepts which were now qualified as
theoretical concepts. The research started with ‘The evolution of animal and the
origin of man’ as a germ cell that both teachers and pupils could see to be evolved
2 Children’s Perspectives and Institutional Practices as Keys … 31
from the same basic general abstraction of the core relation between organisms and
environments mediated by tools. Children’s conceptual knowledge acquired
through learning in the experimental classes was compared to children’s conceptual
knowledge about evolution and the origin of animals in a control group (Hedegaard,
1988, 1990, 1996). A second teaching project became a 3-year project integrating
biology, geography and history from 3rd to 5th grade in public school (Hedegaard,
1995, 2005), teaching the evolution of animals, the origin of man and the historical
changing of society.
2.6.2 Radical Local Teaching and Learning
Children’s everyday concepts are located within their life settings. The life settings
of a local community become more explicit for immigrants and refugees coming to
a new country than for children with generations of ancestors in a society.
Therefore, the relation between subject matter concepts and personal everyday
concepts is often much weaker for students of immigrant or refugee parents.
Together with Seth Chaiklin and Pedro Pedraza, a third project started named
Radical local teaching and learning, to examine the idea of relating local knowl-
edge about one’s community to general concepts in teaching (Hedegaard, Chaiklin
& Pedraza 2001; Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005). The general concepts we came to
work with were living conditions, community, family and resources that were
related to (1) the community of the Puerto Rican immigrants they had left in Puerto
Rico; (2) the community the families came to in 1950 in New York City; and (3) the
Puerto Rican community of New York City today. This research was followed up in
Denmark with refugee children in a school project (Hedegaard, Frost & Larsen,
2004) and also in research on how immigrant children experience their school life
and how conflicts between home practice and school practices were tackled
(Hedegaard, 1999a, b, 2003, 2005).
2.7 Activity Settings and Children’s Social Situations
In 2000, I started to focus on children’s social situations located in different practices
both through the developmental trajectories different educational institutions offer
children as they move through nursery, kindergarten, school, high school etc., but
also recognising that children’s everyday life on the same day may be located within
two or several institutions. Different institutions are characterised by different ac-
tivity settings. In home, it may be breakfast, leaving for day-care or school, coming
home, dinner, bedtime activities. In kindergarten, it may be play settings, lunch or
outdoor activities. Each institution has its specific traditions that reflect the general
traditions in a given society for the type of institutions. So a child’s social situation is
dependent on the traditions in the different activity settings.
32 M. Hedegaard
Focusing on the child’s social situation requires a search for the child’s per-
spective—which means an interpretation of a child’s motive orientation in the
different activity settings the child participates in everyday institutional practices,
and how the child’s motive orientation relates to the demands the child meets while
participating in the different settings. To focus on a child’s social situation of
development and to take a child’s perspective implies that one has to follow how
the child’s orientation in the world interacts with the demands that the child meets
in the different institutional settings. These demands are understood broadly in
Lewin’s theory (1946) as forces from the surrounding world on the child that guide
the child’s activities but also as forces from the child onto his surroundings. These
forces have to be located in the activity settings that the child participates in and are
forces that structure the child’s day as direct demands from other people and from
objects that have drawn the child’s attention.
Parents and children in a family, in their everyday practice, dialectally create
conditions for each other’s activities. Parents through having responsibility for
children’s upbringing are positioned differently in their interactions with their
children from how siblings are positioned with each other in interactions. Parents
have a role in shaping their children’s life courses by making interventions in order
to promote what they identify as a good life and future for their children, and they
do this more or less all the time. Siblings also intervene in each other’s life; their
interventions are related to their age period and position in the family (Bozhovich,
2009; Hedegaard & Fleer, 2009). Adults, however, tend to have more future-related
interactions with children than children have with adults or other children.
Gradually though a child, through her upbringing, moves from orienting herself in
the concrete situation to also become oriented temporally to days, weeks and years
ahead and to what is going on in other settings beyond the immediate situation in a
specific activity setting in which her activities take place.
2.8 Seeing Oppositions and Conflicts Between Children’s
Motive Orientation, and the Demands They Met
in Their Everyday Social Situations as a Way
to Conceptualise Development
Leontiev pointed to the necessity to overcome the nature–nurture split that in
different theoretical refinements has dominated psychology as a two-factor model of
children’s development, either as inner factors or as outer factors or both deter-
mining development.
2 Children’s Perspectives and Institutional Practices as Keys … 33
Of course, no development directly comes from what comprises only the prerequisites
necessary for it, no matter in what detail we might describe it. The method of Marxist
dialectics requires that we go further and investigate the development as a process of
“self-movement”, that is,investigate its internal moving relations, contradictions, and
mutual transitions so that its prerequisites appear in it as its own changing moments.
(Leontiev, 1978, p. 105)
To understand how these internal contradictions and movements contribute to
children’s development, we need to see that a child has to meet demands from
different institutional practices in their everyday life, and these create different
social situations. A child has several different social situations, for instance, my
grandchild has one at home another in the nursery, a third at her grandmother’s
home; these are recurrent different social situations that the child had to handle
before she was 1 year old. My argument here is that the concept of institutional
practice becomes necessary in a wholeness perspective in order to see the dynamic
in children’s development, where the environment and the child’s activities are seen
in connection, creating a child’s social situation of development.
By distinguishing between practice and activity, one can better see the inner
relations between a child’s actions in activities and the societal conditions as
mediated by the institutional objectives for practice, thereby get deeper into the
analyses of the self-movement of children’s development. A child participates in
several activities within several different institutions within the same day. The
relation between different institutional practices and their objectives and the child’s
motivated participation in different activities creates the child’s social situation of
development, as a process of self-movement where societal traditions and values
create the conditions (see Table 2.1).
The demands and motives children meet through their development can be
conceptualised from different standpoints in the structure that creates different
processes, as depicted in Table 2.1. These standpoints also offer different but
dynamically interacting layers of analysis.
Table 2.1 Relations between demands and motives at the different standpoints from which a
persons’ life can be viewed
Structure Process/demands Dynamic
Society Societal tradition and value-
demands
Societal conditions/
needs
Institution Practice demands for type of
participation
Value laden goals/
objectives/motives
Activity setting Social situation demands on both
child and others
Situated motivation/
engagement/interests
Person Reciprocal demands for ways of
participating in an activity
Motive orientation/
intention
Primary functions (thinking,
memory, perceptions)
Physiological demands Biological Needs
34 M. Hedegaard
I will draw on a case study analysing the difference in the dynamic between
motive and demands for siblings in the same activity setting at home drinking tea
and doing homework, to illustrate how different institutional demands may create
contradictions that influence both the demands and motive orientations for the
participants in the activity setting (The example is from Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013).
The children are siblings: Kaisa (4 years) is in kindergarten, Emil (6 years) has
just entered class zero, Lulu (8 years) has just entered 2nd grade and Laura
(10 years) is in fourth grade.
On the day described here, coming home around 4 pm the mother made tea and
afternoon snacks (fruit and bread), and then expects Laura and Lulu to do
homework.
16th November: Tea drinking and doing homework
Lulu had picked some small hard berries on her way home, and as soon as she is home she
finds the box with sewing materials and starts to place the berries on a string. Kaisa finds
some pearls and asks her mother to help her to get started so she can put them on a string.
Emil finds the first aid box and starts to look into it. Mother then goes to prepare tea.
Coming back, Mother asks Emil if he has any homework.
Lulu tells her she should know that children in class zero do not have homework. Emil
expresses that he would like to do homework, and says he has got a booklet to put his
papers into. He says he will write all the letters he knows on a piece of paper. Mother then
says she also wants to hear their names.
Emil draws an A and names it. He draws further Å, R, L E, O, H, T and B.
After a short while Lulu takes out her math exercise book. She announces that she has some
tasks where she has to multiply, and announces she does not like to do this. Then she says I
hate these kinds of tasks where you have to multiply.
Laura had entered the room and has taken out her exercise book.
Lulu announces that she does not want to do her homework today.
Mother tells her that it does not help to say so; she just has to do it.
Laura says she has to practice dictation and wants Mother to listen to her spelling the
difficult words.
Mother looks into Laura’s exercise book.
Emil then addresses the mother: “Why do you only bother to help Laura?”
Mother again orients herself to Emil and asks: “Can you try to find the T on the paper?”
Emil point out the T and Mother says correct, then she asks for a B. Emil point to B.
Lulu has now started her homework which is a math task with multiplication. She is
guessing the results.
Mother says: “Look at the numbers when you calculate and find the abacus.” Lulu goes to
find the abacus. She cannot find it and take some coloured clips instead which she says she
will place in rows with 10, each in different colours. However, it is not a workable abacus.
Emil gets upset and says to Mother: “You had now started with me, so please help”. Emil is
saying the letters as Mother is pointing to the letters on the sheet. Lulu asks again about
help with her math calculation. She formulates a result.
Mother: “This does not make sense you need to find the abacus.”
2 Children’s Perspectives and Institutional Practices as Keys … 35
Now Kaisa starts to say with pleasure profane word such as shit, pig, prick. At the same
time, she is working on a bracelet for her grandmother drawing pearls on a string.
2.8.1 Societal Conditions for Practice in the Family
Society gives conditions for how practice may evolve in home and school and other
institutions, societal policy gives trajectories for both life course and everyday
practices, thereby putting demands on the institutions for creating certain forms of
practices. The practice between specific institutions, such as families, though may
vary considerably and may lead to variations in the demands directed at the par-
ticipants. In this case, Danish society creates conditions for the homework setting,
by having public (state) school, and after school care and allowing the mother to
have flexible working conditions so she can fetch the children early from after
school care. In the home, the mother had created a tradition for a homework setting
before having dinner. What characterises the home practice is that it is influenced
by demands or restrictions from other institutions. In the homework setting, it is
directly the school with demands for doing homework. In addition, indirectly
school influences several other activity settings in the home such as the morning
setting, the bedtime setting and the mother’s working time.
2.8.2 Children’s Motive Orientation
The children each orient differently to the homework situation, where Lulu’s
opposition to doing homework can be seen in contrast to her older sister and also to
her younger brother’s engagement in homework.
2.8.3 Demands, Support and Opposition in the Homework
Settings
The mother has created a cosy setting at the tea table when they come home in the
afternoon. This is a way to socialise the children into homework. She supported the
children by attending to their homework and its difficulties. The mother initiated the
homework by asking Emil if he has homework. She did not ask Lulu, though she
knows she has homework, thereby letting Lulu play with her berries but also
indirectly orienting Lulu to homework by asking Emil about homework. The
children though were not passive respondents to demands from their mother in this
situation they activelycontributed to creating the setting that also placed demands
on the mother for help, and they created opposition and conflicts. Emil’s exercise
36 M. Hedegaard
with the letters interfered with Laura’s and Lulu’s homework; they became irritated
at their mother and each other because they ended up competing for their mother’s
attention and help. Mother also had to attend to Kaisa, who when the demands from
the other raised conflicts, used the situation to pronounce profane words, that she is
not allowed to do otherwise. Her mother could not attend to her because there were
too many demands from the other three children directed at her.
2.9 Conclusion
One of the classical problems of studying concept formation is that concepts are
often only associated with a person’s personal concept formation, without relating it
to the historical origin of what is been acquired. Evald Iljenkov (1977) points out
that knowledge should be conceptualised in relation to the societal productions of
humans. Through work, humans have created their material history imbued with
knowledge. Therefore, knowledge is anchored in material content within the area of
practice traditions.
Motives, direct activity and the content that a person is oriented towards, but
motives have to be seen as more encompassing than activities, and a person’s
actions have to be related to the collective practices of institutions. Not being aware
of these relations between collective activities and historical knowledge processes
has led to the dilemmas that I have gradually tried to resolve through my research
into children’s development of motives, thinking and concept formation. I have had
to navigate within several dilemmas. The main one for me has been how to become
able to say something that both catches the concrete intentional orientation of the
person being studied and the content of the activity settings in specific institutional
practices; and at the same time transcend these settings to formulate a theoretical
understanding at a more general level about children’s way of acquiring concepts,
motives and ways of thinking related to different age periods. A problem has been
how to transcend the specific situation being researched and say something that is
important for understanding children’s development that may be useful for care-
givers in families, in kindergarten in school and other places where children live
their everyday lives. I learnt from the experimental research about children’s
thinking and concept formation to recognise the importance of the researcher (adult)
in orienting children to what they should learn to be aware of and the importance of
children’s intentions (the child’s perspective).
When I started the play group research, it was a radical step to change from a
focus on children’s functions to a focus on children’s intentional actions during
participation in activities and how these have to be placed in different institutional
practice traditions. This change made both the cultural aspect of children activities
and children’s intentions fruitful in my further research.
The interaction-based participant observation method was then formulated as an
analytical approach to children’s social situations, analysing how children’s social
situations are created through cooperation and resolving conflicts. Researching
2 Children’s Perspectives and Institutional Practices as Keys … 37
children in their everyday life settings did not make me leave the experimental
approach behind, but it took another form as research with experimental teaching.
Moving from preschool activity settings to school settings, I found that the
educational practice had to be quite different. In preschool, the leading activity is
children’s play and exploration, where educational play materials are relevant for
their learning. Educational activity in school is more structured than in kinder-
garten. Here, the child’s experiences and motive orientation are still important, but
the conceptual relations in the form of core models and procedures are also
important tools. They are important both for the teachers’ guidance through for-
mulating problems within the key themes of different subject matters and for
children’s engagement and exploration of these themes and their acquisition of
cultural competences.
Entering into family research and extending this into research about children’s
life situations across families into other institutional practices, I extended my
wholeness approach to children’s social situations of development to a plural
understanding of their social situations of development across different institutional
practices. Children learn and develop through their orientation towards the demands
in the different institutional practices they participate in (in home, day care, school
and free-time institutions, etc.) to acquire competences, motives and values.
Children’s participation in activities personalises these practices through their
contributions to the activities in the different settings of the practices, such as
breakfast at home, or lunch in kindergarten, thereby children create conditions for
their own learning and development of personal competences and motives.
I came to understand that a child’s social situations are coordinated across
institutional practices as an age period to form their social situation of development.
This is what Vygotsky meant when he wrote that ‘The social situation of devel-
opment specific to each age determines strictly regularly the whole picture of the
child’s life or his social existence’ (1998, p. 198).
Mary Douglas pointed to how important institutions are for our activities as
legitimised social groupings. Different kinds of institutions allow individuals to
think different kinds of thoughts and to develop different motive orientations, but as
Douglas points out institutions do not think for us. ‘Only individuals can intend,
plan consciously, and contrive oblique strategies’ (Douglas, 1986, p. 92).
In a society, the different institutions are created in relation to societal needs and
through laws and traditions, which influence persons participating in the institu-
tional practices and their activities (Ramirez & Boli, 1987). Promoting children’s
healthy and emotionally stable development implies that parents and professionals
are aware of the values in the motives they promote through the different practices.
When these values are explicated in relation to children’s development, it is pos-
sible to use them in evaluating children’s development as cultural competences.
Doing situated research on children’s social situations, one therefore has to include
perspectives that can illuminate the societal and the institutional conditions and how
these are maintained through institutional traditions, among other things in using
text for keeping traditions (Smith, 2010).
38 M. Hedegaard
This brings me back to my own crises with using text in the form of a test to
evaluate my own child’s development and the problem of ignoring the child’s
intentional orientation by not taking the child’s perspective into consideration and
at the same time using a prescribed evaluation in the form of a test. Today, I am of
the opinion that, based on theoretical knowledge of children’s social situations of
development, one can create tests but they have to have a double aim of being a tool
for society to realise its collective needs in relation to assessment, while also being
important for helping create the child’s social situation where the child’s emotional
and well-being are central (in relation to values for a good life for children).
In 2014, I became involved in a project under the Greenland Government aimed
at creating material to evaluate children’s social situations of development. In this
project, the society through the government had a need, connected to problems with
small children’s well-being in Greenland. With this test, we rejected evaluating
children’s functioning in itself.3 The focusis instead on how to diagnose problems
in children’s social situations of development and then how children’s social sit-
uations can be supported through developing the day-care practice. The aim with
the project has been to produce an instrument that can guide day-care practitioners
in their educational work to support young children’s health and well-being and
their learning of the cultural competences that promote their development. The
evaluation material will be directed at all 3- and 5-year-old children in Greenland to
support the 3-year-old children to move into kindergarten and the 5-year-old
children to move into school. I finish with this example of my work, only to
emphsise how important it is to me that our research and the theorising that arises
through it should help enrich the lifeworlds of the children we study and the people
who work with them.
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Mariane Hedegaard is emerita professor in Developmental Psychology at the University of
Copenhagen. Her research interests include studying children’s activities in their everyday lives
across institutions and formulating a cultural-historical methodology for studying children’s
development in everyday settings.
2 Children’s Perspectives and Institutional Practices as Keys … 41
Chapter 3
Psychological Content of Developmental
Education in the Cultural-Historical
Approach
G. G. Kravtsov and E. E. Kravtsova
Abstract In this chapter, we examine the original Vygotskian conception of the
zone of proximal development in the context of developmental education and
Hedegaard’s contemporary research related to learning and development in ev-
eryday life. In 1935, L.S. Vygotsky published the article, “Problems of education
and mental development in school age.”. That paper attracted attention. At that
time, developmental education was understood as education aimed at the zone of
proximal development, that is, as leading development. This approach to education
and development raises many theoretical and practical questions. In this chapter, we
offer three ideas linked to Hedegaard’s conceptions, which will allow for a
reconsideration of the psychological content of the concept of “developmental
education.” The first idea relates to the understanding of the zone of proximal
development and its transformation to actual development. The second idea relates
to L.S. Vygotsky’s division of education into spontaneous and reactive one. This
idea coincides with Mariane Hedegaard’s analysis and results of her research. On
one hand, she emphasizes the importance of motivated learning in a child’s life. On
the other hand, she pays great attention to child’s everyday life and its role in his or
her psychic development. Finally, the third idea relates to the role of consciousness
in L.S. Vygotsky legacy. There are reasons to believe that the developing nature of
education, according to L.S. Vygotsky, is directly related to changes in a child’s
consciousness.
Keywords Developmental education � Nonclassical psychology �
Zone of proximal development
G. G. Kravtsov
Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia
E. E. Kravtsova (&)
Russian Academy of Education in Moscow, Moscow, Russia
e-mail: ekravcva@rambler.ru
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
A. Edwards et al. (eds.), Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning
and Development, Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_3
43
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mailto:ekravcva@rambler.ru
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_3
In 1935, L.S. Vygotsky published the article “Problems of education and mental
development in school age” (Vygotsky, 2017—see translation by Stanley Mitchell,
2017). This paper attracted attention of various colleagues, students, and disciples
of cultural-historical theory’s author.
In this article, L.S. Vygotsky, first, introduces the notion, which has become the
hallmark of cultural-historical psychology—zone of proximal development (ZPD).
Second, he considers various correlations between learning and development
and comes to the paradoxical (for many scientists) conclusion that learning leads
development.
These two of Vygotsky’s ideas became the basis for the conception of devel-
opmental education (Davydov, 2008), which was introduced to psychology and
pedagogy after his death.
At that time, developmental education was understood as the education, aimed at
the ZPD.
L.S. Vygotsky’s followers, who were actively using this notion, emphasized that
education, aimed at the ZPD, acts as the psychological mechanism of development.
In other words—it leads development (Kravtsova, 2006a).
This approach to education and development raises many theoretical and prac-
tical questions. Thus, for example, from L.S. Vygotsky‘s point of view, the ZPD
itself (though it defines a person’s potential development) is an already formed
structure. So, according to his position, education, aimed at ZPD cannot be called
developmental. This education helps to transform the potential development into
actual development at best, or, using Vygotsky‘s terminology, it provides the
realization of ZPD. And a child (or an adult) with a “small” ZPD will still be behind
those, whose ZPD is larger than his or her. Besides, this approach ignores the
question of what is happening with the “new” ZPD, when the “old” one becomes
the content of actual development. This problem was faced by representatives of
one of developmental education‘s conceptions and they have pointed out that
educational activity, which was formed in primary school, becomes unclaimed in
secondary school.
There are scientists who believe that each person is unique in this ability to learn.
Some children are very smart and quick-witted, while others are not. But it is
interesting and important to note that even when we get similar results—for
example, students, after some learning, equally well fulfill tasks which they could
not cope with before—these students will continue to be different in levels and
peculiarities of their learning ability. In other words, this kind of education does not
have any developmental effect. It only helps to transform the potential that students
have into their real abilities.
Researchers, working in this paradigm, prefer to evade the question of what is
primary—the ability to do something on your own, taken as a mechanism of
reaching a new level of development or a new level of development as a mechanism
of person’s ability to do something on their own.
If we try to analyze the term ZPD in nonclassical psychology, we can try to
answer this question. According to Vygotsky (2017), the content of the ZPD is what
a child has but still cannot implement by himself. That is why he or she needs
44 G. G. Kravtsov and E. E. Kravtsova
adults’ help. The adult or those who play this role help the child only to implement
the content that he or she already has. On the other hand, if a child does not have
abilities, skills, knowledge, and information, nobody can help them to use it in their
own activity.
It is possible to assume that the term “ZPD” from the very beginning has
supposed another kind of development, not only the proximal one. We can call it
the zone of potential development, or the zone of further development. Its content
does not include some definite features, characteristics, and skills thatwith the help
from others can be used to fulfill tasks. Instead, it includes the sources of particular
conditions, which allow these skills, features, and characteristics to appear.
So, the sources of the ZPD are in the zone of potential or further development;
this kind of zone is responsible for some psychological grounds of the ZPD. But the
fact that these sources are available and that there is some psychological readiness
does not mean that something constructive will appear and the process of mature
growth of psychological processes and functions will start by itself.
The process of transformation of the zone of potential development into the zone
of proximal development is directly connected with the general logic and mecha-
nisms of cultural-historical development in nonclassical psychology.
One of the main ideas of the cultural-historical approach relates to the mecha-
nisms of transformation of natural psychological functions to the higher ones
(Vygotsky, 1987). Various tools that people acquire in the process of education are
directed toward themselves. In other words, in the context of a cultural-historical
approach, the changes that take place inside a person are much more important than
the skill, knowledge, or information acquired during education. One person can
learn to solve very difficult tasks and problems but it will not bring changes to his or
her development. On the contrary, another person, after a period of education, still
cannot solve particular tasks and problems effectively but their development
changed greatly. According to this idea, the contents of the term “the zone of
potential development” and the term “potential development” and the ZPD can be
presented as the characteristic of psychological and personality development
(Kravtsov and Kravtsova, 2009).
The zone of potential development is not connected with the development of a
definite person. It is just the soil and what kind of fruit will grow on it depends on
the characteristics of the personality of a specific person. For instance, a preschooler
has imagination as a basis for play. But his or her imagination can be developed
into play, and thus become the grounds for further psychological and personality
development, or it can become the reason for fears or even autism. For instance,
two 5-year-old girls with equal levels of imagination are drawing pictures. They
both have painted a very frightening angry man. One of them draws a magician
afterward and says that he will help make this angry person kinder. While other girl
stops drawing and goes under the table crying: “I won’t draw any more!”.
So, the girls have equal zones of potential development. It is the psychological
criteria of their development. But they differ from each other from the point of their
zones of proximal development—criteria of their personality development.
3 Psychological Content of Developmental Education … 45
Such understanding the content of the zone of potential development and the
ZPD, as well as the relations between them, means that the transformation of the
zone of potential development into the zone of proximal development gives rise to
changes in the personality development of a person. So, the developmental edu-
cation and the cultural-historical approach need to be directed at the potential
development.
There is no need to prove that the ZPD has definite borders. Its lowest border is
connected with the actual development of a person. Its highest border divides the
ZPD and the zone of potential development. This kind of understanding allows us
to tell that developmental education and its results widen the borders of the ZPD.
Through developmental education, there is a deepening and changing of the de-
velopmental condition of children and this is connected directly to the psycho-
logical formations that are in the process of developing. First of all, the borders are
widened by the change in interrelation between the zone of potential development
and the ZPD. Of course, and this is the second factor—in developmental education
—we have changes in interconnection between the ZPD and the Zone Actual
Development. But we think that people with difficulties in this process have
problems with their ability to study, not with common abilities.
It is important to note that expansion of borders of a zone of proximal devel-
opment is connected with qualitative changes in a child’s communication with
people around. We share Mariane Hedegaard’s position, which claims that devel-
opment of children is implemented in changes in their relation to the world
(Hedegaard, 2014).
Vygotsky did not write anything about what kind of help a child should get to
cope with a task on his own. But if we remember the primary role of communi-
cation in psychological and personality development in the cultural-historical
approach, we will see that this help may come in various forms. One of them is to
help person to tap into his or her own subjective content for task-solving. The other
one is to help a person to get help from outside. For example, parents, psycholo-
gists, and educators know that many children and adults have problems with taking
help from outside. When the other adult appears and begins their activity near such
person, it helps to facilitate the process. So, we have two kinds of help. One we can
be called “subjective” help. It is directed toward helping a person to use a subjective
knowledge, skills or abilities, etc. to solve definite problems and fulfill tasks. The
other kind of help is of a communicative character. It helps a person to take help
from outside when they have problems.
So, if a person cannot take help from outside to solve particular problem or task,
we conclude that this content is outside of their ZPD. But when we have the second
kind of help, sometimes a person has an ability to take help from outside. So, we
can come to the conclusion that now this content is inside of the ZPD. In this way,
we see that the process of the ZPD has developed.
In practice, we realize this idea in “pair pedagogy”. Two adults work with
children at the same time. One of them takes position inside children group. He or
she works “alongside” children and can be called “adult–child”. The other one takes
the more common teacher’s position. It can be said that they “oppose” children and
46 G. G. Kravtsov and E. E. Kravtsova
can be called “adult–adult”. The paired work of both adults can be shown in the
following example. The teaching adult is saying that they need to know what things
should you take with you, going to North Pole, while the “adult–child” demon-
stratively takes net to catch butterflies (a mistake that is immediately pointed out by
the group of children) or begins to ask: “Where is the North?”, “I forget, whether
the white bears live there?”, “Where weather is cold or warm?”, etc.
Other words, one adult states the task or problem and offers the tools for its
solution, and the other one helps a child to take what is offered. Sometimes, there is
some dialogue; some communication between adults and the child is in the space of
this communication. It helps the child to understand the first adult, who “opposes”
him. Sometimes, this process results in changes in the child: he or she transforms
from a passive to an active position. We could say that adults demonstratively play
a specific game and take a child into it.
We can conclude now, that in nonclassical psychology (Kravtsov, 2010) de-
velopmental education means a type of education that develops the ZPD.
The creation of a developmental education is closely related to the classification
of different forms of education offered by L.S. Vygotsky (Kravtsova, 2006a)—
spontaneous, when a child studies by following his or her own individual program
(learns by themselves), and reactive, when a child studies by following an adult’s
program (learned alongside an adult). Spontaneous education is more efficient and
less tiresome for children. But on the other hand, spontaneouseducation cannot be
used for building an instructional program because it does not include any special
organization or management from the side of an adult. It turns out that the reactive
education must be transformed in some way to the spontaneous one and only then
we can use advantages of both kinds of education.
The psychological analysis of these types of education in the context of
cultural-historical theory allows saying that only spontaneous training has the
capacity to provoke development—it leads development (Vygotsky, 1987).
This idea coincides with Mariane Hedegaard’s analyses. On the one hand, she
emphasizes the importance of motivated learning in child’s life (Hedegaard, 2012).
On the other hand, she pays great attention to child’s everyday life and its role in
his or her psychic development (see Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013).
The process of learning, which is not based on these principles, so-called
“alienated education”, generally, cannot be called education in L.S. Vygotsky
understanding.
Vygotsky’s idea about spontaneous and reactive education in the preschool
phase of childhood means that until the end of this period (Elkonin, 1999;
Vygotsky, 1998) the child needs only spontaneous education. Other words until the
crisis of 7 years of age it is impossible to use reactive forms of education. Thus,
preschool children can only learn in a spontaneous way.
But spontaneous education has many limitations. If each child has his or her own
program, we cannot teach them together. So, adults must transform reactive edu-
cation into a spontaneous form (see Kravtsov, 2006).
For instance (see Kravstov and Kravtsova, 2011 for details of the Golden Key
Schools in Russia), adults decide that preschoolers should know the four points of
3 Psychological Content of Developmental Education … 47
the compass, be able to read geographical maps, and use a compass. If they want
children to learn spontaneously, they should not explain where the north and south
are, how to read compass’s hands, etc. Instead, they should bring a special toy, e.g.,
a small bear with which children play at dinner and during sleep. They take the bear
for a walk, invent various games to play with it, read to it, etc. But on the next day,
or several days later (depending on children’ specific features), when children come
to the kindergarten, they find out that the bear has gone to the North. The children
would want to return the bear and they decide to follow it. Thus, they decide to go
to the North. But to do so they need to find out where the north is, how to get there,
who lives there, with what animals their bear would meet, and so on. So from the
children’ point of view they themselves, according to their initiative and their own
motivation, begin to study to get some new information. At the same time from the
adults’ point of view, this is a reactive kind of education because the adults decided
to give children information about maps, compasses, etc. Here is another example
—the children’s favorite teacher became “ill”. She could not speak and there is no
medicine to help her. But the children found out from a special letter that there is a
flower in Africa, and juice from this flower can help cure the teacher. Who needs to
get all the information about Africa? Who needs to find out what kind of flowers
grow there? Who needs to study nonverbal communication to communicate with
the people living there? Of course, this situation was created by adults. But the
children are sure that it was them who decided to help the educator, to go to Africa,
etc. In one kindergarten, we had a very funny story about this kind of education.
A mother asked her child: “What does your teacher do in the kindergarten?” And
the 5-year-old boy sincerely answered: “Nothing. We do it all ourselves, we all
decide what to do, we create stories on our own; we make newspapers. Only
sometimes we invite her because she is very bored.”
Thus, adults achieved the result that children started to wish to know everything
about the North Pole, Africa, and other parts of the world. They started to wish to
go there and help the bear, or find the magic flower, etc. In other words, learning
something became their idea and in this way the adult’s reactive program changed
into spontaneous program of child.
It means that the adult, especially when educating small children, has to act from
a position of spontaneous education and from a position of reactive education at the
same time. When the child, due to his or her age, cannot study reactively, the adult
modifies reactive education, turning it into a spontaneous form. Thus, it turns out
that the child follows the program, designed by the adult, and at the same time he or
she realizes spontaneous education.
It is very important to organize education in such way that we can find the place
for children with different levels of development and education. Some of them can
be educated only in a spontaneous way, while others can be educated both in
spontaneous and reactive ways. For example, 7-year-old children usually study in a
reactive way but very quickly they get tired of it and sometimes refuse to continue
the study. If we place them in the group of younger children and introduce some
interesting situation to transform their education into a spontaneous form, they can
study for much longer. And at the same time, children who are able to study in a
48 G. G. Kravtsov and E. E. Kravtsova
reactive way are able to teach younger and less developed children, which is very
important for education and the development of both groups.
The result of this kind of education is that children get the knowledge necessary
for their psychological development. Moreover, this knowledge and education is of
a personal nature. Vygotsky wrote that when a child feels himself a source of his
activity, he acts as a personality (Vygotsky, 1966). Besides, a child learns to
transform reactive education into a spontaneous form, others’ program into one of
his own. This result of education becomes important in the context of child’s
development. In such a way, he or she learns to study in a reactive way or, as
modern psychologists say, he or she gets psychological preparation for school
education (see also Hedegaard, 2014).
This outcome of education has great value for the development of children. In
such education children learn to teach themselves.
Speaking about the results of the developmental education, we should keep in
mind the role which was given by L.S. Vygotsky to consciousness (see Kravtsov,
2006c). According to him, consciousness has to be a subject of psychological
science. For this reason, we consider that the developmental nature of education, in
the logic of cultural-historical psychology, is related to the changes in
consciousness.
In modern psychology, different authors described three periods, where con-
sciousness change qualitatively (Kravtsova, 2005, 2006b). Without claiming that
there are only three such periods, we will try to analyze their common features. So,
first of all, there is the primary school age, when children begin to focus on letters
and numbers and are willing to voluntarily give up their will to the authority of the
teacher, and then a junior adolescence, when yesterday’s children begin to exhibit
the traits and characteristics of adult behavior. Finally, it is adolescence or early
adulthood, when professional consciousness about work-related matters appears.
These different, not even related to each other, periods of children’s ontogenesis,
in which qualitative changes in consciousness happen, are similar in activities
which were experienced prior to this change. So, children who have the con-
sciousness of the primary school student played “school” with pleasure before that.
Teens play adults and adulthood for a long time. Finally, boys and girls, just
entering adulthood, are able to implement professional consciousness about what
it means to be at work. For example, medical students find signsof diseases they
study in themselves, their friends or relatives. This is also a kind of a game—they
play as if in the medical “profession”.
The relation between play and changes in consciousness is easily explained by
understanding the game, which can be found in the L. S. Vygotsky’s texts (see
Vygotsky, 1966). Thus, he notes that when playing “hospital” a child “cries as a
patient, and at the same time, is happy as a player.” This means that in the game the
child (adult) simultaneously implements two positions—the position within the
game (the patient) and a position outside the game (player). As it was shown by
recent studies, these two positions affect each other’s development. In other words,
with the position of a “player“ a child (adult) implements the position of a “patient”.
During the game, some features implemented in the role of a “patient”, for example,
3 Psychological Content of Developmental Education … 49
patience, ability to submit to another, etc. affect the personal characteristics of the
child. He or she learns to be more patient and behaves and acts as is required by the
rules of the game.
Thus, the games that accompany people’s learning processes throughout their
life, ensures that some of the characteristics, properties, and meanings of human
relations and problematic situations become the content of their consciousness. And
to realize something, according to L. S. Vygotsky, is to master it.
This allows us to make an important conclusion. There is a point of view,
according to which, there is a gap between playing and learning (Kravtsova,
2006b). However, it is impossible to build a student-centered teaching, learning,
which changes consciousness and personality, without play.
Creation of the developmental education demands that the teaching adults
possess special characteristics—for example, they are able to play and cooperate
with students and each other during the educational process. In this context, we
consider Mariane Hedegaard’s position (see Hedegaard and Fleer, 2013), empha-
sizing joint (families and schools) contribution to education and development of the
child, to be very promising.
So, the psychological maintenance of a concept of developmental education
assumes an expansion of ZPD’s borders, use of the characteristics of spontaneous
education and the inclusion of play in educational processes.
References
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Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 37(6), pp. 11–30.
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cultural-historical wholeness approach. Mind Culture and Activity, 19(2), 127–138.
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learning and development. An Analysis of Learning in Home and School, Learning, Culture
and Social Interaction, 3, 188–194.
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families and transition to school. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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psychology. Cultural–Historical Psychology, 1(2), 23–24.
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and East European Psychology, 44(6), 19–36.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-0405480402
http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-0405480402
Kravtsov, G. G. & Kravtsova, E. E. (2009). Cultural–historical psychology in the practice of
education. In: M. Fleer, M. Hedegaard & J. Tudge (eds.), Childhood studies and the impact of
globalization: Policies and practices at global and local levels. World Yearbook of Education
New York: Routledge, pp. 202–212.
Kravtsov, G. G., & Kravtsova, E. E. (2010). Play in L.S. Vygotsky’s nonclassical psychology.
Journal of Russian and Easter European Psychology, 48 (4), 25–41.
Kravtsov, G. G., & Kravtsova, E. E. (2011). The cultural-historical basis of the ‘Golden Key’
program. International Journal of Early Years Education, 19(1), 27–34. https://doi.org/10.
1080/09669760.2011.570997.
Vygotsky, L. V. (1935/2017). The problem of treaching and mental development at school age,
Translated by Stanley Mitchell, Changing English, 24(4), 359–371.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1966). Play and its role in the mental development of the child. Voprosy
psikhologii, 12(6), 62–76.
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Publishers.
Professor Elena Kravtsova is at the University for Russian Academy of Education in Moscow.
She has an international reputation in play, learning, and development and is the designer of the
Golden Key Schools in Russia. She has published extensively on play and development. She is
also the granddaughter of L.S. Vygotsky.
Professor Gennady Kravtsov was formally from the Vygotsky Institute, Russian State
Universities for the Humanities. Recognized as a scholar in cultural-historical theory, he has
with Elena Kravtsova made many significant contributions to the theory and practice of the Golden
Key Schools in Russia.
3 Psychological Content of Developmental Education … 51
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09669760.2011.570997
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09669760.2011.570997
Chapter 4
A Collective Social Situation
of Development for Understanding Play
in Families
Marilyn Fleer
Abstract Studying the development of children in their everyday lives from a
personal, institutional, and societal perspective is at the heart of Mariane
Hedegaard’s seminal work. This chapter draws upon research undertaken together
(Hedegaard and Fleer in Play, leaning, and children’s development: everyday life in
families and transition to school. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013)
and expands the original analysis through using Hedegaard’s (Learning and child
development: a cultural–historical study. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 2002)
concept of motives and demands in the context of Vygotsky’s concept of the social
situation of development to study how one Australian family created the conditions
for play and development. Through following the perspective of the youngest child
in her family over 12 months, it was possible to determine how the family works
with a collective social situation of development. Specifically, the chapter shows
how the family was in tune with the differing social situations of development of
each of the four children, and this attunement created the developmental conditions
for learning how to collectively play, as well as how to engage in higher forms of
play, such as games with rules. The outcomes of the analysis foreground the
conceptual power of Hedegaard’s model of child development and her analytical
frames when researching the everyday lives of children in families.
Keywords Social situation of development � Demands � Motives �
Societal, institutional, andpersonal perspective � Child’s perspective � Play �
Cultural-historical
M. Fleer (&)
Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: marilyn.fleer@monash.edu
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
A. Edwards et al. (eds.), Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning
and Development, Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_4
53
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_4&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_4&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_4&amp;domain=pdf
mailto:marilyn.<LIG>fl</LIG>eer@monash.edu
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_4
4.1 Introduction
How play is structured in families and how play contributes to children’s devel-
opment can be captured through following the intentions of children in the differing
activity settings in their family home. In line with Hedegaard’s (2012) theorisation,
the focus of this chapter is on the children’s perspective as they enter into, and
participate in play. Specifically, the youngest child is followed during moments of
play at home with her siblings, mother, father, grandmother, and uncle. It is through
examining each child’s engagement with their social and material world that the
motive orientation of each child may be realized. In cultural-historical research by
Hedegaard and those that have followed, it has always been important to study each
child’s motive orientation in relation to how families create the conditions for their
participation in the different activity settings. In this theorisation, it becomes pos-
sible to study children’s play as a developmental relation between family members
and the material conditions in which they live, as well as how play as a dynamic
force is also in the process of development. This perspective is captured by
Hedegaard, when she says, “…development is the qualitative change in a child’s
relation to other persons and the practices in which the child participates”
(Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013: 205).
In this chapter, the discussion draws attention to how in family play the cultural
conditions for children’s development are created, and how play practices are
actively learned as part of everyday life for some families, rather than being bio-
logically determined. The chapter begins with a brief overview of research into
play, followed by a theoretical discussion of the social situation of development in
the context of Hedegaard’s (2014) concepts of motives and demands. Empirical
examples that expand upon the original study reported in Hedegaard and Fleer
(2013), and which are discussed further in Fleer (under 2018) and Fleer (2013), are
presented in this chapter to illustrate the analytical power of Hedegaard’s concepts.
4.2 Researching Play in Families
In keeping with Hedegaard’s (2009) conception of research into children’s devel-
opment, a societal, institutional, and personal analysis of play is needed for
understanding play in families. It is not possible to understand how a child enters
into play without also considering how societies and institutions create the devel-
opmental conditions for children’s play. Historically, play has been conceptualized
and researched in many different ways across cultural communities. For example,
Elkonin (2005) has shown theoretically how childhood and a conception of play
were invented based on societal needs. For instance, he cites an example of children
pushing a stick into the ground to plant seeds, but as ploughs were invented,
54 M. Fleer
children had to be stronger and taller to use these tools. Childhood became a longer
period of time, and play as a child’s activity was invented because time and
resources (e.g., miniatures as toys) were given to children to practice valued family
activities, such as pretending to plough and till the soil. Sutton-Smith (1997) has
also drawn attention to the role of societies in shaping play practices, but in con-
temporary contexts where play is associated with school achievement and pro-
gression and abstraction. Sutton-Smith (1997) argued that industry, such as toy
manufacturers, fill the perceived need for achievement in abstracted contexts,
through selling toys (digital or miniature) to support children to practice school
abstraction at home. These new societal conditions create new kinds of play
practices in families (Roopnarine, 2015). Like Hedegaard (2009), both
Sutton-Smith (1997) and Elkonin (2005) draw attention to the importance of a
societal perspective when researching child development. In sum, how societies
shape institutional practices has a bearing on what conditions are created for
children’s development, and this dimension is included in Hedegaard’s (2002;
2008) seminal work on a study of child development.
There is now an abundance of evidence to show the diversity of play practices
across communities and families (Tudge, 2008). There is also in-depth research that
follows the play practices of families in the context of everyday life in Australia
(Grieshaber, 2004), Denmark (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013), Canada, Italy, Peru,
USA, Turkey, UK, Thailand (Hancock & Gillen, 2007), China (Hao, 2017), and
Guatemala, India, Utah (US) and Turkey (Rogoff, Mistry, Göncü & Mosier, 1993).
Collectively, these studies speak differently to beliefs about play, as well as the
dominant play practices found in families. Not all families play, not all play
practices are universally the same, and not all families have the same play content
or foci. In Hedegaard’s seminal work, she names these varied family practices as
institutional practices, and she includes this perspective in her holistic conception of
researching children’s development. Specifically, the relations between societal
values and institutional practices are captured by Hedegaard (2009; 2012; 2014) in
her child development model.
Further, Hedegaard’s (2009; 2012; 2014) model includes the perspective of the
person. In drawing upon this model for researching how play in families is struc-
tured and experienced, it is important to follow how children in families enter into
play. In Hedegaard’s (2008) analytical frame, the children’s perspective is implied
through how each child orients him or herself to play within and across activity
settings, as well as how families structure the activity settings and seek to orient (or
not) their children to play. The focus on the person in her model is part of a
dynamic relation between person, institution, and society, and in this analytical
relation, it becomes possible to study the different motives, values, and demands
within each activity setting.
4 A Collective Social Situation of Development … 55
4.3 The Analytical Concepts of Motive, Demands,
and the Social Situation of Development for Studying
Play Settings
Vygotsky (1994) introduced the concept of the social situation of development.
This concept was theorized from his clinical work, a case study of a single mother
with a substance abuse problem who was caring for her three children. The family
environment was identical for each child. However, each child experienced the
same family environment differently, because of their particular social situation of
development. The eldest child (10–11 year old) took on the role of caring for his
siblings, in order to “mitigate the misfortune—help both sick mother and the
children” (Vygotsky, 1994: 341). For the middle child, there was a clash between
his strong attachment to his mother, while at the same time as experiencing fear for
his mother. Finally, the youngest could not understand the difficult family cir-
cumstances and experienced great trauma. Vygotsky (1994) described his experi-
ence as incomprehensible horror.
Even though the social situation was identical for each of the three children, how
they understood their particular circumstances was different. Vygotsky (1994)
suggested that, “any event or situation in a child’senvironment will have a different
affect on him [sic] depending upon how far the child understands its sense and
meaning” (p. 343). The level of understanding of the social situation is important.
The event or the situation as a phenomenon can be captured through the term social
situation. But foregrounding “how far the child understands its sense and meaning”
(Vygotsky, 1994: 343) determines his or her relationship to the social situation.
Vygosky (1994) noted that each child in his clinical example had a “different
attitude to the same situation” (p. 341). He theorized that each child’s level of
awareness of the social situation meant that “the same event will have a completely
different meaning for them” (Vygotsky, 1994: 343). Consequently, the degree of
awareness and the level of understanding are key for studying children’s devel-
opment. Together, the social situation, the child’s level of awareness, and child’s
relationship to the social situation were theorized by Vygotsky (1994) as the
concept of the social situation of development.
Vygotsky (1994) noted that, “one should always approach environment from the
point of view of the relationship which exists between the child and its environment
at a given stage of his [sic] development” (p. 338). However, to study this rela-
tionship and how it changes, other concepts need to be drawn upon to tease out how
a child enters into and participates in these dynamic social situations, which
Hedegaard (2014) has conceptualized as activity settings, and where she uses
motives and demands as analytical concepts. Motive orientation was introduced by
Hedegaard to illustrate,
56 M. Fleer
that a person’s motives are always established as a relation between the person and what the
person’s activity is directed towards; therefore, it becomes possible to analyze the dynamics
between the environment and the child as a relation between institutional demands and
values and a person’s motivated activities within his or her social situation (Hedegaard &
Fleer, 2013: 200).
Hedegaard (2014) suggests that demands and conflicts are part of everyday
family life, but they also have analytical power in research. For instance, she
suggests that conflicts and tensions can often be signs of what a child might be
struggling with in their play and learning, and these struggles point to key
dimensions of their development. Evidence of the child’s development can be seen
in relation to their orientation to the demands that dominate the particular activity
settings, as well as how more competent play partners structure these activity
settings to support the child to deal with any new or existing demands. How a child
responds is also about how they in turn influence the activity settings, and this is
often as a result of their motive orientation, for example, a motive to play or a
motive to learning.
Hedegaard (2002; 2014) uses the concept of motives to show how valued
motives in society, become valued practices in institutions, which in turn become a
person’s leading meaningful motive—which is related to their specific period of
development (e.g., leading motive to play, leading motive to learning). In order to
show how this happens, she conceptualized the concept of stimulating motives
where children are socially oriented to valued institutional practices, such as, to
comply with parents’ wishes or for particular content learning in school, which
teachers want them to learn, and which societies value and which they support
through the public funding of education.
In gaining the child’s perspective in this dynamic relation between society
(valued motives), the family as an institution (stimulating motive), and the child
(leading meaningful motive), Hedegaard has suggested that in research we “keep
the child’s perspective by focusing on play and learning through child initiated
activities and how they relate to the different demands in these activities”
(Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013: 204). By paying attention to motives and demands, it
becomes possible to capture holistically how a child gradually enters into the
activity settings, how each child participates, and how each child shows their own
initiative in relation to the demands made upon them by the family.
Like Hedegaard (2014), Bozhovich (2009) also draws attention to the orienting
function of the activities that a child participates in, but does so in the context of the
social situation of development. Bozhovich (2009) draws on Vygotsky’s (1994)
conception of the social situation of development, but foregrounds the special
combination of cultural conditions in which the child is participating and the
leading motive of the child. It is the activity setting and what the child brings, which
together condition both the child’s present development (as their cultural age per-
iod) and the child’s future new psychological formations that are still in the process
of development (new cultural age period). This complex dynamic is captured in
4 A Collective Social Situation of Development … 57
Vygotsky’s (1994) point about studying the special relationship a child has with
their environment. This is why Hedegaard (2008) draws attention to how a child
enters into the activity setting, and why she pays special attention to how a child
participates, contributes to, or is shaped by, each activity setting or cultural
condition.
Bozhovich (2009) argues that in research it is important to understand the system
of needs and motives around a child, without which it is not possible to understand
a child’s development. In her theoretical writing, she draws attention to how the
emotional experiences (feelings affects and moods) gives insights into the child’s
needs and motives. She argues that if researchers are to understand how the child’s
experiences color how each child enters into an activity setting at a particular
cultural age period, then it is important to also draw attention to “the place that
children occupy within the system of social relationships available to them and their
own internal position in life” (Bozhovich, 2009: 75).
In the context of discussing how children enter into schooling, Bozhovich (2009)
notes that children gain new rights, new responsibilities, and enter into socially
significant activities. She suggests that their level of achievement, “will determine
their place among and their relationships with those around them” (p. 76). Entering
into new socially significant activities, such as being a school child, gives new
possibilities for their relationship with others. They are no longer a child, but a
school child. Entering into socially significant activities can also be analyzed in
relation to how others respond to their growing competence in their new social
position. Like Hedegaard and Fleer (2013), Bozhovich (2009) has suggested that
the children’s social positions are determined “by the demands the people around
them place on children based on the individual developmental features of a par-
ticular child and on the specific circumstances of the family” (p. 78).
Bozhovich (2009) points to the conditions of the social environment that have
formed historically, and which hold expectations of certain behaviors of children at
particular cultural age periods. In this context, she introduces the idea of the child
collective—where the demands made upon a child by other children determine how
a child enters into, and engages in, an activity setting. It is argued by Bozhovich
(2009) that before a study can determine how a child experiences the environment,
the child’s social place in that environment must be determined. How a child relates
to, and how others relate to the child, has bearing on how a child experiences the
environment and how their particular attitude toward their experiences are formed.
For instance, and important to understanding how children enter into play in the
family home, is Bozhovich’s (2009) view that the special place of a child in the
family, and the parents’ attitude to each child,must be examined dialectically when
determining how a child enters into any activity. As such, the concepts of social
position and the social situation of development capture in research an under-
standing of not just “the effects from the environment not as a simple aggregate, but
as a specific system” (p. 80), where
58 M. Fleer
every moment, the effects coming from the environment are refracted through this internal
position… and where whatever demands it might place upon them, until these demands
enter the structure of children’s own needs, they will not serve as true factors in their
development; the need to carry out a particular demand made by the environment emerges
in children only if fulfilling it now only ensures the corresponding objective position among
those around them but also provides an opportunity to occupy the position to which they
themselves strive, that is, if it satisfies their internal position (p. 81).
The social position of an individual child in a family, the complexity of the
cultural conditions for structuring play in families, and how each child enters into
play are captured in holistic research. However, this dialectic dynamic is chal-
lenging to research. Hedegaard’s (2002; 2009) model of child development struc-
turally supports a conception that is rich but manageable for researchers. Her
theoretical framing of a personal, institutional, and societal perspectives allows
researchers to detail how an individual enters into and participates in the activity
setting. By following an individual’s intentions, the demands they meet and how
they deal with them allows developmental complexity to be holistically captured
and analyzed. How this holistic approach to research is realized is illustrated
through examples taken from the play practices of the Westernport family.
4.4 Play in the Westernport Family
Living in a poor community in government-funded housing are the mother, father,
and their four children—Mandy (16 months), Cam (3 years), Alex (4 years), and
Jason (5 years). Digital video observations of the family were made over 12 months
as the family went about their daily lives—having breakfast, walking to school,
playing in the afternoons, and receiving regular visits from their grandmother and
uncle Matthew. None of the adults had employment, which gave the possibility for
them to always be present with their children. A total of 50 h of digital video
observations were made of the family by two researchers.
A study of the everyday lives of the Westernport family from the perspective of
the eldest child is reported in Hedegaard and Fleer (2013). In this chapter, the focus
is on studying family play from the children’s perspective, particularly how the
youngest child Mandy enters into, and participates in the play conditions of the
family.
4.5 The Social Situation of Development of Football Play
The Westernport family regularly plays together, and this includes the adults taking
on the role of a play partner in family play. In the example that follows, the adults
and children are playing a game of football. The game is being played across the
yard in front of their house. The ball is being kicked from one side of the yard to the
4 A Collective Social Situation of Development … 59
other. Through the grandmother commentating the play, and occasionally joining in
as a football player, the kicking actions turn into a football game (Hedegaard &
Fleer, 2013). What follows is an analysis of the data set from the perspective of
Mandy, the youngest child in the family. What is observed in the family is the
importance of football tackling to gain control of the ball. Tackling is experienced
differently in the play by each family member, through how the play practice is
structured, and how each child enters (their motive orientation) into the game of
football.
Tackling in relation to Cam:
The Father is standing in the middle of the yard (football field) behind Cam. Cam is holding
the ball. He is preparing to kick. The Father picks him up from behind, and shakes him
gently from side to side in the air, and then releases him gently to the ground. He laughs and
then runs off with the ball, kicking on the run.
Tackling in relation to Mandy:
Mandy observes the pretend tackle between Father and Cam, and as it is taking place she
runs up and stands with her back to the Father, in anticipation of a tackle. The Father lifts
her from the ground, and in an even gentler manner to Cam, shakes her from side to side,
and then releases her to the ground. She runs off in the direction of the ball.
Tackling in relation to Jason and Alex:
Jason and Alex are lying on top of the ball, both wriggling around on each other to take
control of the ball. They push and shove each other on the ground. Everyone is laughing.
The Father pulls Jason off Alex. The Mother tries to take the ball from Alex by lifting him
in the same manner observed between the Father and both Cam and Mandy (above), and
then she carries him across the yard as he tightly holds the ball. The Grandmother calls out,
‘Free kick’—suggesting the Mother tackled Alex for too long.
4.5.1 Demands
Tackling is being socially structured in ways that is slightly different for Mandy and
for Cam, and very different for Jason and Alex. That is, more demands are made
upon Jason and Alex because the adults allow them to physically fight for the ball,
rolling on top of each other, a play action frequently observed by professional
football players. The tackling action is also experienced by Alex and Jason during
the course of a football game. The mother and father contribute to the play by also
tackling Alex and Cam during the game, but their tackles are reflective of the
children’s size and competence as football players. Their actions are slower and less
forceful, but are nevertheless the same tackling actions as professional football
players. This practice is observed by Mandy.
The demands upon Cam and Mandy are different. They are not expected to be
tackling during a game where the ball is in motion, but rather, the father picks each
child up and gives them a gentle tackling experience from a stationary point in the
60 M. Fleer
middle of the yard—central to the game, but where the game actions are in slow
motion or momentarily suspended. For instance, it is observed that when Cam holds
the ball he is swung around, which suspends, but does not impede his actions to
kick the ball. Mandy, however, simply experiences the actions, even though she
does not have a ball. That is, the swinging actions of tackling are experienced in a
stationary manner, with the imaginary situation of the football game around her, but
no need to be holding or kicking the football. All four children are in the collective
play of a football game, but the demands upon each child are very different.
4.5.2 Social Situation of Development
The actions of the adults and how they structure “tackling practice” appear to be in
tune with each child’s social situation of development. Although the game is in
motion, the adults suspend play to give a tackling experience to the youngest two
children. The youngest children are present in the game, but their participation in
the play, and how they enter into the game, is structured by the adults in relation to
their social situation of development. This suggests that the adults through their
unique actions in relation to each child are in tune with the competence of each
child and their motive orientation, but their actions are also projecting forward into
the maturing functions of each child. That is, tackling and the physicality of this is
embedded in the practice of the football game, where the adults suspend or slow
down the game, so that tackling can be experienced, and the sense and meaning of
the football actions can be progressively understood for Mandy.
4.5.3 Developing a Social Position as a Football Player
The actions of the two eldest children and how the adults relate to them in the game
of footballsuggest that these two children understand the game of football and the
rules of play. They each have a social position in the family as being competent
football players. The expectation is that they can manage the tackling of play, and
that they can continue to build competence of football kicking through the demands
placed upon them to be able to kick the ball as they are running away from someone
who is trying to tackle them. Mandy’s involvement in the football game is also
expected, but how she is involved is related to her social position of someone who
is the process of developing competence as a football player (with later under-
standings of the rules of the game). By following Mandy’s intentions, it was found
that it was not just the adults who structured the play practices to actively include
Mandy, but it was Mandy herself who physically positioned herself so that she too
could experience tackling. Although the sense and meaning of all the play actions
may not yet be understood by Mandy, the expectation of her involvement and her
4 A Collective Social Situation of Development … 61
willingness to be a part of the play were already evident, suggesting the sense and
meaning of games with rules was in the process of development for her.
4.6 Development of New Psychological Formations—from
Object Play to Games with Rules
Another family game that was observed being played by the Westernport family
was Stick the horn on the unicorn. This commercial game involved the use of a
large one meter image of a unicorn and small horn stickers which could also be
written on so that the name of the person “sticking the horn on the unicorn” could
be subsequently identified.
Stick the horn on the unicorn:
Taped to the door of the fridge is a large illustration of a unicorn. Across from the fridge
and seated at the table is the Mother. She is writing the name of each family member on
separate ‘horn’ stickers that are to be ‘stuck on to the unicorn’. The children, with the
support of the Father, place a mask on their face, and then walk towards the unicorn image,
and place the horn on the poster. Jason and Alex have already had their turn. Jason’s
attention is on winning the game.
Turn-taking for Cam and Alex:
The Father places the mask on to Cam. Father says to Cam, “Go forward”. Cam walks
towards the fridge where the poster of the unicorn is located. As he sticks the horn to the
unicorn poster, the Father says, “That’s good work.”
Alex who is observing, along with all the other children, says, “It’s my turn. My turn. My
turn. My turn.”. Alex runs across to the Mother and looks at her writing on to the sticker.
She says, “Who’s name?”. Alex says, with purposeful tone, “Man-dy. Man-dy”.
Turn-taking for Mandy:
The Father puts the mask on Mandy. As with the other children, he guides her walk and
placement of the horn.
Turn-taking for the Father:
After Mandy has her turn, the Father is given a sticker. As he goes to place the sticker, the
Grandmother says, “Dad’s got to have the mask on”. Everyone looks to the Father. The
Grandmother asks, “Oh did dad get it? Noooooo. Who got the closest?”. Jason, who is
strategically close by, peers closely at all the stickers.
4.6.1 Demands
The demands upon each child in relation to the game of Stick the horn on the
unicorn were similar for playing the game because the father guided the walk as
62 M. Fleer
well as the placement of the horn. The family structured the game for successful
participation for each child through first, the mother using the labeling of each
sticker to signal whose turn it was, second, through the father’s guidance in walking
blindfolded and sticking on the horn. The variation in the father’s guidance to
successfully stick the horn on to the poster was minimal, and thus the demands on
each child were similar. However, when considering the social situation of devel-
opment, the demands of turn-taking for different children become evident.
4.6.2 Social Situation of Development
The idea of turn-taking as a key dimension of games with rules was introduced
through this game; however, the sense and meaning of the game was potentially
different for each child. For Mandy, the game was about her participation and doing
the same things as her siblings. For Alex, it was about having a turn, and using the
language of turn-taking to position himself to have another opportunity to play the
game. The observations show that for Jason the demands were in relation to
winning the game. Each child appeared to have a different motive orientation to the
game—Mandy and Cam for participating; Alex for having another turn and not
wanting to wait too long; Jason for winning the game.
The sense and meaning of the game was in relation to their motive orientation,
and their actions and relations to the game suggested their varying social situation
of development. This is not surprising because games with rules are a more
developed form of play. As was expected, Jason already understood how to work
with games with rules, as suggested by his motive orientation toward winning the
game. What was interesting to observe when taking the four children’s perspective
was how the concept of games with rules was in the process of being developed for
Mandy, Cam, and Alex.
4.6.3 Developing a Social Position as a Player
In this example, turn-taking is a part of family’s everyday play practice. The family
game is successful because the children take it in turns to wear the mask and to pin
the horn on the unicorn. It is a rule of playing in the family, and the expression of
“It’s X’s turn” was common play practice observed across all the play episodes
documented (S1 V2 T1 GQ). However, it was not just the adults who supported the
process of turn-taking in this commercial game, but also the children who appeared
to recognize the need for turn-taking. The need for following the rules was
amplified by the grandmother when she commented on the need for the father to
also wear the mask when pinning the horn on the unicorn. The father had to also
follow the rules of the game. Mandy observes and experiences these play practices
which are psychologically in the process of development for her.
4 A Collective Social Situation of Development … 63
In sum, the rules of the game were embedded into the practice of “collectively
playing the game.” Specific language was introduced by both adults and children,
but monitored by the adults, and represented by the children during the practice of
play—“My turn”. There was also “physical positioning to have a turn,” and the
adults who participated in the game were also expected to follow the rules of the
play—even though there were degrees of freedom evident in the practice of the play
(van Oers, 2013). Following the rules was also evident in the example of the
football game, and which were primarily narrated into the game by the adults.
Although the play practices observed in the Westernport family were not “board
games” (Ugaste, 2005), the structuring of the playful actions in the family (Football
game, Stick the horn on the unicorn) builds the foundations for the development of
higher forms of play—i.e., games with rules.
4.7 Discussion
This chapter shows how one family was in tune with the differing social situations
of development of each of the four children, and this attunement created devel-
opmental conditions for learning how to collectively play, as well as how to engage
in higher forms of play, such as games with rules. It is through foregrounding the
difference between the value motives of the family for play (e.g., football) and the
youngest child’s intentions and motives (to be included in the practices of the
family) that it became possible to see how play was being developed in the family,
but also, how the play practices of the family were supporting the development of
the youngest child. The play practices created the conditions for the development of
a new meaningful motive orientation toward the valued practices ofthe family—
such as playing football, playing Stick the horn on the unicorn. Hedegaard’s ana-
lytic concepts of motives and demands made it possible to see how everyday family
play practices can support children’s development.
The outcomes of the analysis foreground the conceptual power of Hedegaard’s
model of child development (Hedegaard, 2002; 2012) and her analytical frames
when researching the everyday lives of children in families (Hedegaard, 2008;
2009). Through examining the play of the Westernport family, it could be shown
how each child experienced the same play practices differently. But what was new
was how the adults structured the play, based on being in tune with the social
situation of development of each child. This can be described as a collective social
situation of development. This collective social situation of development of the
Westernport family expands the original concept of the social situation of devel-
opment by showing how the Australian family played with their children in support
of their development.
The collective social situation of development of play practices are less likely to
be found in laboratory-based studies where the play procedures are set, and where
the dominant play practices of particular families may not be included in the
procedure. Further, many laboratory studies focus on dyads, rather than include
64 M. Fleer
extended families in the procedure, thus reducing the possibility of identifying
variations in how different adults may structure pretend play and introduce learning
opportunities for children. In addition, the context of the laboratory is different to
the children’s natural play settings, such as the family home and back or front yard,
and this too can influence what both the children and the adults can do together.
While laboratory-based studies skillfully give evidence of particular ways of
structuring play, they do so at the expense of identifying new ways in which play
practices could be structured in naturalistic settings where different meaningful
motives and stimulating motives may be at play. However, the in-depth study of
one family over time also has limitations. It only gives evidence from one family
and may miss many other ways in which families structure play. Researchers have
suggested that variations in the results of studies could be attributed to the different
assumptions surrounding how play practices are studied, especially in relation to
universalizing the existing categories when studying a broader range of socioeco-
nomic and culturally diverse communities (see Göncü and Gaskins 2007).
4.8 Conclusion
In building upon the original research of Hedegaard and Fleer (2013), the goal of
this chapter was to show the analytical power of Hedegaard’s (2008) work for the
study of young children’s play at home in the Westernport family, and in so doing,
demonstrate a dimension of the social situation of development that has not yet
been explicitly discussed—collective social situation of development. This was
realized through Hedegaard’s concepts of demands, motives, and following the
child’s perspective.
An attunement of family members, as a collective social situation of develop-
ment, helps explain how in some families the play relationship between family
members appears to be a productive force for the development of children, as well
as the development of the play itself. This perspective is different to an individualist
conception of play and development that is biologically centered on milestones, or
stages of play, where the catalyst for changes in development is the age of the child
(Vygotsky, 1998).
A cultural-historical conception of development includes both the cultural and
biological dimension of human development (Elkonin, 2005; Vygotsky, 1998), and
suggests a reciprocity between the development of children through play and the
development of play itself (Kravtsov & Kravtsova, 2010; Vygotsky 1966). But
powerful analytical concepts are needed to show this reciprocity in play research.
Hedegaard’s (2008) analytical concepts of demands and motives in the context of
her conceptualisation of child development is not just a robust framework for
research, but like Vygotsky’s collected works gives a theoretically rich and
enduring legacy that is available to researcher for years to come.
4 A Collective Social Situation of Development … 65
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New York: Kluwer Academic and Plenum Publishers.
Laureate Professor Marilyn Fleer holds the Foundation Chair of Early Childhood Education and
Development at Monash University, Australia. She was awarded the 2018 Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Laureate Fellowship by the Australian Research Council and was a former President of the
International Society of Cultural-historical Activity Research (ISCAR). Additionally, she holds the
positions of an honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education, University of Oxford,
and a second professor position in the KINDKNOW Centre, Western Norway University of
Applied Sciences. Significant publication is: Fleer, M. (2014). Theorising play in the early years.
Cambridge University Press: New York.
4 A Collective Social Situation of Development … 67
Chapter 5
The Cultural Nature of the Zone
of Proximal Development: Young People
with Severe Disabilities and Their
Development of Independence
Louise Bøttcher
Abstract In many of her writings, Mariane Hedegaard insists on the centrality of
motives in understanding development. Taking the concept of motives to heart, this
chapter explores the development of independence in young people with severe
disabilities. Vygotsky understood disability as an incongruence between the indi-
vidual’s psychological structure and the structure of cultural forms. The incon-
gruence describes a dialectical relation between the person with a disability and the
surrounding society. Thus, a disability is never stable, but changes over time as a
function of both individual development and the shape of the supportive activities
and assistive technologies in the person’s activity settings. A study of eight young
people with congenital motor impairment and severe difficulties in developing
verbal speech is presented. The young people and their parents were interviewed
about the life history of the child and the family and the young person’s current
situation. The analysis unravels how cultural-historically grounded practices for
support impacts on the child’s social situation of development, including devel-
opment of independence. The point of the chapter will be to discuss the benefit of
understanding independence as a developmental and relational phenomenon.
Focusing on motives and developmental crises in the social situation of develop-
ment highlights the development of independence as related to societal opportu-
nities and institutional motives.
Keywords Disability � Defectology � Independence � Cerebral palsy �
Augmentative and Alternative Communication
L. Bøttcher (&)
School of Education, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
e-mail: Boettcher@edu.au.dk
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
A. Edwards et al. (eds.), Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning
and Development, Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_5
69
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_5&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_5&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_5&amp;domain=pdf
mailto:Boettcher@edu.au.dk
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_5
5.1 Introduction and Aim
In many of her writings, Mariane Hedegaard insists on the centrality of motives in
understanding development. Motives are the goals, which characterise the actions
of persons in different activities over an extended period of time (Hedegaard 2002,
2009). The concept of motive is related to Hedegaard’s analytical model of the three
planes of analysis in relation to child development. In this chapter, I will approach
the development of independence in young people with severe disabilities through
the lens of these central Hedegaardian ideas. Independence in relation to disability
has often been researched as an individual and measurable skill such as health
self-management (Warschausky, Kaufman, Schutt, Evitts, & Hurvitz, 2017) and the
ability to carry out daily living skills without help (Tamaru, McColl, & Yamasaki,
2007). However, these approaches to understanding independence as related to a
quantitative measure of individual competence have been criticised for being based
in ableist prejudices that equate independence with a certain level of motor and
cognitive performance, thus denying many people with different types of impair-
ments of ever being able to obtain independence and confining them within a label
of dependence. The counterargument, from a disability activist stance (Oliver,
1989) as well as a philosophical critique of the modernist subject (Reindal, 1999), is
to shift from the opposition between dependence/independence towards an under-
standing of interdependence as a basic human condition. From a cultural-historical
perspective, the idea of independence-as-interdependence is in alignment with its
overall approach to understand human activity as a collective phenomenon.
Through the theoretical model of Hedegaard (Hedegaard, 2009), this chapter will
investigate independence as a particular type of motive that develops within a
cluster of interdependent participants in one or more activity settings within insti-
tutionalised practices. The central argument will be that development of indepen-
dence in a cultural-historical frame is related to social and cultural value positions
and the types of demands and support people with different types of disabilities
encounter during their development.
5.2 Vygotsky and Development with a Disability
In Lev Vygotsky´s theoretical work titled Defectology (Vygotsky, 1993), the
psychological development of children born with a disability is understood within
his general frame of child development, which explains how development arises
from the child’s social situation of development shaped by the cultural-historical
development of society. Vygotsky outlined development as made up of two lines.
The first is the natural line of development, which is the individual biological
maturation. The second is the cultural line of development, understood as the
socialisation process, whereby the child acquires knowledge of and the ability to
use cultural tools through his or her participation in social practices. Under normal
70 L. Bøttcher
circumstances, the natural and the cultural line of child development supports each
other. In its everyday settings, children encounter demands and participate in ac-
tivity settings organised according to cultural expectations of what children at that
age are able to do—or able to do given the support that is also part of the activity
setting. The demands and support are built into the organisation of the activity
settings as age-graded taken-for-granted ways of organising children’s and young
people’s everyday life within a particular cultural-historical setting. Parents of
children developing language through natural speech can rely on widely available
children’s books, on culturally mediated activities such as songs and language
games and they imitate and build on what they see other parents do. This does not
mean that child development is automatic. It means that when parents and pro-
fessionals spend time with a child or want to support a child’s development, they
can draw on a wide cultural knowledge base of what to support and ideas about
how to do it.
The fusion of natural and cultural development builds on cultural-historical
dialectic processes that have shaped and still shape both children and the
cultural-historicalinstitutions in which children and other people live their lives.
This process of mutual adaptation between cultural-historical institutions and their
individual participants is based on the most widespread ways of participating. To
illustrate, most mainstream activity settings are based on the notion that the par-
ticipants will be using natural language (speech) and the activity settings support
the development of natural language. In contrast, parents of children without natural
language cannot rely on common cultural knowledge about language development
and how to support it: they cannot just look at other parents, send their child to the
local school and expect it will work out. This example illustrates Vygotsky’s basic
idea that disability emerges from the incongruence between the individual’s psy-
chological structure and the structure of cultural forms such as practices and activity
settings.
5.3 Motives and Planes of Analysis
In Hedegaard’s theoretical understanding, central and important activities in the
practices are based on the dominant institutional motives of particular practices. The
concept of motive is related to Hedegaard’s analytical model of the three planes of
analysis in relation to child development. These are a societal level in which cultural
value positions arise: an institutional level of motives in different practices and an
individual level or plane with the child’s own motives. Cultural values of what
constitutes a good life within a society and appropriate development towards these
values are reflected in institutional motives and practices. As development takes place
through the child’s participation in social institutions, the cultural and institution-
alised values andmotives become conditions for the development of a child’smotives
and competences (Hedegaard, 2009). During childhood in western heritage societies,
several successive dominating motives can be identified: the motive of the infant is
5 The Cultural Nature of the Zone of Proximal Development … 71
contact with caregivers; the toddler’s dominating motive is exploration of the sur-
roundings; the dominating motive of the preschool child is play; during the first years
at school, the child has a learning motive which over time is replaced by the motive to
be accepted by friends and becoming someone of consequence (Hedegaard, 2002,
2009). Activities are multi-motivated. Each child develops a motive hierarchy, in
which one or more of the dominating motives figures alongside other motives. The
specific motives of a particular child are the result of former experiences in specific
practices, development in interests and ideas about what he or she would like to do in
the near future. Motives develop and change as the cognitive and emotional abilities
of the child grow, leading the child to new forms of acting and participation in new
institutional settings, thereby providing the child with new cognitive and emotional
challenges. As such, motives are an integral part of development.
During the transition to adulthood, western heritage cultures value independence
as part of the move into adulthood. Brennan, Traustadottir, Rice, and Anderberg
(2016) in their study of parents who coordinate personal assistance for their adult
children with multiple disabilities stressed how the goal of autonomy through
separation from one’s parents is a common western heritage value position. The
parents in the study considered it ‘right’ that their children with disabilities moved
out of the family home around the time of finishing high school. Thus, inclusion as
a general societal value position has developed into the more specific idea that the
same goal of independence is applicable and desirable for all young adults, even if
the move to independent living is obtained by different means (e.g. with a set of
personal assistants versus being on one’s own).
Crisis is another important concept in relation to development. Crises arise as
conflictual relations between the child’s motives and the social situation of the
child. During the crisis, the former social situation of the child is deconstructed and
resolved into a new social situation of mastering, the neo-formation (Vygotsky,
1998). The source of development is the child’s participation in practice settings
together with other children and adults. Vygotsky wrote about the zone of proximal
development that by ‘[s]tudying what the child is capable of doing cooperatively,
we ascertain tomorrow’s development’ (Vygotsky, 1998: 202). The child’s activity
of imitation of more skilled participants takes place in the activity settings as ‘the
social environment is the source for the appearance of all specific human properties
of the personality gradually acquired by the child…’ (Vygotsky, 1998, 203). The
remaining part of this chapter will explore the developmental consequences of this
socio-cultural nature of the zone of proximal development—for children and young
people following atypical developmental trajectories—in relation to development of
independence as a neo-formation arising from crises in the social situation of
development. All the young adults in the study were reliant on others to take care of
all basic needs. Thus their development of independence must necessarily be dif-
ferent from the development of independence of young people without disability, at
least in some aspects. The cultural-historical perspective draws analytical attention
to aspects of learning and development in relation to independence. The question to
ask will be: What types of activity settings as zones of proximal development of
independence exists for young people with severe disability?
72 L. Bøttcher
5.4 Presentation of the Participants in the Study
The study involved eight young people with severe cerebral palsy (CP) and severe
difficulties in developing verbal speech due to their motor impairment. The young
people and their parents were interviewed about the life history of the child and the
family in relation to becoming able to/making their child able to communicate, and
the life situation on the verge of adulthood. The study design consisted of two
waves of in-depth interviews. The first wave of interviews focused on current
communication preferences and the life history of the young person and the family.
The second set of interviews was shorter follow-up interviews a year later. Most of
the young people were in some kind of transition phase towards life away from
their childhood home and the interviews in the second wave were designed to
follow up on how they had or were still negotiating their current and future life
opportunities and place in society a year later. Thus, the interview guides in the
second wave were different in each case, tailored to the particular transitions and
challenges that had emerged in the first interviews. The analysis presented in this
chapter focuses on the interrelation between motives at the different planes of
analysis in relation to the development of independence of the young participants.
Despite the inclusion criteria of being aged between 15 and 25, severe disability
and need of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), the participants
had very different developmental trajectories and were in very different social sit-
uations at the time of the interviews. At one end, Emilia and Freya had followed
trajectories of mainstream schooling and peer-equivalent development, and at the
other end was Frederick who had followed a trajectory of special education and
general delayed development. The participants also differed in levels of commu-
nicational competence from partner-supported yes/no communication (Frederick) to
gaze-controlled voice output computer used in a mainstream high-school envi-
ronment (Emilia).
All of the young people used either some form of AAC (Systematic commu-
nication books or symbol system, manual or gaze-controlled voice output systems)
or were dependent on interpreters of their natural, but dysarthricspeech. Here, I
need to point to the relationship between independence and AAC. When devel-
oping an AAC system, one option is to value and work towards a system that gives
the user the opportunity to operate the communication system independently.
Another option is to value and work towards a system that allows the user of the
system to express him- or herself independently with the communication system,
even if the system, for example, a communication book, is operated by someone
else. While the first option could seem the most desirable, problems might arise if
the effort of operating the system discourages or disturbs the process of expressing
one’s thoughts and wishes. Thus, in relation to creating opportunity for independent
communication, choices and decisions between different AAC systems can be a
balance between autonomous operation and ease of expression. However, without
some kind of AAC system, the person with no verbal speech is dependent on others
to guess their wishes and thoughts. The people using interpreters were to some
5 The Cultural Nature of the Zone of Proximal Development … 73
extent reliant on their interpreters’ vocabulary, but used the option to spell words
frequently. The development of independence in the young participants will thus be
interrelated with their development of a useful communication system.
5.5 Cultural Practices for Support and Technologies
in AAC Development
Across cases, all had followed atypical developmental trajectories due to their
complex communication needs. Following a cultural-historical understanding of
disability, the trajectory of a child with disabilities is not necessarily representative
of the child’s natural line potentials. The dialectical interaction between the natural
and the social line of development as a particular trajectory both produces and
impedes opportunities along the way. Following Hedegaard’s analytical model
mentioned earlier (Hedegaard, 2009), the person and the AAC interventions are part
of a wider social and cultural setting. Life and development with AAC consists of
movements into and out of particular practices, shaped by societal and cultural
traditions and value positions about disabilities, what types of schools children with
disabilities should go to, and what types of support families with children with
disabilities can receive. Societal organisation and legalisation, cultural traditions,
practices and activity settings all shape the child’s zone of proximal development as
a cultural creation.
Unlike the development of verbal speech, the zone of proximal development for
children using alternative ways of communicating has to be created and recreated as
the children grow. Some general organisations and trajectories exist, but they are
rarely a ready fit, perhaps due to the large variability in impairments and type of
support needed. For example, Emilia and Jonathan and their families had been
introduced to courses in manual signs (Supplementing speech, not similar to sign
language for deaf people) as it was a widely used practice at that time. They had,
however, since abandoned the manual hand-signs, as Emilia and Jonathan’s
impairments in fine motor functioning limited their use of manual signs as a means
for expression (Emilia mother 1, 10: Jonathan parents 1, 150–151).
It was clear looking across the whole set of cases, new technological develop-
ments had impacted on the developmental opportunities of the participants.
However, social opportunities and creating a zone of proximal development is more
than just the existence of a technology. For example, the new gaze-controlled Tobii
technology1 was expensive and thus the municipality was reluctant to try it out. At
the same time, the professional’s judgment was that this technology was not
1Tobii Dynavox is a technology that enables users to access and operate a computer by gaze. The
device offers a speech output option and users can spell their message or code and use ready
messages. Furthermore, they can access and operate mainstream software, surfe the internet and
much more by gaze. More information at: https://www.tobiidynavox.com/.
74 L. Bøttcher
https://www.tobiidynavox.com/
suitable for children with CP. Thus, several of the parents had to discover the
technology for themselves and subsequently struggle to get this technology for their
children.
Emilia’s mother: Finally, they arranged a testing session. And [Name of company] pro-
vided the device. It took place at her school. We [the parents] were present and […] actually
there was a bunch of people, all her teachers and everything, and Emilia, she just placed
herself – she was in her wheelchair, and they placed her in front [of the Tobii] and she just
started to comment right away. […] It was awesome. And the [Director of the company] he
was just: “Yeah, a new market”, because he had never sold them to people with cerebral
palsy before (Emilia mother 1, 41–43).
The parents of William and Jonathan describe similar histories of having to
discover the Tobii technology for themselves and subsequently having to struggle
to get the municipality to provide it. However, the parents of Emilia, William and
Jonathan were examples of cultural front-runners. Over the next few years, the
picture changed. For Freya who was born a few years later, the Tobii technology
was part of the societally offered zone of proximal development. She had her Tobii
when she started school. Emilia received hers when she was 8, after having waited
for more than one year and William was 8.
Both the children, now young people, and their parents had actively shaped the
longitudinal construction of a mode of communication. On one hand, the zone of
proximal development and the presence of individual developmental opportunities
were culturally bound, for example, in professional values about AAC and in the
development and availability of new technology. On the other hand, developmental
opportunities are not determined by social conditions alone. Parents actively strive
to create opportunities for their children—according to their ideas about what kind
of life is possible and desirable for their child—and sometimes they are able to
change the system through their activities, as the parents of Emilia, William and
Jonathan did.
5.5.1 Practices for Youth Life and Preparation for Adult
Life
Incongruence as a developmental challenge is related to the chronological age of
the child and social developmental trajectories. The coming of legal age at 18 brings
with it demands for being an adult, and making long-term decisions for what type of
adult life to lead. Societal support of children and families with severe disabilities is
based on the cultural expectation that young adults are ready for adult life. Societal
support of parents’ support of their children changes at 18, for example, parents’
compensation for lost income due to a larger care burden terminates as if the
children will now be able to look after themselves or do not require the support of
their parents because the roles of parents will be taken over by the adult children
themselves or by professionals. Thus, the young participants and their families are
5 The Cultural Nature of the Zone of Proximal Development … 75
faced with the societal demand to prepare for a life of greater independence. Across
all cases, parents expressed the idea that their child should move out of the family
home as they reached young adulthood. This motive was based on a general
societal value position of inclusion for children with disabilities: they should have a
life as close to mainstream life as possible and moving away from one’s parents to
live by oneself is what adult children do in Denmark:
Susan’s mother: We just think it is normal, that when you turn, not eighteen, but after
eighteen, then you should try to be yourself. You should not live at home. This has always
been our attitude. (Susan parents 1, 208).
However, due to the multiple impairments of the participants andthe incon-
gruence with mainstream social practices, the development of independence from
the parents and the move out of the family home cannot be on the same conditions
as for typically developing young adults. For the parents in the study, their adult
child’s move out of home included concerns about the balance between ensuring
their child’s needs were still met—both basic needs and developmental needs—and
letting go, withdrawing their involvement (see also Almack, Clegg, & Murphy,
2009). The shift in responsibility is not only from parent to young adult child but
also to the new activity settings the child is moving to:
Freya’s mother: Freya shares her assistants and I don’t like that, because, well, I’m against
it if it means she doesn’t get the help she needs. […]It’s no good, if you have to wait to eat
while all the others are eating. But it isn’t like that.
Interviewer: That was your concern?
Freya’s mother: Yes, it was. But, Freya says it is not a problem and I trust her (Freya
parents 2, 24–26).
The parents of Frederick shared a similar feeling of relief after Frederick had
been at his new boarding school for several months, and they experienced that his
needs were being met. His mother described how their situation had finally begun to
feel similar to when their other, younger children without disabilities had gone off at
their boarding schools (Frederick parents 2, 77).
As the young people move into adulthood, they can either move towards life in
an institutionalised living unit or independent life in their own house or apartment
with user-managed personal assistants financed by the welfare system. To trace the
development of independence from the perspective of the young participants, the
material was further analysed using the concepts of motives, crisis, social situation
of development and developmental demands and support constituting zones of
proximal development for independence.
5.5.2 Crisis of Moving from Home to a New Practice
One form of crisis was associated with the move from the familiar home setting and
into a new practice with new young people, new professionals and new activity
76 L. Bøttcher
settings with new types of demands. While this move potentially can lead to a
developmental crisis for all young people regardless of their level of ability, the
social situation associated with severe CP and the young peoples’ ever-present need
for others to provide help with even the most basic needs accentuated the crisis.
This crisis becomes even more emphasised when the person communicates with
other means than verbal speech and is not a very efficient communicator. Frederick
moved to a boarding school for his adapted young person’s education. At the time
of the move, he had no established AAC and had been reliant on others to ask him
relevant questions that he could then answer with an eye blink for yes. At home, the
daily practice was very established based in his mother’s extensive knowledge
about Frederick’s preferences and daily routines (Frederick parents 1, 92–95). To
move into the new setting was very demanding for Frederick and in the beginning
he slept poorly and was uncomfortably tense in his body (Frederick parents 1, 76–
79). The main incongruence in Frederick’s life all along has been his lack of verbal
speech in a socio-cultural setting where most activities include speech—or at least
communication. His previous adapted zone of proximal development: his home
setting and the setting at his special school—the special teachers and other pro-
fessionals—had not had the knowledge and skill to support Frederick in learning a
useful alternative way of communicating. Based on his parents’ second-hand
impression, the communication support had been discontinuous and centred around
trying to teach Frederick to operate different computer systems by hand (Frederick
parents 1, 42–48). In the new practice at the boarding school, he was confronted
with a new demand to begin to express himself with a new tool for communication:
Frederick was introduced to communication with a communication book with a
particular conversational structure that he needed to learn (Pragmatic Organized
Dynamic Display PODD,2 see also Porter, 2007). The new activity with the PODD
book created a crisis. There was a conflict between the new demand to express
himself and Frederick’s learned, passive way of participating in communication,
waiting for others to take the initiative. This new set of demands was much harder
than anything Frederick had encountered in previous communication situations.
However, the demands were mediated by a special type of support:
Frederick’s pedagogue: So, in the first long period, the young person is not required to
express himself with the [communication] book. He only needs to absorb what you can use
the book to express. […] We are the guides and the moment they [the young students] show
initiative to express something, or – I might also begin by saying “I wonder whether we
together might learn what’s on your mind right now? Let’s try it out! Let’s go fishing in the
book.” And if we don’t succeed in the first attempt, then it’s just: “Oh, this wasn’t what’s on
your mind, I see, let’s go back to categories. Is it something with a person? An activity? Or
is it dut dut dut?” [Refers to her pointing in the book]. And then, suddenly we hit it. And
this mutual experience: Together we discovered what you had on your mind, with this tool,
it endows them with the drive to try it out themselves … (Frederick pedagogue 1, 16).
2Pragmatic Organized Dynamic Display is a strategy for communication and how to organise
vocabulary. It can be operated by low-tech communication books as well as high-tech ICT options.
See more at http://www.lburkhart.com/PODDinfo.htm.
5 The Cultural Nature of the Zone of Proximal Development … 77
http://www.lburkhart.com/PODDinfo.htm
Rather than demanding an answer, the staff regarded themselves and other
students with similar disabilities but more experienced as communicators, as role
models. The support in the situation—the professionals as role models—was not
only to demonstrate the categories of the book and the conversational structure, but
also to demonstrate the motive of the activity with the book: to express and share
what was on the young person’s mind. During the next couple of months, Frederick
began to use the book to express not only statements about his immediate condition
(e.g. being in pain or thirsty), but to make demands and contributions to the social
setting in wholly new ways, for example, by expressing that he wanted to buy a
birthday present for his sister (Frederick pedagogue 1, 51). The crisis of moving out
of home was resolved as Frederick began to build a motive to express himself,
aided by his current social support and its possibilities for independent expression
with the PODD communication book. Furthermore, Frederick’s gradual develop-
ment of more active communication also paved his way to more active participation
in learning activities in general and in his social participation. He was developing a
motive for participating in social settings in culturally conventional ways, paying
attention to how things were done according to social customs and expressing his
wish to participate in them (Frederick parents 2, 43, 66). At the time of the second
wave of interviews, he was much more comfortable at the boarding school and
willing to engage with a wider set of people (Frederick parents 2, 8–15: Frederick &
pedagogue 2, 9–13). His parents associated this development with the crisis and its
resolution into a new situation:
Frederick’s mother: And this is why they are doing such a good job with these young
people. They know exactly what the young people are interested in and think about. There
are really good at that. I don’t think we have been good enough at that here at home. We
have just done the same things as we have always done with Frederick. Not really involved
him…
Frederick’s father: Like, just decidedbeforehand. (Frederick parents 2, 55–56).
Currently, Frederick has developed a new motive for keeping track of his money
and his daily and weekly schedule. He expressed concerns about how much money
he had spent and how much was left through his new active communication. In his
current social situation of development, this motive was supported at the boarding
school with Frederick getting a notebook in which his pedagogues helped him to
keep track of his expenses (Frederick parents 2, 45–51). The motive of Frederick
was in alignment with his parent’s motive and the institutional motive at the
boarding school:
Frederick’s father: That was the whole idea of getting him into that place, that he should
become able to control his own life. He’s not there yet, but he’s well on his way (Frederick
parents 2, 80).
The parents’ experience was that the boarding school has functioned as a zone of
proximal development in relation to development of independence in ways they
were not able to create by themselves. The developmental crisis during the first year
at the boarding school resolved into development of independence expressed as
78 L. Bøttcher
development of new wishes and demands on the social settings and being able to
assert himself in new ways in relation to new people and his parents:
Pedagogue: He is making a lot of demands now, it may seem like, but it is just because he
has his own opinion about how things should be. […] He said he wanted new clothes [for a
big family celebration] and she [Frederick’s mother] was like ‘he already got some, a nice
shirt and a tie’, but Frederick remembers he had that on last time, he will not wear the same
clothes again (Frederick & pegagogue 2, 55–63).
5.5.3 Crisis of Learning to Organise One’s Life
Independently
As mentioned earlier, preparation for adult life and development of independence
need to be seen in relation to the bifurcation into two main possible life trajectories
for young people with severe and multiple disabilities: life in an institution or life in
own house or apartment with user-managed personal assistants. To be eligible for
user-managed personal assistants, the young adult must be able to plan and direct
their own life and function as employer and director in relation to her/his personal
assistants. It is a strong motive of many of the participating parents as well as for
the young participants themselves to be eligible for user-managed personal
assistance:
Jonathan [With Tobii]: I would like to live independently (Jonathan 2, 54).
The parents of Jonathan, Emilia, Freya and William all imagined their young
person’s future as one independent life with personal assistants and sought to create
a zone of proximal development that would support the young person to become
able to manage her or his life with assistants. This preparation was possible in some
of the cases in the study, where the family had personal assistants at home a limited
amount of hours per week as respite. The parents explicitly considered how to
create conditions for development of organisational skills and forethought in their
adolescents as a preparation of a future life living independently through the help of
personal assistants. Freya’s mother described how she deliberately withdrew part of
her support at home to let Freya take over more responsibility for remembering
practicalities and get things done (Freya parents 1, 141). Emilia had increasingly
been given responsibility for hiring her own personal assistants, deciding what type
of people she wanted to assist her and leading the job interviews herself (Emilia 1,
39: Emilia mother 1, 75).
Next to this parent-created zone of proximal development towards life with
user-managed personal assistants, the Danish context contains a particular institu-
tionalised practice with the motive of supporting the development towards being
eligible for user-managed personal assistance. ‘Egmont Højskolen’ (https://www.
egmont-hs.dk) is a unique folk high school funded in 1956 with the aim of creating
more life opportunities with people with disabilities. The learning environment
5 The Cultural Nature of the Zone of Proximal Development … 79
https://www.egmont-hs.dk
https://www.egmont-hs.dk
combines students with and without disabilities and offers subject teaching in ‘life
with user-managed personal assistants’ and ‘my life- my responsibility’. While at
Egmont, the students with disabilities hire personal assistants among the students
without disabilities.
Jonathan experienced the last part of his adapted young people’s education at
Egmont. The environment created a demanding situation for him. Jonathan
described the experience in the following way:
Interviewer: How was it to move to Egmont?
Jonathan [Tobii]: I think it is great, but a little tough.
Interviewer: Why is it tough?
Jonathan [Tobii]: I am completely new and employer and school.
[…]
Interviewer: What is it you need to be able to, to be an employer?
Jonathan: Responsibility and meetings and laundry and other things (Jonathan 2, 10–13,
38–40).
The activity settings at Egmont placed new, high demands on Jonathan that were
beyond what he was capable of at the beginning. However, the presence of sup-
portive teachers and supportive practices enabled him to engage with his new
responsibilities and gradually acquire new skills and competences, thereby
becoming able to participate in new and more advanced ways. At the first job
interviews, his father participated and guided Jonathan with questions to help him
reflect on who he would like as his personal assistants. The next time Jonathan
needed to hire assistants, he did it without his father (Jonathan father 2, 56–58). He
has also begun to take more initiatives to go on outings on his own with his
assistants (Jonathan father 2, 56–58).
Learning to live on your own is associated with new demands such as organising
one’s own life and being an employer and will for many young people with severe
disabilities be a developmental crisis. Although the parents in the study share the
motive of enabling their young adult children to develop independence, the chal-
lenge is that the responsibilities and tasks that must be transferred to the young
people and/or their assistants/pedagogues are both more numerous and more critical
compared to the tasks taken over by young people without disabilities. The
dilemma for parents is to withdraw their support while still feeling sure that both the
basic and developmental needs of their young adult child are met. The learning
environments at Egmont folk high school and Frederick’s boarding school offer
their students a zone of proximal development that contains the necessary support
for basic needs and at the same time supports them in developing self-organising
skills and other skills necessary to be ready for a more independent life.
80 L. Bøttcher
5.6 Discussion
The aim of this chapter has been to celebrate Mariane Hedegaard’s insistence on
motives as a central concept in understanding development. In doing so, the dif-
ferent analytical planes in Hedegaard’s model (Hedegaard, 2009) have proved their
usefulness in untangling how development of independence is anchored in
cultural-historically framed opportunities. Development of independence at the
individual and institutional level is related to social, cultural and institutional values
of what children, adolescents and young adults with disability are supposed to be
able to do or aim at. Parents as well as the young participants themselves expressed
motives for particular types of independent adult life, such as being in control of
one’s life and/or living in own apartment or house with user-managed personal
assistants. However, the possibilities for realising these motives depend not only on
motives at an individual level, but on institutional motives as well. The institutional
motive arises from opportunities based on value positions at the societal level such
as the welfare offer of user-managed personal assistantsand legalisation of adapted
young people’s education as a right for people with disabilities.
Possibilities for an independent life arise as developmental opportunities that
need to be seized by the young person him- or herself. In the examples of the
developmental crises related to motives of independence experienced by Frederick
and Jonathan, the crises were resolved by their own active creation of their social
situation of development along with the institutionalised types of support. Both of
them benefitted from their participation in institutional practices (Egmont, the
boarding school) and activity settings (e.g. subject teaching in ‘life with
user-managed personal assistants’ and daily activities with the PODD book) aimed
at development of independence in young adults with severe disabilities. The future
developmental trajectories of Frederick and Jonathan have been shaped by these
institutional opportunities regardless of whether they are moving towards life at an
institution or life with user-managed personal assistants.
The similarity between Frederick and Jonathan in how the institutional demands
and support fuelled their development of independence on the verge of adulthood
drew attention to the importance of understanding independence as interdepen-
dence and a system of relations between people. As long as independence is
understood as the individual capacity to do something, there will be the risk of
focusing on independence in communication with AAC technologies from the
individual operation perspective only. Emilia and Jonathan both preferred and
appreciated their ability to communicate by independently gaze-operated Tobii
tools. However, for several of the other participants, different types of communi-
cation means that required interdependent work was appreciated as part of their
independent communication. For Frederick, his development of independence took
off at the time he was supported in a functional communicational system focused on
5 The Cultural Nature of the Zone of Proximal Development … 81
his potential for independent control of communicational content rather than
independent operation of the AAC device. The PODD system addresses the in-
terdependence and the role and possibilities for the person without verbal speech
with other persons in activity settings, allowing the person with communication
disabilities a more active role, as became apparent in the analysis of Frederick. The
support of Jonathan’s development of organisational skills addressed the interde-
pendence between him and his assistants and their mutual roles. The demands and
support were built into the organisation of the particular activity settings. Focusing
on development of independence in a cultural-historical frame highlights devel-
opment with disability as relative. It reveals that independence is related to social
and cultural value positions and the types of demands and support people with
different types of disabilities encounter. Resolution of crises often depends on
specialised knowledge and specialised activity settings, although these might be
part of a mainstream practice. Cultural values of what constitutes a good life—
independence—are reflected in institutional practices and as child development
takes place through the participation of the child in the social institutions, the
cultural values become conditions for the development of independence and further
motives about what type of adult life one would like to build for oneself.
References
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The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky: Volume 2. New York, NY: Plenum Press.
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self-management, transition readiness and adaptive behaviour in persons with cerebral palsy
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rep0000157.
Associate Professor Louise Bøttcher is a member of the research programme future technology,
culture and learning. Her research interest has focused on the interplay between neurobiological
and social and cultural conditions for development and takes its point of departure in Vygotsky’s
idea about disability and is aimed at the investigation and further theoretical understanding of
children with disabilities and neurobiologically based impairments. A key publication is Bøttcher
& Dammeyer (2016). Development and learning of young children with disabilities. A Vygotskian
perspective. Springer: New York. She has received a textbook award and a research award.
5 The Cultural Nature of the Zone of Proximal Development … 83
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rep0000157
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rep0000157
Chapter 6
Supporting Heritage Language
Development Through Adults’
Participation in Activity Settings
Liang Li
Abstract The field of heritage language studies is under-researched and bilingual
families struggle to maintain their heritage languages at home. The in-depth study
reported in this chapter examined an episode of one child, a 4-year-old girl, and her
parents, baking at home in order to explore how parents’ participation aligns with
children’s actions in supporting their heritage language development in a home
activity setting. Hedegaard’s (Studying children: A cultural-historical approach.
Open University Press, Maidenhead, pp. 30–45, 2008, Mind, Culture and Activity
16:64–82, 2009) wholeness approach and model of children’s learning and de-
velopment through participation in institutional practices form the foundation of the
analysis. Through taking different perspectives, this chapter explains how the
parents interact with their daughter differently while they both aim to support her
bilingual heritage learning and development and how this impacts on their
daughters’ opportunities to practice Chinese in the home activitysetting. This study
gives insights into the essence of the activity setting as an analytical concept to
research the child’s development.
Keywords Activity setting � Demands � Motives �
Heritage language development � Adults’ participation
6.1 Introduction
Much work done on the linguistic perspectives of children’s bilingual development
has focused on bilingual language development in school and after-school class
contexts (e.g., Laurent & Martinot, 2009; Fairclough & Beaudrie, 2016). However,
very few studies focus on how the family as a social unit supports children bilin-
gually, especially in terms of children’s heritage language development
(Esch-Harding & Riley, 2003). How to support children’s heritage language
L. Li (&)
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: liang.li@monash.edu
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
A. Edwards et al. (eds.), Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning
and Development, Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_6
85
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_6&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_6&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_6&amp;domain=pdf
mailto:liang.li@monash.edu
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_6
development has been of great concern to many immigrant families. Several recent
empirical studies of bilingualism have paid close attention to the issue of
crosslinguistic interaction and transfer in preschool bilingual children (Cheung
et al., 2010; Cummins, 2005; Nicoladis, Rose, & Foursha-Stevenson, 2010). The
interpretations of bilingualism are focused on the process of language development
as an adaptation to the external environment (Mori & Calder, 2017; Thordardottir,
2011; Zhang, 2016). However, these approaches and studies have not considered
the complexity of children’s language interactions and associated social and cultural
influences. Drawing upon Hedegaard (2012), I suggest that these approaches to
studying children’s bilingual development neglect important aspects, including
children’s personal characteristics (e.g., motives and motive orientation), institu-
tional practices (e.g., values and demands), and dynamic social and cultural tradi-
tions. These interrelated aspects shape and reshape each other, explaining children’s
bilingual development. There is a need for immigrant families to be more aware of
how they can support bilingual development of their children at home (Hu, Torr &
Whiteman, 2014) and Hedegaard’s work offers a way forward.
The aim of this chapter is to show how a first-generation preschooler of Chinese
heritage living in Australia and her parents engage in a home setting activity aimed
at supporting her bilingual heritage language development. Through this exami-
nation a better understanding of children’s bilingual heritage language development
within a family context is gained, revealing how a societal perspective reflected in
the parents’ different educational backgrounds, and appears to impact on their
interactions with their child and the demands and opportunities presented to her. In
doing so, the chapter illustrates the value of taking the wholeness approach
developed by Hedegaard (Chap. 1; Hedegaard, 2012) to investigate how parents’
participation aligns with their preschoolers’ actions in the home activity setting to
support heritage language development.
I begin by discussing the “wholistic” model of children’s learning and devel-
opment offered by Hedegaard. This is followed by details of the analysis of one
family’s activities involving parents and a child in order to examine the pre-
schooler’s bilingual heritage language experience in the activity setting, and a
discussion of how Hedegaard’s framing of child development informs the analysis.
6.2 A Wholistic Model to Examine Children’s Learning
and Development
Hedegaard’s (2012) wholistic model of children’s learning and development
through participation in institutional practices (See Fig. 6.1) was adopted in order to
examine a 4-year-old child’s heritage language learning experience in the family
context.
86 L. Li
This model represents Hedegaard’s wholeness approach outlined in Chap. 1. In
brief, it allows us to examine a child’s motivated actions within activities in an
activity setting. The activity settings themselves are located within institutional
practices such as family life, which reflected the wider societal norms and values.
Importantly, these different perspectives are gateways into a research study
allowing the researcher to approach a topic from the perspectives of, for example,
the child’s perspective (favored by Hedegaard) or from analyses of institutional
practices. Taken together, they also offer ways of studying the dynamic interrela-
tionships between, for example, the purposes of institutional practices and the
possibilities for motivated actions in activities within those practices (Hedegaard,
2012). In the present study, these different perspectives are specified in the fol-
lowing ways:
In this study, the societal perspective refers to Chinese cultural values realized
through family practice within Australia where government regulations are pro-
moting children’s heritage language development. For instance, The 2012 Australia
in the Asian Century White Paper (Australian Government, 2012) increased the
linguistic value of Chinese language in Australia and the Australian curriculum
(Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA, 2014)
emphasizes Asian language learning in the development of young children. It also,
in the case to be discussed, allows us to consider how historic family patterns and
traditions may contrast with ways of thinking and acting in the society that has been
entered by immigrant families.
Fig. 6.1 Hedegaard’s (2012: p. 130) a model of children’s activity settings in different situations
6 Supporting Heritage Language Development … 87
The institutional perspective refers to the informal traditions and demands in
daily practices that children enter such as home or school context. In this chapter, it
relates to parents’ demands in their daughter’s heritage language development
reflected through their interactions with their daughter and how they create the
conditions to support their daughter’s heritage language development at home. This
perspective allows the researcher to identify the overarching priorities and values
that give shape to what happens in the activities that comprise the institutional
practices.
The activity setting perspective takes us to where children’s engagement in
activities unfolds. In this chapter, it refers to the activity setting where the child’s
baking and counting activities took place at home kitchen area. Through following
the child’s and adults’ intentions as they take part in activities within an activity
setting, it is possible to better understand how a child enters into the practice
traditions and what supports the parents offer.
The personal perspective is where the research lens is on the individual moti-
vated actions of the child. The key focus is on the child’s actions as their motives
are enacted when engaging in an activity. Through these actions, the child gains
access to the social meaning and aims of the activity, such as baking. Thus, motives
develop as a relation between children and the activity they engage in (Hedegaard
& Chaiklin, 2005).
These perspectives allow for the building of a wholistic view of the child. In the
present study, the focus is both on the child’s motives, and the demands she faces in
the activity setting. It is through following her intentions during interactions with
her mother and her father that I attempt to offer insights into how she meets the
different demands of learning Chinese within the activities of baking and counting.
6.3 Study Design
Hedegaard’s (2008) dialectical-interactive approachto research creates conditions
for researchers to study children’s heritage language development within the social
practices of their daily life. It allows for a wholistic view of children’s participation
in the institutional practice of family life as they undertake motivated actions in
typical activity settings; in this case, the setting is where baking and counting
activities took place. This focus on actions, as explained in Chap. 1, requires steady
attention to the perspectives of the child engaged in an activity setting and
addressing its demands. In the present study, the researcher’s gaze is on the child
and the language used when interacting with parents and on the actions of the
parents in the activity setting.
88 L. Li
6.4 Participants
The case discussed here is part of a larger project in which three families in
Chinese-Australian communities joined the study for a period of 8 months in order
to allow me to research how immigrant families support preschoolers’ bilingual
heritage language development. All parents were from China and speak Mandarin.
The focus child in each family was aged 4–5 years old. Mandarin was their first
language. All the children were enrolled in English-based childcare centers and
attended weekend Chinese school programs in Melbourne. In this chapter, I draw
on data gathered from Lin’s family: Lin (4 years old), her sister Meimei (1.5 years
old), and her parents. The parents were originally from Taiwan and immigrated to
Melbourne nearly 6 years prior to the data collection. Lin was born in Melbourne
and attended a childcare center 4 days a week from the age of 2. Her parents
reported that they speak Mandarin at home most of time, and only occasionally
speak English. According to her parents, Lin’s comfortable language is English.
Both parents were educated in Taiwan. Lin’s mother was a nurse at a hospital in
Melbourne and her father was studying for a master’s degree full time at university
during the research period. Since they were concerned about Lin’s Chinese lan-
guage learning and development, Lin’s father started reading books on early
childhood education in order to learn how to better support Lin’s heritage language
development. He also discussed his concerns with his younger sister in the US, who
specialized in linguistics.
6.5 Procedure and Data Collection Methods
There were five phases of data collection in the overall study, as summarized in
Table 6.1. This includes total number of hours of filming family everyday practices
and Chinese school practices, and two interviews with participating families.
The study began with an interview with the research family using photos the
family took within the first 2 weeks of their involvement, in order to elicit the
family’s values and beliefs about children’s bilingual heritage language develop-
ment. The first interview helped to provide a basic understanding of the family. This
led to the next phase of data collection: video observation to capture everyday
family activities within the home context and children’s performance at Chinese
school. Video observation allows the researcher to consider “all of these
multi-dimensional elements of children’s participation in their everyday life.”
(Hedegaard, 2008: 30). A final interview was organized with the family to
understand the parents’ views and children’s perspectives of the video recordings
selected by the researcher after initial data analysis. This interview allowed the
researcher to clear up any uncertainties in the data and check for face validity in the
initial interpretations of the data. This chapter is based on extracts from one video
sequence involving Lin’s family in baking and counting activities as this provides a
6 Supporting Heritage Language Development … 89
whole picture of both parents’ different interactions with their daughter in the same
activity setting where baking and counting were taking place, while they both aim
to support their daughter’s heritage language development. The study seeks to
examine what occurs within the activity setting to reveal family pedagogical
strategies used in supporting Lin’s heritage language development.
6.6 Data Analysis
Within the broad framing of a wholeness approach outlined earlier, the analysis has
focused on the dialogical interactions (Hedegaard, 2018) between Lin and her
parents in the activity setting where baking was taking place. In building upon
Hedegaard’s (2008) model of common sense, situated and thematic interpretation,
four spirals of analysis were undertaken of the digital visual observational data (Li,
2014). For the overall study, the first spiral of data interpretation focused on cap-
turing the different personal perspectives of the child’s, parents’, and researcher’s
perspectives within activity settings. For the data presented in this chapter, the
activity setting where baking was in progress was the focus. The second spiral of
digital data interpretation examined the patterns of motivated actions in activities
across activity settings situated within the practices of family life. The third spiral of
interpretation related to the theoretical concepts guiding the research, such as
motives, intentions, demands, and transitions between the activity settings, across
institutional practices, and related to societal values associated with learning
Chinese heritage language in Australia. The third spiral of data analysis focused on
answering the overarching research question, by undertaking a deeper conceptual
and theoretical analysis of the emerging themes. For instance, this process of data
interpretation foregrounded different pedagogical practices of each parent in Lin’s
heritage language learning and development. The final spiral of interpretation led to
Table 6.1 Data collection procedure
Phases Research procedure Collected data
1 Orientation visit to three research families 3 h
2 Parents and children photograph their home activities over a
2-week period
223 photos
3 Video recording of first interview with each family using their
own photos as prompt
3 h
4 Video recording the families’ everyday activities during four–
five visits to capture their daily practices, such as morning
activities, afternoon activities, dinner, bedtime routine, etc.
64 h families
video data
Video recording the focus of children’s Chinese school activities
for 2 h for each child
6 h Chinese
school data
5 Final video interview with each family using selected recorded
videos from phase 4 as prompts
6 h
90 L. Li
the synthetic analysis of family practices across the activity settings. It met the
challenges of dealing with disparate rich data.
The data generated allowed the researcher to create a narrative of each particular
activity in the activity settings, capturing the interaction patterns between family
members. In this chapter, the focus is on following Lin and her parents in the
activity setting where baking and counting were taking place. The narrative is
introduced through showing how Lin interacted with her mother during the baking
process, and then as she interacted with her father during the counting activity in the
same activity setting.
6.7 Discussion of the Case Example: Lin as a Baker
The selected video extracts were of a household activity recorded in Lin’s house on
a hot Thursday afternoon. The video captured an activity where Lin baked cookies
with her mother and then when she talked about the cookies with her father. In this
activity setting, Lin’s heritage language learning was experienced by her in very
different ways: in her interactions with her parents and in relation to baking and
counting. Her mother operated mainly with closed questions and did not make the
most of Lin’s motive orientation toward baking in order to capture her active use of
Chinese. On the other hand, her father, by setting her problems to solve in relation
to her baking and counting, built on her interest in baking to develop her Chinese.
The element of the study presented here, therefore,examined the questions used by
both parents in supporting Lin’s interactions.
(Bold words indicate new Chinese words/concepts for Lin.)
6.7.1 The Acknowledgement of Child’s Motive Orientation
<Excerpt 1>
Lin’s mother prepared to bake a cake. Lin was asked to wash her hands, and get
ready for baking.
Mother: 我们要做什么 cake 呢? <What kind of cake are we going to bake?>
Lin: 妈妈我们的 cinnamon 呢? <Mum, where is our cinnamon?>
Mother: 肉桂。你会不会讲肉桂? Cinnamon? <“Rou Gui” (Chinese). Do you know how
to say “Rou Gui”? Cinnamon?>
Lin: 肉桂Rou Gui. <Cinnamon>
Mother: 肉桂Rou Gui. <Cinnamon>
Lin’s mother consciously taught her how to say “cinnamon” in Chinese like a
teacher in a recitation class. The correction showed her mother’s strong feelings
toward Lin’s Chinese language development, as her English had become better than
6 Supporting Heritage Language Development … 91
her Chinese. It can be seen that teacher–pupil talk was used by her mother through
the interactional patterns. These strong feelings were also evident in the interviews,
where she commented: “It would be a shame if she could not speak Chinese when
she has a Chinese face.” The mother regularly corrected Lin’s Chinese pronunci-
ation and consciously taught her Chinese words when she used English words
during conversations.
The baking activity had been set up so that Lin would talk Chinese with her
mother and keeps the language alive for her in a potentially informal setting; but at
the same time her mother was using limited teacher strategies in her interactions in
the joint activity. In the observational data that follows, it can be seen again how
Lin’s mother consciously and frequently requested Lin to speak Chinese at home.
In Excerpt 2, a particular interactional pattern is shown. The mother raised her
voice when she asked Lin questions. The rises in intonation should be noticed. The
mother only asked Lin yes/no questions, did not wait for her responses and
immediately continued with the next steps in the cake baking preparation.
Lin’s mother brought out a box of cake mix and let Lin have a look at what was
needed to prepare for baking. Lin’s mother looked at the instructions together with
Lin and explained the instructions to her.
Mother: 两个鸡蛋、油和什么? 和牛奶。对不对?
<Two eggs, oil, and what? And milk, is that right? (Intonation rises)>
Lin nodded her head to express her agreement.
…
By raising her voice, it seemed that she wanted Lin to pay attention. It is
important to reiterate that the types of questions she asked Lin were yes/no closed
questions. She did not offer Lin any thinking space and opportunity to express
herself in Chinese, so Lin automatically replied “yes”.
Lin’s mother poured some flour and two eggs into a big mixing bowl.
She showed Lin how to stir the eggs and flour together.
Mother:搅,搅,搅。轻轻的搅。不要太用力哦。 <Stir, stir and stir. Gently, don’t need to
do it too hard.>
Lin was stirring. She imitated what her mother did.
Lin: 我们在弄cake. <We are baking a cake >.
Mother: 那是鸡蛋糕。 <It is Ji Dan Gao (Egg Cake)>.
Lin: 鸡蛋糕。<Egg Cake>
Mother: 鸡蛋糕,就对了。<Egg Cake. That is right.>
…
Again, her mother consciously paid close attention to her English expression.
She told her the Chinese word for “cake”, and Lin was able to understand the
meaning of “cake” in Chinese.
92 L. Li
Lin’s mother opened the milk box. Then her mother used a cup to measure the milk.
Mother: 我们要加多少呢?加入165的牛奶。 <How much milk do we need to put in? Add
165 ml of milk.> Lin was watching what her mother was doing.
…
Although her mother asked “how much milk do we need to add”, she imme-
diately gave the right answer and did not offer Lin enough time to think about the
question and formulate an answer in Chinese.
Mother: 这个我们要怎么弄呢? <How can we cook this one?>
Lin : 妈妈,我想弄那个蝴蝶的。 <Mum, I want to bake a butterfly cookie.>
…
Now, Lin and her mother started baking the butterfly cookies.
Lin’s mother brought out the pastry. Then, she put some sugar on the bench.
Lin looked at the pastry.
Lin: 有个broken了。 <It is broken.>
Mother: 那是破掉了。是不是? <It is broken, isn’t it?>
Lin nodded her head to express “yes”.
…
The baking process showed Lin’s interest and motive orientation in baking. In
the interview, Lin’s parents mentioned that Lin enjoyed cooking with her mother.
They believed that with her mother’s support, Lin could explore cultural knowledge
about baking and that Chinese language use would be encouraged during the
baking process. Baking as collective knowledge was introduced to Lin through her
parents’ active participation in the activity setting in which baking took place. The
parents believed that during the baking, Lin could use simple Chinese words to
communicate with them. Within the process, Lin would not only perform her
Chinese, but more importantly, she could understand the meaning of the baking
process and the meaning of the words, because the words were embedded within a
meaningful everyday activity in a familiar activity setting.
In this case example of baking, Lin carried out the baking steps. Her mother
modeled how to stir the flour, pour the mixture into the cake tin, and place it into the
oven. Again, her mother consciously instructed her in Chinese for words that Lin
initially said in English, such as “egg cake”. Although Lin’s baking experience with
her mother appeared to support her Chinese language development, Lin’s passive
responses showed her inactive engagement with the new words and baking
knowledge. There were lost opportunities in how the activity was enacted. Lin’s
mother acted more like a formal teacher than a baking partner, with her restricted
and restricting repertoire of responses, asking Lin close-ended yes/no questions. For
instance, she asked “we need to add some milk, is that right?”, and when Lin said
that the pastry was broken in English, her mother used direct Chinese language to
say “it is broken, is that right?”. Lin mechanically responded to the questions by
nodding her head to express her agreement or simply replying “yes”, reiterating the
6 Supporting Heritage Language Development … 93
question. It was evident that this kind of question offered Lin little opportunity to
think and express her ideas in Chinese. In this way, she engaged relatively passively
in the baking activity and acted as a passive partner although she tried to engage in
baking. This form of interaction is explained by Lin’s mother’s belief that her direct
talk to Lin supports her bilingual heritage language development. The central
control, direct teaching, and teacher authority were part of traditional Taiwan’s
kindergarten classroom culture (Lin & Tsai, 2006), which obviously had impact on
Lin’s mother’s parenting style. Here, we see the values of Hedegaard’s wholeness
approach (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013), allowing us to connect a societal perspective
with actions in an activity setting within the practice of family life. The traditional
cultural values in the Chinese community affected Lin’s mother’s interaction pat-
tern while actively participating in the activity of baking within a home activity
setting.
Hedegaard has also alerted us to the disadvantages of too strong control over the
actions of young children, if they are to become learners. She argued, “In an
educational situation it is important to be aware of the child’s motive orientation as
well as directing the introduced activities toward supporting new motives.”
(Hedegaard, 2012: 135). Lin’s mother was aware of Lin’s positive motive orien-
tation toward baking and tried to direct her to link this with new motives for
speaking Chinese. However, as she did not take Lin’s perspective, the pedagogical
opportunity was missed.
This was not Lin’s first experience of baking a cake with her mother. Lin’s
mother could have prodded Lin’s memory as part of the conversation. “An activity
can be motivating if it relates to children’s already-developed motives” (Hedegaard,
2012: 134). The baking activity was likely to be motivating for Lin as she had
already experienced it. When Lin’s motherasked her “how can we cook this one?”,
Lin responded that she wanted to bake a butterfly cookie. They had baked a
butterfly cookie before and she remembered this.
Further open-ended questions would have supported the development of Lin’s
thinking and language and new motives for conversing in Chinese. For instance,
Lin’s mother could have engaged Lin’s agency by asking her “Can you remember
what we cooked last time? What kind of ingredients did we use?”, which might
have stimulated her memory and engaged her in expressing her previous experience
and thoughts in Chinese. Her instructions may have oriented Lin’s heritage lan-
guage development in the future. However, the yes/no questions Lin’s mother
asked, did not provide an opportunity for Lin to speak Chinese in ways that might
move her intentions forward.
Unfortunately, Lin’s new motive in using Chinese was not developed through
the baking process as her mother did not consider taking Lin’s perspective or
understand her expectations of what she could contribute to the baking experience.
A child’s social situation of development in an activity setting is always potential
and to be realized that the child needs to be an agent with their own interpretations
of the demands in the activity, and have intentional responses to those demands
(Chap. 1; Hedegaard, 2012). Lin was not able to explain her own response to the
94 L. Li
demands in the activity of baking. Her mother was unable to create this condition in
the activity setting by only offering instructional responses to Lin.
6.7.2 The Achieved Collective Engagement
In the next excerpt, the productive father–child interaction at the end of the baking
sequence is examined. Here, we saw much more opportunity for Lin to engage and
use her Chinese in solving problems set by her father. She was no longer dealing
with restricted responses from an adult.
It was time to take the cookies out of the oven. They were very hot and they could not be
eaten right away. Lin was eating an apple. While they were waiting, Lin’s father asked:
Father: 你算算看,这里有几个? <Can you count how many cookies are on the plate?>
Lin counted the cookies one by one on the plate by using her pointer finger.
Lin: 要数的吗?1, 2, 3,… 9. <Do I need to count them? One, two, three… nine>
Father: 九个啊。如果妹妹吃了一个,那还剩几个? <If your sister has one cookie, how
many cookies will be left?>
Lin: 她…这一个。 <She… this one.>
She started counting again.
…
Lin was very happy to tell her father that there would be eight cookies. It seemed
that she liked counting numbers. Lin’s father asked a question which was more
difficult than the one before. Her father introduced the concept of counting to her
through a series of questions, which developed her thinking.
Father:还剩8个了。那我们现在有几个人? <Okay. Eight cookies left. How many people
are in this room?>
Mother: 算算看,我们现在有几个人哦。一个人吃一个还是两个? <Count how many
people are here. Can one person have one or two cookies?>
Father: 你刚刚算过了,一共有九个饼干。对不对?(Lin nodded her head to say ‘yes’。)
那我们现在有几个人呢? <You have counted the cookies just now. There are nine
cookies, right? How many people do we have here now?>
Lin started to count.
Lin: 1,2,3,4,5, 6. 6个人. <Six people.>
She pointed one by one and counted.
Father: 6 个人啊,6个人,一个人可以吃几个?
<Six people. How many cookies can each person eat?> [Her father was happy with her
counting.]
Mother: 算错了,不能吃哦。好,你快算。 <Okay. You won’t eat it if you calculate it
wrongly. Okay. Quickly count it.>
[Lin counted the number of the people again as her mother pushed her.]
6 Supporting Heritage Language Development … 95
Lin: 1,2,3,4,5,6. <One, two, three… six. > …
Father: 哦,那是六个人,可是这里有九个饼干。那一个人可以吃几个?你要不要分看
看? <Okay. Six people. But we only have nine cookies. Then, how many cookies can each
one eat? What about distributing the cookies to each person and see what happens?>
[Lin was thinking and looking at her parents.]
Lin: 要分个人一个 <We need to give one to person.>
Father: 九个分给六个人,一个人可以吃几个? < Nine cookies to six people, how many
cookies can each person eat?>
…
It can be seen that what she said was, “We need to give one to person” which is
not clearly expressed in Chinese. It should be “We need to give one to each person”.
Her father did not directly correct her, instead, he used an explanatory talk to
explain his question in Chinese again that “Nine cookies to six people, how many
cookies can each person eat?”. This showed that the communication between Lin
and her father in daily household activities allowed her father to pay attention to her
expression in Chinese and also gave Lin a chance to perform her Chinese in
everyday use.
Lin was interested in the distribution of the cookies. Her father asked her
questions which became harder and harder. For example, If Meimei has one cookie,
how many cookies will be left? The increasingly difficult questions created a situ-
ation in which Lin could explore mathematical knowledge by understanding the
questions in Chinese and expressing her thoughts. She was interested in the
counting activity because she contributed to the cookie baking and she had expe-
rience in distributing the objects. Her father used Lin’s motive orientation in baking
to support her new motive of mathematics concept development. She was able to
both express her ideas and perform her Chinese. This echoes Hedegaard’s (2012)
statement that adults “use small children’s motive orientation toward contact and
tenderness to appeal to and motivate them for new activities” (p.135).
The collective engagement has been developed as Lin’s father took Lin’s per-
spective of being interested in counting and baking, set up the mathematics learning
activity through the open-ended questions, which also allowed Lin to experience
Chinese language environment. Lin’s motive orientation in cooking was sustained
and extended to develop a new motive in counting the cookies and thinking in
Chinese. Lin and her father through their shared thinking space, created the col-
lective knowledge in mathematic contexts. Hedegaard’s wholeness approach sug-
gests that the father’s parenting style could well have reflected his experience in
studying in Australia, searching early childhood education literature and consulting
the professional experts in language development.
96 L. Li
6.8 Conclusion
In drawing upon Hedegaard’s (2012) wholistic model of children’s learning and
development, it has been possible to analyze within a home activity setting where
baking was ostensibly the focus activity, the different ways in which Lin’s family
maintained their Chinese heritage language at home. The study found that the
different ways parents interacted with Lin in the activity setting provide different
opportunities for Lin to participate in the conversation in Chinese at home.
Uniquely, Hedegaard’s concept of activity setting made it possible to notice how
Lin experienced Chinese heritage language differently, depending upon which
parent was interacting with her around the baking of the cookies. It was found that
in the same activity setting, different demands were made upon Lin, and these
demands oriented her differently to Chinese heritage language development. But to
fully understand the demands and motives expressed through the interactions in the
same activity setting, it was also important to include in the analysis the societal,
institutional, and personal perspectives, as detailed in Hedegaard’s model.
In following the perspective of the child, it became possible to notice the child’s
motives, intentions, and responses to both parents’ participation. As Chaiklin
(2012) discussed, “motive is both an individual and collective concept. Individuals
can have motives, but the individuality of motives is always within the fabric of
societal practice.” (p. 219). This study suggests that the individual perspective can
be realized when the child’s own motives are connected to the activity in the
activity setting. The interactions between the parents and Lin in the same activity
setting were expressed differently based on thevalues and beliefs of the parents.
These reflected their experiences of societal and institutional practices and could be
seen in how they supported their daughter’s bilingual heritage language.
Through the institutional perspectives, by isolating one activity setting, it was
possible to discern how both Lin’s parents created the conditions to support Lin’s
heritage language development through the activities of baking and counting.
However, their active participation and pedagogy was different due to their personal
educational background and beliefs about education. The mother’s direct instruc-
tional talk might be interpreted through her educational experience in Taiwan and
Chinese cultural values in education. In traditional families, children are expected to
follow parents’ instructions without discussion as the Chinese believe that children
need to respect their parents’ decision (Fees, Hoover & Zheng, 2014: 236). In
modern Chinese families, although parents are more flexible and lenient, they are
still strict. Lin’s father, on the other hand, was engaged in a master’s course at
university in Australia during the data collection period and as he explained, he had
studied child development and read articles about parenting. He also communicated
with his younger sister in the US, who has expertise in linguistics, in relation to
supporting Lin’s bilingual language development. The educational experience of
the father in Australia and his personal reading and efforts were reflected in his
parenting style. Therefore, when employing the activity setting as an analytical
concept it becomes possible to explain parents’ actions and Lin’s insights in the
6 Supporting Heritage Language Development … 97
demands of institutional practices. In doing so, the hidden values and beliefs that
come into play around the activities in an activity setting become visible and we are
able to see how shifts in interaction patterns occur as immigrant families begin to
absorb the demands of the cultures they are entering.
The detailed analysis that can be undertaken when focusing on one activity
setting also, therefore, gives access to the societal perspective on child develop-
ment. What can be seen within the activity setting was how the family values from
the Chinese community were reflected through the actions of Lin’s parents. Yet at
the same time, ways of interacting modeled by the father were pointing to possi-
bilities for nontraditional pedagogies to accomplish the use of heritage language.
Finally, I turn to the question of motive and motive orientation to reflect on the
findings. The different perspectives of analysis promoted by a wholeness approach
revealed that the institutional demands can become children’s personal motives
within an activity setting. When children join an activity setting in an institution
such as family life, the demands adults have for the particular activities might be
very different to the motive the child had for entering into this activity setting
(Fleer, 2014). When the adults understand and align their actions with children’s
motive orientation in the particular activity setting, and take children’s perspective,
children’s new motive orientation/ideal motive development will be achieved. Both
parents’ interaction patterns with Lin were very different in the activity setting in
this study. Although they shared the same aims in relation to Lin’s heritage lan-
guage development, the demands they made on her were different. Lin’s mother’s
active participation using direct talk could not build a motivational situation to
allow Lin to actively participate in problem-solving and engage her in Chinese
language use. In contrast, Lin’s father understood Lin’s motive orientation when he
actively participated in the activity setting with her, so that the appropriate support
was offered to extend the shared thinking. Consequently, collective engagement
was achieved, indicating that Lin’s father, by taking Lin’s perspective in relation to
the baking, supported her development of motives in a new activity—counting.
Through achieving collective engagement, the child’s motives and her father’s
perspectives became aligned. This echoes Fleer’s (2012) argument that “the view of
motives foregrounds the institutional perspective, but also the child’s perspective”
(p.92). Children’s desires and initiation of an activity encourage parents’ engage-
ment in the activity setting and vice versa, parents’ demands and support motivate
children’s engagement. What can be learned from this is that through the active
participation in children’s activity, children’s motive orientation must be actively
considered by their parents. Importantly, this can be reflected by collective com-
munication in the activity setting. It confirms Hedegaard’s (2008) argument that a
child’s development of motives is dialectically related to his/her creation of
activities in practices with different demands. Therefore, pedagogically having a
sound understanding of the child’s motive orientation is the key to achieve col-
lective engagement in order to support children’s learning.
98 L. Li
However, as this study shows, this collective engagement is not easily achieved,
when different traditions meet within changing institutional practices, and therefore
present different demands on the child at the analytic level of the activity setting. By
focusing on an activity setting within the institutional practice of one family and
examining the perspectives and intentions of the parents as well as of the child, we
are able to identify some of the conflicting demands that different cultural-historical
traditions bring to bear on the developing child.
Acknowledgements I would like to show my gratitude to Professor Marilyn Fleer, who provided
invaluable support as supervisor of my doctoral research from which this chapter was developed.
I would like to thank all the editors for their comments and contribution to this chapter. I also
acknowledge my three researched families’ participation and thank them for welcoming me to
video-observe their everyday activities. Feedback on earlier versions of the chapter by colleagues
(Dr. Avis Ridgway and Dr. Feiyan Chan) was very much appreciated.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0300443961230111
Chapter 7
Motives and Demands in Parenting
Young Children: A Cultural-Historical
Account of Productive Entanglement
in Early Intervention Services
Nick Hopwood
Abstract Parent–child interactions significantly influence children’s development.
Focusing on parenting practices is therefore a crucial means to disrupt trajectories
characterised by risk or disadvantage. Hedegaard’s approach to understanding
children’s development looks at the interplay between society, institution and
person, foregrounding motives and demands in practice. Her associated valuable set
of analytical resources can be used to go beyond previous cultural-historical
accounts of expertise in partnership-based early intervention services. This chapter
proposes the notion of partnership as a productive entanglement between institu-
tional practices of the family and those of early intervention. Such entanglement is
constituted in an emergent and expansive pedagogic practices of noticing, attaching
significance and attributing agency. This offers a new way to conceptualise rela-
tional work between professions and families.
Keywords Expertise � Pedagogy � Noticing � Partnership � Emergence
7.1 Introduction
Parent–child interactions significantly influence children’s development. Focusing on
parenting practices is therefore a crucial means to disrupt trajectories affected by
adverse circumstances. Societal commitment to support children at risk is often
enacted through early intervention services that focus on preschool years.
Hedegaard’s approach to understanding children’s development looks at the interplay
between society, institution and person. In early intervention settings, professionals
become involved in the institution of the family for a period of time. This chapter
N. Hopwood (&)
University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia
e-mail: nick.hopwood@uts.edu.au
N. Hopwood
University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
A. Edwards et al. (eds.), Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning
and Development, Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_7
101
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_7&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_7&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_7&amp;domain=pdf
mailto:nick.hopwood@uts.edu.au
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_7
outlines an expansive and emergent pedagogic practice found in diverse early in-
tervention settings, discussing how this addresses motives and demands—another
hallmark of Hedegaard’s work. Through noticing, attaching significance and
attributing agency to parents, professionals bring institutional practices of the family
and those of intervention into a productive entanglement that resolves important
practical problems. Framing this in cultural-historical terms addresses conceptual
gaps relating to the use of specialist expertise in work with families.
7.2 Early Intervention for Children at Risk
Australian state and territory governments are committed to providing all children
with the best possible start in life (DEEWR, 2009). Given that the first 5 years are
pivotal in children’s development, services for children and families increasingly
adopt a risk and prevention approach (France & Utting, 2005; see also Edwards,
2009), seeking to identify risks and buffer against them by building up protective
factors. In New South Wales (NSW), where the study was conducted, different
service levels are activated in response to increased risk and progressively complex
circumstances, from universal services, to early intervention and prevention, to
coordinated team management of the most complex cases (NSW Health, 2010).
Families in the study were mainly in the middle of these categories, though some
were referred to the highest level.
In Australia, socio-economic disadvantage is strongly associated with adverse
effects on children’s development (AEDC, 2016). Other risk factors often co-occur
with disadvantage but also arise in other circumstances, including domestic and
family violence, child protection issues, substance abuse, neglect, parent disability,
current or history of mental illness, anxiety, and challenges associated with chronic
fatigue and feelings of helplessness (NSW Health, 2010).
Relationships between children’s development and these risk factors are amenable
to change. Parenting practices, familyroutines, home learning and psychosocial
environments are particularly important (Kelly, Sacker, Del Bono, Francesconi, &
Marmot, 2011). Early intervention can strengthen protective factors within the
institution of the family by fostering secure parent–child attachment, parents’
capacity and their confidence, but this only works if the intervention takes hold in
families. Institutional practices of early intervention and those of particular families
are therefore co-implicated in meeting the needs of families with children at risk.
This means that services cannot simply step in and solve problems on behalf of
parents. Empowering, respectful and negotiated partnerships are needed (Day, Ellis,
& Harris, 2015), and are encouraged in early childhood policy across Australia
(COAG, 2009). Partnership implies a relational approach, joint decision-making,
and building parents’ agency (Hook, 2006). Trust building, listening to parents’
concerns and valuing their knowledge are hallmarks of this approach (Smith,
Swallow, & Coyne, 2015). Partnership has been embedded in institutional practices
of early intervention through adoption of specific models such as the Family
102 N. Hopwood
Partnership Model or FPM (Day et al., 2015). The FPM has been implemented in
NSW and across Australia, and all professionals involved in this study had com-
pleted FPM Foundation Training. This focuses on enhancing skills and qualities
including active listening, authenticity, showing unconditional positive regard and
empathy (see Day et al., 2015). Partnership is contrasted with ‘expert’ approaches
in which professionals dominate, set the agenda, solve problems on clients’ behalf
or tell clients what to do. Hopwood (2017b) contrasts partnership and expert-led
models on cultural-historical terms, highlighting how solutions emerge through
complex processes of professional–client collaboration.
Working in partnership presents significant challenges relating to the use of
professional expertise. Building genuine partnerships is ‘hard work’ (McDonald,
O’Byrne, & Prichard, 2015), compounded by the need to challenge parents.
Challenge can arise in relation to expanding possible interpretations of a problem,
addressing concerns for children’s safety, or as part of encouraging parents to try
something unfamiliar and perhaps anxiety provoking. The outcomes of suggested
changes are never known or guaranteed, so challenge also presents a risk of effort
not matched by expected progress, which can erode parents’ confidence or lead
them to disengaging from services (Hopwood, 2016).
Studies in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands have found professionals to be
unsure of how to wield their expertise, especially when challenging parents
(Fowler, Lee, Dunston, Chiarella, & Rossiter, 2012; Harris, Wood, & Day, 2014;
van Houte, Bradt, Vanderbroek, & Bouverne-De Bie, 2015). Professionals can
experience a tension between recognising the value and relevance of their specialist
knowledge, and the desire not to be a ‘bossy expert’ but rather support parents to be
enablers of change through developing agency. The result is that professionals
report ‘getting stuck’ in the relationship, struggling to go beyond ‘being nice’ to
parents (Rossiter, Fowler, Hopwood, Lee, & Dunston, 2011). There is a need to
empirically document and conceptualise how specialist expertise can be put to work
effectively within the context of partnerships between professionals and clients.
7.3 Conceptualising Expertise in Partnership
Questions of expertise in partnership have been explored through cultural-historical
perspectives, showing the dynamics of intervention to be responsive to current
conditions and targeted just ahead of parents’ existing capacity. In an ethnographic
study, Vygotskian concepts of the zone of proximal development and scaffolding
explained how professionals judged when and how much to challenge parents, what
supports were needed, and how to withdraw those supports effectively (Hopwood,
2016).
Other accounts have captured forms of expertise complementing specialist
knowledge in partnership with parents. Early data from the Creating Better Futures
study showed how professionals draw on distinctive knowledge and capacities as
they move between locating and orienting change, creating new meanings for
7 Motives and Demands in Parenting Young Children … 103
change, engaging in live parenting activity with parents, and planning for change
beyond particular visits or appointments (Hopwood & Clerke, 2016; Clerke et al.,
2017). Applying a Vygotskian model of double stimulation (Sannino, 2015)
showed how professionals sometimes have to recognise conflicts of motives, and
frame the intervention around tools that help parents regain volition action in situ-
ations where they are pulled in opposing directions (Hopwood & Gottschalk, 2017).
Edwards’ (2010, 2017) work on relational expertise, common knowledge and
relational agency is relevant. These concepts originated as labels given to aspects of
expertise exercised by practitioners in the accomplishment of effective
inter-professional work (Edwards, 2017). Analysing data from a residential par-
enting service, Hopwood (2017a, b) showed how relational expertise, common
knowledge and relational agency formed an intra-mediated problem of practice
through which professionals used narratives in handovers to overcome epistemic
dilemmas relating to uncertainty in complex work with families. The idea of
relational expertise—a capacity to work relationally with others on complex
problems—highlights how complex relational work requires forms of expertise that
augment rather than displace specialist knowledge. It is about expanding inter-
pretations of problems, knowing how to recognise the expertise of others and being
able to make one’s own expertise explicit (Edwards, 2017). The pedagogic practice
of noticing, significance and attribution depends on precisely such capacities.
Common knowledge concerns being able to recognise and understand the
standpoints and motives of others, and can become a resource that mediates col-
laborative work. This concept emerged in a study of relationships between pro-
fessionals and clients in a women’s drop-in centre (Edwards & Mackenzie, 2005),
before being taken up in a study of inter-agency collaboration (Edwards, 2011).
Hopwood and Edwards (2017) returned the focus to professional–client interac-
tions, explaining how partnership depends crucially on work done to reveal what
matters to parents and align responses to this.
A preliminary connection between the concept of common knowledge and a
Hedegaardian approach in the context of early intervention parenting services was
made by Hopwood and Clerke (in press). Professional expertise can be used to
build common knowledge between parents and their children as a mediational
means to help parents support children through difficult transitions. This highlights
the importance of understanding children’s motives and what is demanded of them
in navigating such transitions, although these motives and demands are often far
from clear to parents. By making them visible, early intervention can help parents
construct a different social situation of development in which the agency of the
child is fostered.
A pedagogic practice based on noticing, significance and attribution was found
to be widespread across diverse intervention approaches (Hopwood, 2016;
Hopwood, Clerke, & Nguyen, 2018). However, it has not been fully connected to
the cultural-historical work described here, nor conceptualised in these terms, hence
this chapter.
104 N. Hopwood
7.4 A Hedegaardian Approach
Central to the Vygotskian spirit is the idea that concepts change in their use, and
that scholarly concepts are refashioned when to put to work, in particular, empirical
projects (Edwards, 2017). Thus, a Hedegaardian approach is one that takes up key
principles and concepts from Hedegaard’s work (Hedegaard, 2012, 2014; see
Edwards, Fleer, & Bøttcher, this volume),but which adapts and appropriates them
in working on specific analytical and practical problems.
Hedegaard’s ‘wholeness approach’ foregrounds children’s perspectives (espe-
cially motives) and institutional practices in understanding their development
(Hedegaard, in press). This chapter follows the principle of studying everyday
settings in order to understand the social situation of children’s development
(Hedegaard, Fleer, Bang, & Hviid, 2008). The practice of noticing, significance and
attribution connects interactions between parents and professionals with those
between parents and their children, which shaper the child’s social situation of
development. The social situation of development refers to a system of relations
between a subject and her surroundings. These relations include motives but also
demands arising in that social environment and ways the subject responds to them
(Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2011). By tracing how what professionals notice is imbued
with significance and linked to parents’ agency, this chapter addresses motives and
demands of children, parents and professionals, connecting with Hedegaard’s
(2012) planes of analysis, outlined in Table 7.1.
Relationships between these planes are key to understanding the dynamic ten-
sion between agency of the developing child (or person) and demands and affor-
dances of an activity setting (Hedegaard & Edwards, 2014).
By distinguishing between practice and activity one can better see the inner relation
between a child’s activities and the societal conditions as mediated by the institutional
objectives of practices (Hedegaard, 2012: 12).
In this chapter, societal conditions concern relationships between risks and
children’s developmental trajectories, and the institutional objectives of practices
are those of early intervention services and those of the family. The activity settings
are situations of everyday parenting (such as settling a child for sleep) and those of
specific early intervention approaches (see below). The motives of the child, parent
and professional are all in play at an (inter)personal level.
Table 7.1 Planes of analysis of dynamic relations
Entity Process Dynamic
Society Tradition/political economy Societal needs/conditions
Institution Practice Value motive/objectives
Activity setting Situation Motivation/demands
Person Activity Motive/intentions
Hedegaard (2012)
7 Motives and Demands in Parenting Young Children … 105
Although the framework was originally developed with a focus on children’s
intentional actions at and between home and school (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2008), it
has proved useful in studies of professional work and as a reflective tool for
practitioners (see Edwards, 2017). Intervention grounded in of noticing, signifi-
cance and attribution addresses learning arising through a dialectic in which de-
mands inherent in activity are recognised and engaged intentionally.
7.5 Empirical Study
This chapter draws on data from the Creating Better Futures study (Hopwood et al.,
2018; Hopwood & Edwards, 2017; Hopwood & Gottschalk, 2017). It focuses on
observation data from three approaches to early intervention: home visiting, day
stay, and a toddler clinic, delivered by three Local Health Districts across Sydney.
A total of 67 appointments or visits were observed, involving 19 nurses and 60
parents from 58 families (both the mother and father attended in two instances,
otherwise, only the mother and child/children were present). All were targeted
services (offered as a result of one or more risks to a child being identified), free of
charge to families and accessed voluntarily by parents.
Home visiting services take diverse forms. Universal approaches typically offer
one or two visits by a nurse or midwife to all known mothers close to birth. Those
studied here offer further support over 2 to 12 months for parents of children from a
few weeks old to around 3 years of age where additional risks are identified. Visits
last up to 2 h, focusing on breastfeeding, sleep and settling, difficulties adjusting to
parenting, and (less frequently) toddler management. Thirty-two home visits were
observed.
Day stay services are delivered in clinics that host multiple families simulta-
neously, and comprise nurseries, a playroom, lounge space and consultation rooms.
The intervention is completed within 2 months over the course of two or three visits
of 5 to 7 h. During a visit, parents are supported by a nurse but often also access
appointments with a counsellor or social worker. The issues addressed are similar to
those of home visiting, again focusing on newborns to toddlers. Visits to 25
families were observed.
The toddler clinic is equipped with playrooms and linked observation rooms. It
is offered to parents with children aged between 15 months and 4 years of age, and
involves a 12-week program of 1 h, weekly visits, based on parent–child interaction
therapy (PCIT; Hembree-Kigin & McNeil, 1995). The first visit explores the
challenges parents are facing, which typically relate to conduct disorder, physical or
verbal aggression, hyperactivity, sibling rivalry, tantrums or anxiety and with-
drawal. Most subsequent visits begin with parents playing with their child, observed
by the nurse, and then a period of coaching as the nurse watches, prompting the
parent through an earpiece. The nurse then joins the family in the playroom for a
more open discussion, giving feedback, and planning approaches to take in the
home over the coming week.
106 N. Hopwood
7.6 An Expansive, Emergent Pedagogic Practice
A particular practice was found to be widespread in these home visiting, day stay
and toddler clinic services (Hopwood et al., 2018). It involves professionals
noticing something in what is happening or what parents say, making the signifi-
cance of this explicit to parents and attributing agency to parents in terms of past
accomplishments or capacity to secure desired change in the future. This reveals the
complexity of children’s activities in different practices (Hedegaard, 2014) and has
both expansive and emergent qualities.
The notion of expansion opens the analytical gaze to how people create meaning
in collaboration (Kaptelinin, Vadeboncoeur, Gajdamaschko, & Nardi, 2017). Often
associated with cycles of learning in activity systems (Engeström, 2001), expansion
is also key to understanding learning in terms of ‘within-person changes, which
modify the way in which we interpret and may act on our worlds… we are both
shaped by and shape our worlds… the mind looks out on the world. Interpreting it
and acting on it’ (Edwards, 2005a: 50).
The capacity to transform the world depends on expanding interpretations and
then acting on the basis of those interpretations (Edwards, 2005b). Working on an
object, such as the trajectory of a child at risk, involves understandings of the
trajectory being expanded so that more of its complexity can be seen (Edwards,
2017). Relational expertise is needed in order to collectively expand the object, and
the development of agency through joint action with others involves both learning
how to access the interpretations and support of others, and how to offer inter-
pretations and support to others (when examined at the level of person in activity
setting; Edwards & Mackenzie, 2005; Edwards, 2007).
The practice under examination here is also emergent. Chaiklin (2012) connects
the orientation to change that characterises cultural-historical work with an ana-
lytical purpose of revealing how possibility emerges. ‘What can be’ is not deter-
mined prior to any particular activity, but comes into being through it. Emergence
cues analytical attention to complex dynamics and histories of change, and
addresses responsive and non-routine qualities of collaborative work on complex
problems (Edwards, 2017).
An ethnographic study of a residential service showed how professionals’
attunement to what was happening around them provided a basis for important
pedagogic work (Hopwood, 2016; 2017c).This transformed something that might
be overlooked by parents, or regarded as insignificant or even a failure, into
something overt, meaningful and affirming of parents’ agency. Understandings of
children’s development, participation in practices and how parents’ actions connect
with these were expanded, in line with professional motives to build on parents’
existing strengths, enhance guided change processes and challenge parents.
These motives arise in particular activity settings, reflecting institutional objec-
tives to offer strength-based interventions through partnership with parents. For
example, a nurse noticed a child retaining a dummy while settling for sleep,
remarking ‘You’ve done an excellent job helping him associate the dummy with
7 Motives and Demands in Parenting Young Children … 107
sleep’ – imbuing the significance of association, and clearly attributing the accom-
plishment to the parent. This built on the mother’s existing strengths. Motives to
drive guided change framed a different example, when a nurse was working on a
child’s feeding: ‘It’s important that you stay relaxed around eating times. Right now
she’s trying the food, and you’re helping her do that because she can see you’re not
stressed’. Motives to challenge unhelpful constructs when necessary were also served
by the same sequence, often by expanding meanings in situations parents regarded as
failures, as when they ended up breastfeeding a child to sleep: ‘Even though you
breast fed in the end, you had all that time trying something different. That has given
her a chance to learn. Each time you do this, you help her to settle’.
Analysis of data from home visiting, day stay and toddler clinics revealed over
1500 instances of noticing, explaining significance and attribution across all 67
observed interactions (Hopwood et al., 2018). Noticing was not confined to what
was happening at the moment (through a sensory channel, illustrated in the
examples above), but also drew on what parents said (a reported channel), typically
about what happened in the past or since the last meeting. The excerpts below
exemplify the latter.
Mother: I’m soothing her, taking her to listen to the tap running, whatever works!
Nurse: So you’re finding what you can do to ease her stress levels. [Home visiting]
Mother: One time I got upset so I gave him to my mum and he was fine
Nurse: You’re very insightful, you can tell what he needs very well. [Day stay]
Mother: He says “Stop talking!” when you’re trying to encourage him
Nurse: It’s good you’ve identified that, so you can put that back with a praise: “I love
talking with you, I love spending time with you, you’re so much fun”. [Toddler clinic].
Noticing often focused directly on the child, including actions such as lifting the
head and crawling, facial expressions such as smiling, and sets of cues that implied
states such as hunger, tiredness and alertness. Much attention was paid to inter-
actions between parents and children, noticing children’s response to their parents,
the ways parents interpreted their child’s cues and particular qualities of interactions
such as warmth, calmness or signs of parent–child attachment. Noticing also
focused on parents’ actions (like placing cushions or toys in a cot), or beliefs about
their capacity as parents.
7.7 Productive Entanglement that Addresses Motives
and Demands
The study found that institutional practices of early intervention become produc-
tively entangled with those of the family through the practice of noticing,
explaining significance and attributing agency. This addresses motives and de-
mands not just in relation to children, but also parents and the professionals sup-
porting them.
108 N. Hopwood
7.7.1 Motives and Demands—Children
Expansive noticing made children’s motives explicit and helped parents understand
what particular situations demand of children. In other words, it revealed the
complexity of children’s activities in different everyday practices such as feeding,
sleeping and playing. This expanded interpretation infuses everyday situations with
new meanings, enabling parents to act in ways that align with these motives and
help the child meet particular demands. A day stay nurse noticed a child toddling
into another room, saying:
She’ll come back to you, you’re that secure base for her. She’s exploring the world now,
but coming back to you. Actually the same is important in settling. It’s like a separation for
her. She needs to know you are around.
The nurse’s comments were an emergent response to the child’s actions in an
activity setting that comprised adult talk about settling, and the child in play. She
expanded meanings of child’s action in terms of the parent as a secure base, and
made a connection to the activity setting of settling. The nurse explained why
settling might be hard for the child, highlighting what matters to the child in this
situation. This then opened up a conversation about what the parent could do to
help her daughter know she is around and feel safe. Having shown the child’s
secure attachment and confidence in the world by drawing explicit attention to her
toddling away, the nurse secured commitment and confidence in the mother trying
approaches to settling that gave the child opportunities to learn to settle indepen-
dently, with a parent always available when needed.
In a day stay, parents who sought support with breastfeeding and settling
described how they had a toy mobile over their child’s cot, switching it on when
they put their son down for sleep. This feature of institutional practices of the family
was noticed and expanded. The nurse explained how babies can find it hard to calm
down, struggling to turn away from stimulation. She stressed how much of a
difference the parents could make to the settling process by making settling a calm
practice through removing stimulation. Taking the mobile away and darkening the
room became concrete actions that helped the child meet the demands of the
situation. She then remarked on what was happening right at the moment, char-
acterising the ongoing breastfeed as ‘a beautifully calm feed’. This connected
reports and prospects of settling activity with the live activity of feeding by high-
lighting an accomplishment of the parent (producing calm interactions) that was
relevant to both.
Parent–child interaction therapy is based on an understanding that regulating
behaviour in the activity setting of play is demanding for toddlers. Demands stem
from expectations to avoid physical aggression, share, cope when play comes to an
end and comply with requests from parents. While this was explained in a more
general sense near the beginning of the toddler clinic program, productive
7 Motives and Demands in Parenting Young Children … 109
entanglement with the institutional practices of the family came about when parents
and children were actually playing together. During each visit, the nurse would
notice signs that children were meeting these demands in a live activity setting of
coached play. Interpretation of these signs was expanded and imbued with sig-
nificance by connecting them to broader ideas about children’s motives (to be in
warm relationships with parents and siblings) and then connected to the parent’s
concrete actions in terms of ‘special play’ (interactions based on specific praise,
reflection of children’s language, imitation and description of the child’s actions
and parents showing enjoyment; Hembree-Kigin & McNeil, 1995).
7.7.2 Motives and Demands—Parents
Expansions of noticing also attuned to parents’ motives, making available resources
that helped them meet the demands of emerging situations. In a home visit, one
mother expressed guilt that she was not able to stop her baby crying, categorising
herself as a failure, asking ‘Why can’t I fix it?’. The nurse observed as the mother
held the child in arms, talked gently to her and swayed. She then pointed out
synchronicity between the mother and child (for example,in their breathing), and
expanded the interpretation of the mother’s actions. Being with the child in these
comforting ways was reframed as meeting all the demands from the child, but this
placed a new demand on the parent to accept that she was doing enough and not
failing her child, and to persist with this way of being together even when it was
hard for her. The activity setting was reoriented from a motive to fix to a motive to
be with:
Nurse: That sense of guilt or failure or wanting to fix it, it’s quite overwhelming. But at the
same time, it’s tapping into all the wonderful things you are doing, and there are some times
when our babies are in such a frantic state that the only thing we can do is be with them.
One example from a day stay focused on how trying new approaches in the
activity of settling was connected to the other practices of the family, and institu-
tional motives regarding adult rest.
Mother: My husband has a manual job, so I want him to get his rest. I need to keep the
family healthy.
Nurse: Yes, that’s really important. But you need your rest, too. You could try some
changes maybe on Friday and Saturday nights.
The nurse confirmed the mother’s motive to keep the family healthy, and built
on the connection the mother had made between this and the demands of working
on ways to settle their child. She expanded it by extending the motive to include the
mother herself, and then offered a way to meet these demands by timing settling
work on nights that fitted the rhythms of other practices in the family.
110 N. Hopwood
The toddler clinic intervention promoted being consistent in moments when
children’s behaviour becomes aggressive or dangerous. Often, a ‘time out’ was
used, placing children somewhere safe, and giving them chance to calm down. This
was recognised as demanding for parents:
Nurse: You may have to wait another three minutes, and then go back. That might be really
hard at that point.
Mother: Yes, because, at the moment, I don’t always do it in the same way. I’ll find that as
soon as I say “You’re not ready” [to come back to play], suddenly he’s very ready.
Nurse: It is hard, I know, to follow through when he’s sort of lost in the middle.
Here, motives connected with the family’s objectives to reduce physical
aggression between an older toddler and younger infant. The demands of being
consistent and taking charge as the adult were recognised by the nurse and built on
by explaining why being consistent is a way of being fair to the child, making the
world predictable.
Parents’ agency was thus built up in relation to shaping the social situation of
development for the child by addressing and affirming parents’ own motives,
recognising what activity settings demand of them through expanded interpretations
of significance, and buttressing their capacity to act as a result of these new
meanings. Fostering parents’ agency in this way depended on professionals being
able to access parents’ interpretations and offer expanded interpretations to support
new forms of action (see Edwards, 2017).
7.7.3 Motives and Demands—Professionals
The widespread and frequent incidence of this practice suggests it is more than an
incidental feature of the institutional practices of early intervention. Arguably, it is
such a pervasive presence because it aligns with and further relevant motives, and
helps professionals meet demands of partnership practice. Its significance in early
intervention lies in addressing dynamics at planes of person, activity setting,
institution and society (see Table 7.1).
Early intervention reflects a general social concern for children’s development.
Institutional practices have developed historically to address this need, organised
around values of partnership with parents and objectives to build capacity in
families. Professionals have motives to resolve immediate dilemmas, help families
in the longer term and to enact partnership as espoused in models such as the FPM.
The demands of practice are to uphold these motives while navigating tensions
relating to their use of expertise.
The example below illustrates how the noticing, explaining significance and
attributing agency provided a pathway through which expertise found expression.
7 Motives and Demands in Parenting Young Children … 111
Mother: He lies there smiling [when I breastfeed]. I try to ignore him. He pulls off and I
don’t look at him.
Nurse: I would encourage you to look at him. That’s what he needs. Feeding is one of those
beautiful moments to catch up. They’re saying “I want you”.
The nurse’s expertise guided what she noticed in the mother’s description of
feeding practices. It then informed the way she imbued mutual gaze with signifi-
cance, articulated in connection to the activity setting by verbalising the child’s
thoughts. Thus, professional expertise found expression through suggestions or
commentaries connected directly everyday activities of the family. Such knowl-
edgeable offerings were not just closely attuned to the contingencies of the family,
but addressed children’s and parents’ motives, and their capacity to meet the de-
mands arising for them. This folded what professionals said firmly into the matters
of concern to parents. In this way, the dilemma of expertise was resolved.
7.8 Conclusion
The expansive practice of noticing, attaching significance and attributing agency
emerges out of professionals’ attunement to and interpretation of what is happening
and what is reported to them by parents. It addresses connections between personal
motives and intentions, motives and demands in activity settings, and matters of
importance to the institutions involved. Thus, the practices of early intervention and
those of the family are brought into productive entanglement. Figure 7.1 presents a
figurative conceptualisation of this. It adapts Hedegaard’s (2012: 11) prior repre-
sentation, capturing the complex dynamics of partnership-based early intervention.
Fig. 7.1 Conceptualising productive entanglement in early intervention
112 N. Hopwood
Professionals face a dilemma in practice relating to the use of expertise in
partnership. The practice of noticing, attaching significance and attributing agency
addresses this in a way that aligns with societal needs to nurture children’s de-
velopment, and institutional objectives to work in partnership and foster positive
change in families through reshaping parenting practices. Crucially, it also aligns
with the motives and personal intentions in particular activity settings that arise in
everyday life of the family. The productive entanglement of practices of families
and early intervention institutions is inherently and intimately tied to motives and
demands. It thus connects professionals and parents dialogically to each other and
to a common good (Edwards, 2017).
Labelling aspects of professional work in this way can support professional
reflection and action (Edwards, 2017). It does not merely describe what profes-
sionals do, but lays out what is demanded of them in practice, shifting from a
dilemma to a specification of demands and description of how they are met in
practice. These demands begin with noticing—the capacity to attune through a
sensory channel to live interactions, and to solicit detailed accounts from others to
create a rich reported channel. Demands extend into making the significance of
what is noticed available as an expansive interpretive resource for parents to work
with and base their actions upon. The final demand involves buttressing these
actions by explicitly attributing agency to parents, either in the accomplishment of
past successes, or of changes yet to be realised.
The practice of noticing, significance and attribution addresses the dialectic of
learning in which demands of activity are recognised and engaged intentionally. It
is so effective because it also addresses dynamic relations between planes of
society, institution, activity setting and person. It functions as a means to accom-plish intentional, motive-driven activity and to further institutional objectives that
respond to pressing social needs.
Hedegaard’s work provides analytical resources that can be used to go beyond
previous cultural-historical accounts of expertise in partnership-based early inter-
vention services. This chapter has done so by proposing the notion of partnership as
a productive entanglement between institutional practices of the family and those of
early intervention. Such entanglement is constituted in an emergent and expansive
pedagogic practice. This provides a new way to conceptualise relational work
between professions and families, not as ‘heroic boundary crossing’ (Edwards,
2017) but showing how practitioners contribute their own specialist expertise when
working in partnership on complex problems.
Acknowledgements This study was funded by the Australian Research Council, project number
DE150100365. Thanks are given to staff and clients from Karitane, Tresillian and Northern
Sydney Local Health District for their support. Teena Clerke and Anne Nguyen contributed to
initial analyses of the practice discussed here.
7 Motives and Demands in Parenting Young Children … 113
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Dordrecht: Springer.
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practices. In M. Goller & S. Paloniemi (Eds.), Agency at work: An agentic perspective on
professional learning and development (pp. 121–140). Dordrecht: Springer.
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Nick Hopwood is Associate Professor at the UTS School of Education, and Extraordinary
Professor at Stellenbosch University Department of Curriculum Studies. His research focuses on
practices and learning, especially in connection with parents and professional education. Drawing
on and extending cultural-historical and practice-theoretical perspectives, Nick is author of
Professional Practice and Learning: Times, Spaces, Bodies, Things (2016, Springer), and has
contributed to numerous volumes exploring issues of agency, learning and relationships at work.
116 N. Hopwood
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12067
Part II
Life in Schools
Chapter 8
The Double Move in Meaningful
Teaching Revisited
Bert van Oers
Abstract It can be argued that the appropriation of academic concepts provides stu-
dents with powerful tools for understanding and improving their life conditions. Since
the works of Davydov in the 1970s on the formation of scientific concepts in primary
school children, studies on meaningful education debated how academically approved
subject matter knowledge can be meaningfully integrated into primary school pupils’
learning. However, Davydov’s solution of going from the abstract to the concrete is
disputable. Hedegaard (The qualitative analysis of the development of theoretical
knowledge and thinking.CambridgeUniversityPress, Cambridge, pp. 293–325, 1995),
Hedegaard (Learning and child development. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 2002)
adjusted Davydov’s approach into a dialectic move from the general to the situation
specific. This is now known as the ‘double move’. The reconciliation of a pupil’s
personal notions and motives with academic concepts is, however, still an issue of
struggle between researchers, teachers, teacher educators and curriculum developers.
Recent re-conceptualisations of the notions of ‘the abstract’, ‘the concrete’ and the
positionof subjectmatter knowledgeyield a revisionof the doublemove.On thebasis of
our implementation of ‘Developmental education’ in primary schools, this article pro-
motes the double move as a dialogic movement between meaning positions of novices
and experts, prompting the recontextualisation of available knowledge and skills.
Keywords Double move � Abstracting � Germ cell � Generalisation � Dialogue
8.1 Schooling as an Answer to the Variety
of Environmental Demands
Human nature is essentially problematic. Human beings are born with limited
capacities to fulfil their own (biological) needs and to deal with the demands and
threats from the direct environment. Human beings need help to cope with their
B. van Oers (&)
Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: bert.van.oers@vu.nl
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
A. Edwards et al. (eds.), Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning
and Development, Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_8
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http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_8&amp;domain=pdf
mailto:bert.van.oers@vu.nl
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_8
immensely varying environment (physical and cultural), as babies, youngsters and
adults. As Bruner (1972) has pointed out, this natural ‘immaturity’ of humankind
has urged the necessity of learning and education in order to adapt to these varying
conditions. Through education, human beings are assisted ‘to achieve knowledge
and skills that are not stored in the gene pool’ (Bruner, 1972, p. 29).
Learning from others how to deal with demands from the environment is vital,
because of the limited capacity of human beings to deal with too much variety. Our
biological system has already built in mechanisms of inhibition that filter out too
much stimuli and pay attention to relevant exigencies. This focus is based on the
ability to form joint attention (with educators and peers), which help us benefit from
the support of more experienced others. In its deepest sense, the need for culture
springs from this limited cognitive capacity to deal with an overwhelmingdiversity
of stimuli and demands from the environment. Culture is an evolving facility of
many generations of human beings to enable themselves to deal effectively with an
overload of stimuli and impressions (see van Oers, 2012a).
One of the oldest intellectual inventions of humankind for handling such variety is
the formation of categories. Categories are cognitively coded facilities that help us
to treat diverse objects as if they are basically the same. With the help of such codes
(e.g. ‘names’) we can treat an enormous diversity of objects as if of one type (e.g.
‘trees’) and distinguish them from other internally diverse categories (e.g. houses).
Most of the time there is no need (for survival or efficient communication) to take
all details into account, which considerably decreases the cognitive demand on the
human system. Over the ages, human beings have spent immense efforts on
improving the categories to make them more powerful for the recognition of
invisible qualities that can be derived from the systematised knowledge connected
with the categories’ name. This ‘going beyond the information given’ (see Bruner,
1973) is only possible when categories are transformed into concepts. Concepts are
universally acknowledged as powerful means for dealing with reality and predicting
its (perceptually hidden) characteristics.
It was Vygotskij’s great contribution to explain the power of categories and
concepts by interpreting them as tools for actions in the humans’ cultural worlds. In
his terminology he dubbed the categories as spontaneous, everyday concepts that
emerge through direct interactions with, and evaluation of, empirical situations;
while the conscious, systematised and generalising categories are called ‘academic
concepts’, which can only be acquired through teaching (see Vygotsky, 1987a).
The inherent systematisation of academic concepts is often based on relationships
with other concepts.
With his famous experiment on concept formation (using the so-called
‘vygotskij-blocks’) Vygotsky (1987a) demonstrated that the role of language is
essential for structuring categories and making them into real concepts. Vygotskij
was, moreover, unambiguous about the relationships of the two types of concepts.
Academic concepts get their (initial) meaning and substance from everyday cate-
gorisations, while the spontaneous everyday categories are structured with the help
of academic concepts, offered by more knowledgeable others. Vygotskij, however,
120 B. van Oers
also warned against too easily concluding that the meaning of our words were
actually academic concepts. In Thinking and speech (ch. five) he writes:
From the perspective of dialectical logic the concepts that we find in our living speech are
not concepts in the true sense of the word. They are actually general representations [i.e.
categories, BvO] of things. There is no doubt, however, that these representations are a
transitional stage between complexes or pseudoconcepts and true concepts. (Vygotsky,
1987a, p 155).
Due to their internal structure, academic concepts are a powerful means for
upgrading word meanings, and uncovering information about the things the con-
cepts can be associated with. By recognising a whale as a mammal, for instance, it
is also possible to ‘know’ that these animals, though living in the sea, will give birth
to their offspring as living creatures, even if we cannot perceive this from the
outside. And from the moment people conceptualised the world as a spherical body,
they could infer that we can never fall off the edge of the world, as many of
Xenophon’s soldiers feared in about 400 years AC.
No wonder human beings spend so much effort on shaping and upgrading their
everyday categories (word meanings) into valid, reliable and powerful concepts.
People specialising in concept development were gradually seen as a special group
in the course of human history, and long since labelled as philosophers or scientists.
The concepts that they produce can be named as scientific concepts. Given the
power of these concepts, it is even more understandable that educators also want to
help their students with upgrading their empirical concepts and everyday word
meanings into scientific concepts, and thus (possibly) improving their participation
in diverse cultural practices.
Hence, scientific concepts essentially require teaching. Vygotskij, however, was
not very explicit in his view on teaching scientific concepts (even though he was a
teacher himself in his 20s!). It is obvious, however, that he found the appropriation
of conceptual and abstract thinking a major task of teaching. According to Wertsch
(1996), this may be due to the fact that he seemed to adhere to Enlightenment
Tenets, suggesting that the use of scientific concepts may lead to an abstract
rationality that leads to uniform intellectual functioning and true understanding of
the world. Scientific concepts could be seen as the ‘telos’ of human thinking.
Wertsch argues, however, that Vygotskij was at least ambiguous about his view of
the future of human thinking. There are reasons to believe that Vygotskij was also
aware of the untenability of this position. Anyway, it is true, as Wertsch points out
(p. 40), that Vygotskij never clearly explained how scientific concepts could be
linked to inner speech and the promotion of conceptual thinking in pupils. In
conclusion, we may say that Vygotskij did not explain in detail how scientific
concepts should be taught. This aspect of his theory was mainly elaborated by his
students, particularly Davydov and El’konin, who, in their collaborative work,
refined this part of the theory from the 1960s onwards.
8 The Double Move in Meaningful … 121
8.2 Davydov’s Approach to Theoretical Thinking and Its
Critiques
Davydov agreed with Vygotskij on the importance of theoretical concepts for the
cultural-historical formation of humankind, and also adhered to the Enlightenment
project that aims at universal knowledge of reality. Davydov, however, criticised
Vygotskij for neglecting the importance of subject matter in a theory of teaching
theoretical concepts. Theoretical concepts represent the highest level of thinking at
a certain stage of history, according to Davydov. Therefore, theoretical concepts are
vital for linking students’ perceptually driven understandings to the deep under-
standings produced by science, and thus learners’ development of thinking benefits
from cultural history.
Davydov published his seminal work on concept formation in 1972 in a book
called (translated) ‘Types of generalisation in teaching’ in which he discussed his
research undertaken with colleagues (e.g. Ajdarova, El’konin and others) on the
development of a generalised theory of concept formation. Following Vygotskij
and strongly influenced by Il’enkov (1960, 1964), Davydov maintained that
teaching students to think is the main purpose of education and the best way to
harmonise the development of pupils’ thinking with the cultural-historical devel-
opment of human thought. Hence, it was necessary to provide pupils with the
outcomes of modern scientific-technological work (Davydov, 1967; 1972, p. 369–
376). More particularly, this meant that students should be assisted to learn how to
go beyond their primitive understandings of the world in terms of superficial,
perceptual categories (empirical concepts) and rather learn to approach reality on
the basis of ‘substantial, really human reflective, dialectical thinking’ (Davydov,
1972, p. 285), based on deep understanding of the basic and universal relationships
that underlie human praxis. Consequently, they could conceive of the world as a
process of development of objects rooted in a universal image of its concrete nature.
(p. 287).
Davydov (1972, pp. 368–373) maintained that this educational purpose can be
achieved by teaching the students the academic concepts in a way that makes sense
to them and is based on pupils’ concrete actions with the help of theoretical models
that are providedto them by the teacher as tools for action. The core of this
teaching-learning process (‘obučenie’) exists in the exposition (izloženie) of the
subject matter in a genetic system that can describe the subject matter as a
movement from an abstract fundamental, universal core concept (i.e. the germ cell,
kletočka) to a system of derived (more specified) sub-concepts. Hence, for example,
mathematical subject matter could in Davydov’s point of view, be interpreted as a
conceptual system derived from basic mathematical ‘mother structures’ to more
122 B. van Oers
specific theoretical concepts.1 This process is called ascending from the abstract to
the concrete, and it is used as a model for thinking about subject matter and
learning. Actually, in matters of teaching and scientific research, the whole process
also includes the reverse: exploring the concrete (in its multifaceted complexity)
and constructing a universal abstract. True knowledge must always be grounded in
empirical facts (Davydov, 1972, p, 305; see also Falmange, 1995, pp. 205–228 for
an elaborate analysis of the abstract and the concrete in dialectic logic).
Over the years, Davydov’s approach has encountered many critical analyses,
especially as a theory of teaching. First of all the notion of the abstract as the unit
which interrelates the general and specific qualities of concrete reality, and which
should be conceived of as an ideal, universal and true representation of a cultural or
physical object. It is evident that Davydov comes close to an essentialist concept of
knowledge, even though one of his main philosophical sources (e.g. Il’enkov, 1960)
was very sceptical about the possibility of such universals. Leaving aside the
epistemological discussions of this view, we have to discuss his use of this idea of
‘abstract’ in his theory of teaching. As we saw above, Davydov conceived of
teaching theoretical concepts as a process of ascending from an abstract to concrete
specifications or derivations of this abstract. In subject matter issues, he propagated
the starting point of the development of theoretical thinking as a process starting
from a germ cell which he interpreted as a general, primary abstraction which could
produce all concrete specifications of a whole domain. It was the cultural function
of science to explore concrete reality and find out the primary abstractions for the
true explanation of this part of reality. Hence, teaching theoretical thinking must
start out from this germ cell (general abstraction) and progress along the lines of
specific concepts that emerge from further (conceptual and empirical) analyses of
the germ cell.
Davydov and his colleagues have demonstrated the power of this approach in
primary school in different subject matter domains (especially mathematics and
language education, summarised in Davydov, 1972, 1996). All examples of these
successful programs, however, show that the students can (creatively) use the
theoretical concepts, but no examples can be found where they were themselves
theorising concrete reality. The students acquired a system of theoretical concepts,
indeed, but did not learn to theorise! In all cases, the primary abstraction was
offered by the teacher, handed out, indeed, in ways that could be adopted by the
(young) pupils for solving more or less isolated (though comprehensible) problems,
such as measuring the classroom. In line with this criticism, experts on didactics of
subject matter domains are very reluctant to state whether a whole disciplinary
domain (like mathematics, biology, linguistics, etc.) can ever be reduced to one core
1Davydov followed the ideas of a French collective of mathematicians, working under the name of
Bourbaki, who were trying to reduce the whole of mathematics to a limited number of so-called
‘mother structures’: algebraic structures, ordering structures and topological structures (see
Davydov, 1972, p. 262). This shows Davydov’s inclination towards structuralism and a universal
abstract rationalism that we hinted on previously in Vygotskij’s work.
8 The Double Move in Meaningful … 123
basic concept (substantial abstraction or germ cell). The Dutch mathematician and
didactician of mathematics education, Freudenthal, once summarised his critique of
Davydov by saying that instead of the acquisition of (universal) mathematical
structures, pupils should appropriate abilities in structuring problems with the help
of mathematical tools (Freudenthal, 1979).
Epistemologically, it is questionable whether something like a universal germ
cell can be constructed, and is productive for teaching pupils subject matter con-
cepts, without getting themselves involved in activities of theoretical thinking. Due
to Davydov’s heavy reliance on the germ cell for organising and teaching theo-
retical concepts, he deprived the pupils of necessary experiences to appropriate
theoretical thinking. In matters of curriculum development and teaching/learning,
Davydov strictly adhered to the idea that pupils should not repeat scientists’
methods of investigating reality in order to discover the historically produced
concepts for themselves (see Davydov, 1967, p. 267–268). He was right, but his
conclusion that teaching always should be based on exposition of main concepts is
illogical, and actually precludes the possibility of meaningful inquiry-based
learning and cooperative learning in the classroom. As I shall demonstrate later, it is
possible to get children engaged in a scientist’s role and still let them benefit from
valued scientific concepts (see also Carpay & van Oers, 1993, 1999)2. I will return
to this issue later.
In terms of teaching, Davydov’s approach definitely needed further elaboration.
It was one of Mariane Hedegaard’s great contributions to educational science, with
regard to teaching theoretical thinking, to develop Davydov’s work and implement
her improved version in classroom practices.
8.3 The Double Move in Teaching for Meaningful
Learning of Theoretical Concepts
Hedegaard has conducted a lot of research on the implementation of teaching the-
oretical concepts in the classroom on the basis of a modified Davydov approach. She
described this research in many publications, but I will base my discussion mainly on
her 2002 book. In this book, her primary mission is to contribute to the improvement
of school teaching that ‘should provide children with the motive and method for
thinking theoretically in concrete situations as well as contribute to their personality
development’ (Hedegaard, 2002, p. 69). In her early works, she used the notion of
‘double move’ for the explanation of the development of theoretical thinking in
2In his later work, (Davydov, 1996) reacted to our 1993 article. It is interesting to note that he
became more open to inquisitive work of pupils (as we argued). It is typical of his position in 1986
that he only picked up our argument for polylogue (i.e. the use of expert texts), which again can be
used of an exposition of state-of-the-art scientific concepts. See, for example, Davydov, 1983.
Although true, this was not our argument for the use of polylogue (elaborated later in this chapter).
See Davydov (1986, p. 225–226).
124 B. van Oers
subject matter domains. I will focus my present analyses on this concept, which is
nowadays still quoted (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013). In her later work, Hedegaard shifts
her attention to the ‘acquisition of conceptual systems that relate to the social, societal
and political aspects of life’ (Hedegaard, 2008, p. 309). In this multilevel system, the
double move is still present, and explained as an outcome of the students’ partici-
pation in an institutional tradition of practice. The explanation of the developmental
process of students in subject matter domains is furthermore enriched by showing
how it is related to motive development (rather than concept formation alone). The
question still remains how to conceive of this double move. This latter motive de-
velopment, however, cannotbe addressed here within the limits of this chapter.
A core concept in Hedegaard’s work is Davydov’s notion of ‘ascending from the
abstract to the concrete’. As a consequence, she also uses the notion of ‘germ cell’
as a general starting point for teaching theoretical concepts and theoretical knowing.
In her interpretation of the ‘germ cell’, she discards the universalistic (essentialistic)
connotations found in Davydov’s theory. Most of the time this germ cell now takes
the form of a general, generative model to use as a tool for problem-solving for
specific types of problems without attributing universal truth to them. Nevertheless,
she writes:
A germ cell is differentiated and elaborated from a set of conceptual relations that char-
acterise a subject domain (Hedegaard, 2002, p. 31).
Evidently, she assumes that such conceptual constructions can be found for all
subject matter areas, and that these will be helpful for promoting theoretical
thinking in pupils. In this matter, she takes a more liberal position than Davydov by
not claiming that the germ cell can determine the evolution and theoretical inter-
pretation of a whole discipline. Hedegaard’s theorising is actually more modest, and
offers powerful tools for the solution of specific types of problems.
Hedegaard also enriched the original approach of Davydov, by allowing pupils
to engage in genuine classroom inquiries and cooperation on the basis of problems
that make sense from pupils’ everyday life (Hedegaard, 2002, p. 21).
The previously described movement from the abstract to the concrete and vice
versa was named the double move by Marianne Hedegaard. It became a cornerstone
in her research into teaching in different subject matter domains (see among others
Hedegaard, 1995, 1999, 2002); but she also elaborated this idea beyond Davydov’s
descriptions. She acknowledges (Hedegaard 2002, p. 42) that her approach is
heavily influenced by Davydov’s notions of ‘developmental teaching’ and ‘as-
cending from the abstract to the concrete’, but she continues that she
transcends the idea of ‘ascending from the abstract to the concrete’ and instead builds more
directly on Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development, transformed into a
conceptualisation of teaching and learning as a double move between situated activity and
subject matter concepts (p. 42–43).
As alternative formulations of this double move, we also find definitions in her
work that avoid the notion of ‘the abstract’ and refer to ‘the dialectic interaction
between the collective cultural activity and the ideographic personal activity as the
8 The Double Move in Meaningful … 125
basis for development and concept formation’ (Hedegaard, 1999, p. 22; 2002,
p. 21). In classroom practices, the double move amounts to mutual interactions
between the general (as embodied in theoretical concepts of a subject matter area)
and the particular (as embodied in pupils’ situated knowledge and images).
In her elaborations of this notion of developmental teaching, Hedegaard starts
out from a strong Vygotskian principle that the learning of subject matter should
extend a child’s everyday meanings, and enable a child to use this knowledge for
the conduct of everyday activities. Subject matter learning can only be successful if
it builds on a child’s everyday knowledge (Hedegaard, 1999, p. 23; Hedegaard,
Chaiklin, and Pedraza, 2001, p. 122). In this view, Hedegaard also endorses the
Vygotskian principles that learning implies a transition from interpersonal notions
to individual knowledge, and that the essence of cultural learning is rooted in the
help that children get in their accomplishment of activities that they cannot yet carry
out without help from adults or more knowledgeable peers. It is in this zone of
proximal development that theoretical concepts (theoretical models) can be handed
out to pupils for the development of their conceptual thinking (use of scientific
concepts). Through this dialectical move in a zone of proximal development,
children’s everyday concepts can be meaningfully integrated with subject matter
concepts (Hedegaard 2002, p. 78–79). It is the role of the teacher to guarantee that a
useful and general theoretical model is presented in children’s problem-solving
activity.
Hedegaard has elaborated her teaching theory of double move by describing six
steps for the implementation in classroom practice within different subject areas
(see, for example, 2002, Chaps. 6, 8 and 11 focusing mainly on the domain of
history teaching). From these descriptions, it is evident that problem formulations
and the (re)formulation of the germ-cell/core models are pivotal.
The teacher gives assignments to the children, which engage them in collabo-
rative problem-solving and building a model that may help them better understand
the topic of the assignment, and that represents an issue from the domain of history
teaching (and its objectives). Close reading of the text and inspection of the
wonderful examples of children’s work, a number of issues remain unclear in the
approach, mostly because the work is presented as research where teachers,
researchers and experts in discipline content conceptualised the teaching together
(e.g. how teachers are trained to implement this model).
As with Davydov’s work, Hedegaard seems to be successful in helping children
to acquire theoretical (model-based) concepts, but it remains unclear to what extent
the children are really introduced into theoretical thinking proper (including
hypothesising, data collection and analysis, reporting). I suppose that a deeper
analysis of her grounding concepts (like abstraction, zone of proximal development,
play) may provide a new interpretation of the double move, and transform it into a
teaching strategy that comes closer to the children’s personal action, and makes the
double move a teaching strategy that is not only culturally meaningful but also
makes personal sense to the pupils with respect to their classroom inquiries. Let me
first start with some brief critical reflections on the grounding concepts.
126 B. van Oers
8.3.1 Critical Comments on Some Grounding Concepts
THE ABSTRACT. Although Hedegaard gradually changed her descriptions of the
ascendance from the abstract to the concrete into formulations focussing on the
interaction between the general (scientific concepts) and the specific (children’s
background knowledge), there is still some notion of the abstract involved by her
use of the notion of ‘germ cell’. By so doing, Hedegaard remains close to
Davydov’s understanding of the abstract (theoretical concepts) in her earlier work,
and gives no explanation of the psychological process of abstracting. In this view,
‘the abstract’ is basically an epistemic category that guides the teachers’ interactions
with the students in their processes of model formation, and not a psychologically
interpreted result of the pupil’s process of focusing from a particular point of view,
highlighting specific aspects, while neglecting others (i.e. abstracting). This criti-
cism can also be levelled at Davydov and Il’enkov. As a result, this approach
sustains a view of the development of conceptual thinking that takes curricular
content matter as a starting point. By teaching, this content should then be made
meaningful for the pupils, by connecting it to their available (concrete) knowledge
(see also Engeström, 2009, p. 327 for a similar critique of Davydov’s view).
A more psychologically relevant conception of ‘abstracting’ can be found in the
works of the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer who defined abstracting as an act
of taking and maintaining a specific point of view on a particular object. Looking
consistently at the world, for example, from the point of view of ‘redness’ yields a
mental image of red things, neglecting all other colours (try it when looking at your
bookshelf!). Looking at the world from the point of view of ‘things with three
corners’ yields a mental image of triangles which includesmany different specific
forms (see van Oers, 2001; 2012b). Hence, abstracting is a psychological activity of
taking a specific point of view and consistently sticking to it in the analysis of and
communication about the environment. When confronted with a problem in ev-
eryday life (including classrooms) for which the pupil does not possess a ready
solution, a first step can be to abstract the problem from one perspective and look
for solutions that may turn out helpful. However, any solution (tool) offered by a
teacher for such abstracted problem is by itself also problematic, as the pupil has to
see the meaning of this tool for him/herself, and figure out how to use it, and predict
what may be the result of this use. We see here the process of double stimulation as
it was once described by Vygotskij (Vygotsky, 1978). Adopting this Cassirerian
concept of abstraction precludes any form of essentialism, while providing a useful
starting point for a concrete psychological description of the double move. From
this latter point of view, the double move refers to permanent interactions among
different points of view.
Generalisation. The notion of the general and generalisation can be criticised in a
way similar to the critique of the notion of abstraction. It is an epistemic category,
and lacks a psychological description of what is going on when people are gen-
eralising their (theoretical) models. Generalised models are supposed to be appli-
cable to more situations or objects than the ones originally involved in the
8 The Double Move in Meaningful … 127
construction of the concept (model). As such, it is close to the quality of transfer.
However, transfer is generally seen as a qualification of the outcomes of some
learning; it does not describe or clarify the process of transferring knowledge itself.
In my analyses of transfer from an activity theory point of view, I have argued that
transferring is actually a process of transforming available knowledge, models or
skills to make it fit in new situations, or recontextualisation (see van Oers, 1998,
2001). As we could demonstrate in empirical research in biology education in
secondary education, transfer of understanding energy in muscle cells (cellular
respiration), can be promoted in students when they learn to transform their
knowledge in their interactions with new situations (like energy production in yeast,
muscles of sprinters or muscles of endurance sportsmen or—women (Wierdsma,
2012; see also van Weelie, 2014). The ability to transform once appropriated
knowledge into new forms that fit in new situations is the psychological foundation
of knowledge that we call ‘generalisations’. The benefit of this psychological
reconceptualisation of generalisation is that it can now be encouraged in pupils by
helping them reflect on varying applications of models and knowledge structure and
examining how they should be transformed in order to make them fit in these new
situations. We found in our research that this is a powerful strategy in the devel-
opment of conceptual thinking of students.
Zone of Proximal Development. As we have seen, Hedegaard relates the double
movement to the zone of proximal development. However, her interpretation of this
ZPD remains very close to the description given inMind in Society (Vygotsky, 1978,
p. 86), referring to the distance between the pupil’s actual level of development and
the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under
adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. By itself there is nothing
wrong with this description, be it that any kind of instruction can be qualified like this
(problem-solving under adult guidance). This is evidently not what Vygotskij (nor
Hedegaard) have in mind. This frequently quoted ‘definition’misses any reference to
the psychological quality Leont’ev called sense (the valuation of actions and tools
from the perspective of personal motives). This conception of the ZPD overlooks
Vygotskij’s emphasis on the fact that the core element of the ZPD is ‘imitation’. This
is not to be conceived of as copying isolated actions (Vygotsky, 1987b, vol. 5,
Chap. 6)! The zone of proximal development is located (and retrieves its meaning
and sense) within an imitated cultural practice. This view on the zone of proximal
development could be easily integrated in Hedegaard’s double move approach, but it
is not in her earlier work. She brings this concept into her later writing on the play,
learning and development of children in families and school (see Hedegaard and
Fleer, 2013). The double move in the process of formation of theoretical concepts
then can be conceived as imitative participation and social interaction in the context
of an emulated academic practice (including empirical research and conceptual
analysis), and accomplishing moves among different meaning positions
(perspectives).
Transition From Play to Learning Activity. The notion of play in Hedegaard’s
analysis is conceived as a child’s activity that transforms into learning activity at a
certain moment in development (Hedegaard, 2002, p. 70). Here, she follows the
128 B. van Oers
theory of El’konin and Davydov, and elaborates the idea of developing motives
(e.g. meaning giving motives, dominant motives) through participation in new
institutional practices which gives possibilities for a child’s development. This
conception of play is problematic for different reasons. It does not convincingly
explain what happens to play after the transition to learning activity and its dom-
inant motive. Moreover, it cannot give an explanation of the relationship between
learning and play.
Analyses of play from an Activity Theory point of view offer a view of play as a
way cultural activities may be carried out. If a child is allowed to get voluntarily
engaged in activities, and is ready to imitate this activity in his/her own way,
follows some of the rules of that activity, and is allowed to get some degrees of
freedom to change the goals, actions, tools, rules, then we call this activity play. As
‘learning’ is an inherent function of all cultural activities, it is also a potential
element in play activities. Moreover, there is no reason to be reluctant about the
inclusion of adults (van Oers, 2013). Even more importantly for the present
argument, all cultural activities can adopt a playful way of executing (if allowed by
the environment). Hence, learning (as institutionalised in science) can also take a
playful form. So in this view, there is no transition from play to learning activity,
but an innovation of play activities through engagement in new cultural practices
(or activities). The new dominant motive only opens possibilities to get children
engaged in a new type of practice, in which conceptual and special strategic rules
dominate. It does not prescribe by itself the mode in which this activity is to be
carried out. This new conception of play opens new possibilities for the organi-
sation of the collaborative activity of building theoretical concepts. In my view, it
originates in the imitation of academic practices, pursuing personal questions,
including posing hypotheses, decisions of how to collect data, discourse on different
interpretations and reporting the outcomes. Sure, students cannot perform all these
element from the beginning (as peripheral participants), but they will get help from
more knowledgeable others in order to explore the proposed solutions (models) and
explanations from different angles (see van Oers, 2012b).
8.4 Getting Engaged in Academic Practices:
The Development of Historical Thinking
In the Netherlands, we have been working on the implementation of Developmental
Education in primary schools since 1980s. In the beginning, we also tried to
implement a Davydovian approach in this curriculum. In those days, we struggled
with how to fruitfully communicate the basic epistemic concepts (abstract, concrete,
general, particular) to teachers and teacher trainers astools for them to organise
their everyday classroom practices, and to maintain the ambition to establish
meaningful education for both students and teachers. By transforming the funda-
mental, epistemic concepts into psychological theoretical concepts (according to
8 The Double Move in Meaningful … 129
CHAT), it turned out easier and more productive to work with practitioners for the
collaborative implementation of a play-based curriculum in the primary school (4–
12 years old) in all subject matter domains. Like Davydov and Hedegaard, we
aimed at introducing primary school children to the highest possible levels of
cultural development, that is, to say into forms of theoretical thinking in different
subject matter domains. Therefore, we revisited the idea of ascending from the
abstract to the concrete, or shifting from the general to the particular, as starting
points for everyday classroom practices.
One of the projects we have been working on in the past decade was the
implementation of an innovated way of history teaching in primary school. The
main purpose was to develop historical thinking in pupils (higher grades of primary
school), rather than pursuing the acquisition of historical knowledge about events,
persons and periods (as is usual in traditional approaches to history teaching). The
following guiding concepts were constitutive for this project:
(1) PlayfulLearning: The practice of historians was emulated as playfully con-
ducted activities of researching shared questions, the pupils played the role of
historians, following their methodical rules (like searching for and investigating of
historical sources, such as archives, pictures, experiences, etc.). They were free to
organise and interpret their sources and methods according to their own under-
standings. Important in this imitation of the historians’ practices was the permanent
critical discourse on the (shared) questions, methods, interpretations, conclusions
among pupils and experts (teacher or other external specialists in their area of
research). A truthful imitation of cultural practices always respects the intergener-
ational character of such practices. As explained above, care must be taken that the
experts are not pushed into a teaching role, but always act as co-researchers pos-
sessing specific information (respecting the characteristics of play). For a mean-
ingful continuation of the pupils’ play, it is important that all moves (at the levels of
actions or conceptualisation) are meaningfully contextualised in the children’s
activities, and at the same time are consistent with the cultural heritage. Fleer (2010,
p. 15) quite rightfully argues that this is a conceptual and contextual intersubjec-
tivity, necessary for a meaningful double move for (young) pupils.
(2) Personal Questions as Point of View: The pupils personal questions origi-
nating from their everyday life (such as names of street in their environment, the
emancipation of women, the history of Zoos) were always their starting points
when they researched historical objects. This starting point had two positive con-
sequences: it guaranteed the high involvement of the pupils (as was required for the
play-based format of their activities), and it created the proper starting point for
abstracting, i.e. strictly focusing on relevant information and neglecting information
that could not contribute to the development of their understandings in their view.
(3) Use of Ad Hoc Co-constructed Models: During their researches, the pupils
also were looking for appropriate schematisations (models) to represent their
findings. One of the major models which represented their findings in causal
sequences between events in the past, present and future was the time line that they
reconstructed together and discussed with peers and more knowledgeable others.
130 B. van Oers
(4) Engagement in Polylogue: It is important that the progress of the pupils’
research is not only guided by their peers, but also by experts (e.g. the teacher).
Additionally, when searching for answers to their personal questions, the pupils
also start looking for sources that are available outside the classroom, like relevant
(history) books, Internet, films, interviewees, etc. The pupils’ research should not
only be based on within group dialogues, but also must include polylogues, which
means dialogues with many (‘poly’) other, external sources in order to critically
evaluate their own solutions with the help of established, historically produced
findings of scholars. As a consequence, the findings of the pupils also must be made
public by reporting (i.e. building their own archive that can be consulted by others).
Through practicing polylogues, meaningfully linked to their personal queries,
pupils also appropriate a professional stratification of their personal language
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 289). The critical use of external sources and existing authori-
tative texts is a basic element in the imitation of historians by the pupils. Teachers’
guiding questions, as participants in the research process, are also essential here.
(5) Promoting Personally Persuasive Discourses: Through experiencing many
external discourses, pupils learn to shift from their personal points of view to those
of others (peers and experts). It is important that children also investigate the
conceptual changes this may require (for example, by asking questions like: ‘Are
we sure?’), and get used to reformulating (reconstructing their own knowledge and
understandings in other forms), to become able to recontextualise their situated
knowledge (important for generalisation). By being encouraged to reflect on their
own and others’ thinking and utterances, and telling in their own words what was
achieved collectively, it may be expected that pupils also learn to avoid just
repeating authoritative language and develop in due time a habit for internal dia-
logue before contributing to external discourses (called internally persuasive dis-
course by Bachtin, 1981, p. 342–343). We have not yet been able to investigate this
issue more closely in our history project, but the teaching strategies implemented in
the classrooms with the help of the ‘Toolkit’ (recently developed and investigated)
include advice and examples for teachers, so we may expect such internally per-
suasive discourse to emerge in due time.
8.5 A Short Conclusion: What About the Double Move?
In this chapter, I have engaged with the central ideas in Hedegaard’s conception of
a double move, and in so doing have elaborated and transformed the text that
describes her approach into psychological language. Through linking the central
ideas in the double move approach to historically evolving concepts as well as
to contemporary pedagogical approaches, the importance of her work becomes
more easily recognisable to teachers in their classrooms and to teacher educators. In
short, I argued for a conclusion that frames the double move as a process of moving
8 The Double Move in Meaningful … 131
among different meaning positions that rouse the needs for recontextualisation of
personal knowledge, and bringing this in harmony with expert formulations
(including the standard academic formulations of concepts).
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Bert van Oers (1951) (Ph.D.) is Emeritus Professor in Cultural-Historical Theory of Education at
the VU University Amsterdam (Faculty Behavioural and Movement Sciences). Since 1980s, he is
involved in the elaboration, implementation and evaluation of the Developmental Education
Concept, based on the Cultural-historical activity theory. His main research topics and publications
are related to this approach (play, early childhood education, mathematics education, literacy
education and music education). He defended his dissertation ‘Activity and Concepts’ (in Dutch)
in 1987. In 2004, he received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Jyväskylä
(Finland).
8 The Double Move in Meaningful … 133
http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000339293
http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000339293
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2013.789199
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2013.789199
Chapter 9
Vygotsky’s Developmental Pedagogy
Recontextualised as Hedegaard’s
Double-Move: Science Teaching
in Grades 1 and 2 in a Disadvantaged
School in South Africa
Joanne Hardman and Natasha Teschmacher
Abstract Fleer & Raban (2007) notes that science teachers generally feel under-
prepared to teach science at the early years stage and argues for the importance of
developing a philosophy for pedagogy that pays more attention to schooled or
scientific concepts. The importance of science teaching cannot be underestimated in
a country such as South Africa that has been noted as being unable to keep up with
the ‘average levels of science attainment in certain other industrial and techno-
logically developed countries’ (Wilcox, On Mathematics education in SA and the
relevance of popularising mathematics, 2003:9). Indeed, South Africa is still
struggling to increase its basic literacy and numeracy levels as its apartheid legacy
has left it with numerous shortages, not only in facilities and resources but also in
skilled mathematics and science teachers (Wilcox, On Mathematics education in
SA and the relevance of popularising mathematics, 2003). Research (Asoko in
Cambridge Journal of Education, 32:2, 2002; Driver in Educational Researcher,
23:5–12, 1994; Fleer, 2009) indicates that the mediation of scientific (schooled)
concepts is necessary for conceptual development. The acquisition of school-based
concepts in the Foundation Phase (Grades 1 and 2) in the Beginning Knowledge
unit of CAPS (Curriculum Assessment Policy Standards) pertaining to science
teaching is of special relevance to this chapter, where we discuss the science
teaching pedagogy of two foundation stage teachers. We conclude that the
Vygotsky-based radical-local approach to curriculum and pedagogy developed by
Hedegaard and Chaiklin has much to offer how science teaching is approached in
ways that respect cultural heritages in South Africa and enable the decolonising of
the current curriculum.
Keywords Mediation � Radical-local teaching and learning �
Scientific and everyday concepts � Science teaching
J. Hardman (&) � N. Teschmacher
University of Cape Town, Cape Town, UAE
e-mail: Joanne.hardman@uct.ac.za
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
A. Edwards et al. (eds.), Cultural-HistoricalApproaches to Studying Learning
and Development, Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research 6,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_9
135
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_9&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_9&amp;domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_9&amp;domain=pdf
mailto:Joanne.hardman@uct.ac.za
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_9
9.1 Introduction
In January 2012 South Africa introduced a new curriculum known as CAPS
‘Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements’, aiming to ‘give expression to the
knowledge, skills and values worth learning in South African schools’ (CAPS,
2011:4). It also aimed to, ‘ensure that children acquire and apply knowledge and
skills in ways that are meaningful to their own lives’ (CAPS, 2012:9). While this
quote specifically points to the local application of knowledge that will be mean-
ingful in children’s lived experience, in fact, CAPS is a ‘one size fits all’ cur-
riculum, which makes no allowance for different cultural-historical contexts within
South Africa. This is problematic in the South African context which has a Gini
co-efficient that ranges from 0.660–0.695, with one representing a completely
unequal society (Bhorat, 2015), suggesting marked differences in children’s local
contexts and their preparedness to acquire academic concepts at school.
It is important to note that science isn’t taught as a separate body of knowledge in
South African foundation phase classrooms. Instead, it falls into a category of Life
Skills, which consists of the following four study areas: Beginning Knowledge,
Creative Arts, Physical Education and Personal and Social Wellbeing. Science comes
under ‘Beginning Knowledge’ which, according to the official documentation is
awarded just one hour of teaching in a 23 h teaching week, in Grades 1 and 2.
At the same time, South Africa’s White Paper on Science and Technology
recognises the subject as a requirement for creating wealth and improving the
quality of life for South African people (Muwanga-Zake, 1998). Indeed, many
sponsors, companies and organisations agree that a scientifically literate population
is essential for a twenty-first century workforce (Dani, 2009). Yet, science educa-
tion appears to be experiencing problems that could lead to a crisis. South Africa is
faced with the problem where ’historically white schools have had the advantage of
decades of infrastructural investment and access to well-trained and qualified
teachers as these were well resourced, while African education was characterised by
high teacher–pupil ratios, unqualified and under-qualified teachers, lack of books,
libraries and laboratories, and a curriculum that perpetuated the myth of white
superiority and black inferiority.’ (Veriava, 2010:10).
It is against this background that the chapter sets out to examine the teaching of
science in grades 1 and 2 in a disadvantaged school in the Western Cape Province
of South Africa. We have chosen (Hedegaard’s 1998; Chaiklin & Hedegaard, 2013)
work to engage with our data for two reasons: the first is that Hedegaard proposes a
teaching method that elaborates Vygotsky’s pedagogical theory in a practical
manner. Moreover, Hedegaard’s work pays specific attention to utilising a child’s
local context within a pedagogical space, to make academic concepts meaningful to
the child in such a way that these concepts can be mobilised in the child’s social
context. We regard this as extremely important in our context, which is charac-
terised by extreme inequality and a curriculum that is aimed at all students,
regardless of their local cultural context. Second, we feel that Hedegaard’s (1998)
work is of particular importance in South Africa where, over the past 3 years,
136 J. Hardman and N. Teschmacher
university students have been calling for the decolonisation of the curriculum
(Francis & Hardman, 2018). While there are not yet fixed ideas of what a deco-
lonised curriculum consists of, we suggest that decolonised pedagogy must look
something like Hedegaard’s (2006) articulation of pedagogy where ’development
has to be considered from the perspective of the minority group’s ideas about
personality formation…’ and ‘has to reflect the community’s pedagogic goals of
personality formation as well as its goals for the acquisition of skills and knowledge
relevant to its cultural practices and events’ (p. 136).
While Hedegaard’s work is with minority groups whose culture has been
silenced by the culture of the majority, our own work is located in a context where
the culture of the majority has become silenced by the brutality of the apartheid
regime, which has had the lasting effect of discounting the culture of the majority in
favour of a Western model of identity and teaching/learning. This can still be seen
today in South Africa in that children are required to transition from learning in
their home language to learning in English at school at the end of Grade 3. Hence,
we find that Hedegaard’s ‘double-move’ in pedagogy within her radical-local
teaching/learning model (Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005) provides a useful lens
through which to examine pedagogy in science classrooms in grades 1 and 2 in a
disadvantaged school in the Western Cape.
Hedegaard’s radical local teaching/learning model situates pedagogy within the
child’s actual context, drawing on the child’s lived experience to enable them to
meaningfully appropriate academic concepts in such a manner that these concepts
can be mobilised to address problems in their actual social contexts. With this in
mind, our research site was chosen for two reasons; first, the second author was a
teacher in the school enabling access, and second, we were interested in how
teachers in this disadvantaged school linked scientific and everyday concepts to
assist children to develop their understanding of science.
We asked: Do teachers draw on the children’s lived experiences in order to make
scientific concepts meaningful to these particular children? In this chapter, we begin
by outlining the work of Vygotsky and his notion of scientific and everyday con-
cepts, before illustrating how Hedegaard and Chaiklin (2005) have extended this
work into a practical application for teaching/learning in schools by expanding on
the work of Davydov. We did not implement an intervention in this school and are,
therefore, merely describing pedagogy as it happens. Our aim is to show how
Hedegaard’s work can be mobilised in our disadvantaged schools to improve
outcomes in science teaching/learning. We examine actual practice in science les-
sons in Grades 1 and 2 before arguing that Hedegaard’s ‘double-move’ could work
to open pedagogical spaces to children in disadvantaged schools in South Africa,
potentially radically altering current outcomes and, also, decolonising pedagogy as
it does so.
9 Vygotsky’s Developmental Pedagogy Recontextualised … 137
9.2 Vygotsky and Pedagogy
‘The Russian word obuchenie does not admit to a direct English translation. It
means both teaching and learning, both sides of the two-way process, and is
therefore well suited to a dialectical view of a phenomenon made up of mutually
interpenetrating opposites’ (Daniels, 2001: 19).
For us too, teaching/learning are two sides of one coin and cannot be separated,
except perhaps artificially for some forms of analysis. This view of pedagogy
follows Hedegaard’s use of the term. Hedegaard’s double-move in pedagogy
(1998) finds its theoretical impetus in the work of Lev Vygotsky (1978, 1986) who
famously proposed that learning preceded development in his articulation of the
zone of proximal development (ZPD) as:
… the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent
problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem
solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers… the actual
developmental level