Toward the end of his life, the Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky turned away from his earlier work that he has become famous for only to sow the seeds for a new theory. In this theory, affect was to play a central role, there was to be a primacy of social relations, and anything mental (mind, thought, self, other, knowledge) was an event rather than a thing. This is essentially a transactional perspective. In this book, the author articulates a transactional psychology (...) of education drawing on the works of G.H. Mead, J. Dewey, G. Bateson, F. Mikhailov, and E. Il'enkov. All theoretical positions are developed out of videotaped exchanges, thereby giving concrete character to every psychological concept articulated. (shrink)

Radical uncertainty is a concept currently debated, for example, in the economics literature to theorize the impossibility of foreseeing the outcomes of scientific and technological development work. The purpose of this study is to extend the concept to articulate and theorize the minute-to-minute transactions in scientific laboratories. Empirical materials resulting from five years of ethnographic work in one laboratory focusing on fish vision are used to show how scientists produce a material continuity between some natural phenomena and the way they (...) are represented in scientific discourse. Because the outcomes of scientists' actions sometimes turn out to be uncertain, the material actions that produce this continuity themselves retroactively become uncertain. Scientists may at any one point determine that what they had done is not what they thought and said to have done. Actions and the objects they produce therefore stand in a dialectical relationship: they produce, mutually presuppose, and in their respective materiality, stabilize one another. (shrink)

In this article, we propose that gestures play an important role in the connection between sensorimotor experience and language. Gestures may be the link between bodily experience and verbal expression that advocates of embodied cognition have postulated. In a developmental sequence of communicative action, gestures, which are initially similar to action sequences, substantially shorten and represent actions in metonymic form. In another process, action sequences are based on kinesthetic schemata that themselves find their metaphoric expression in language. Again, gestures enact (...) kinesthetic schemata that are correlated with verbal expressions. Examples from a large database are used to illustrate the various processes by means of which language arises when students conduct school science investigations. (shrink)

Over 60 years ago, the influential language philosopher L. Wittgenstein suggested that there is no need to use "understanding" and "meaning" to understand how language works and, in fact, that the two theoretical terms are part of a primitive idea. Today, both remain two of the most frequently used terms in education. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate a discussion about abandoning these terms from the theoretical discourse of education in the way these are commonly used. Case materials (...) from the research literature chosen from a large database on knowing and learning in science are used to exemplify the approach that does not require either concept. Implications are drawn for education research and practice. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 109-154.

This study was designed to find out what scientists and science students actually do when they are reading familiar and unfamiliar graphs. This study provides rich details of the subtle changes in the ontologies of scientists and science students as they engage in the reading tasks assigned to them. In the course of the readers’ interpretation work, initially unspecified marks on paper are turned into objects with particular topologies that are said to correspond to specific features in the world. We (...) theorize this interpretive work as a transition of graphs from things to signs that come to stand for natural objects. Especially among physicists and theoretical ecologists, graphs enter new relations and become natural objects in their own right. (shrink)

A science that does not critically interrogate its theoretical concepts literally does not know what it is doing. The attempt to clarify a widely used concept in psychological research—the concept of concept—therefore constitutes an important effort in clarifying what role it plays in the discursive work of the field. In this commentary, I take a cultural-historical approach to suggest that the clarification of concepts requires both a genuine rupture and a historical study of the movement of a concept. Moreover, our (...) study of concepts has to be reflexive because they are simultaneously objects of inquiry and means by which such inquiry unfolds. Rather than doing mere analysis of concept use, I propose a categorical, historical reconstruction of the concepts psychologists use. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Toward post-constructivist epistemology -- Respecting common sense and first-person perspective -- On method -- Looking ahead -- Being is dwelling -- Dwelling grounds building and thinking -- The foundation of dwelling -- From epistemology to environmental ethics -- Response to a world in crisis -- On being rooted -- The earth does not move - literally -- The ground of the image -- Fostering the taking of roots -- On getting the earth to move -- Uprooting | rooting -- Cultivating (...) culture -- Cultivating (an interest in) science -- Nacherzeugung and nachverstehen -- Nacherzeugung, nachverstehen, and the cultivation of culture -- Emergence of the image -- An empirical case -- Recon/naissance: from first movements to symbolic gestures -- Ideation implies intersubjectivity and history -- Multiplicity, bifurcations, pregnance -- Movement and the birth of form -- Becoming aware -- Aspect dawning -- An empirical investigation -- A post-constructivist perspective on the coming of awareness -- The invisible body -- A mysterious illness -- Pathos and learning -- Our animate bodies and school learning -- Disappearance of the subject -- On theory and its relation to life -- Memorable moments of classroom life -- Inchoate living vs. an experience -- Life and its mimesis -- Concrete human psychology -- The subject-in-the-making -- The subject* as patient -- L'interloque -- The death of autopoiesis -- There is (a) life after constructivism. (shrink)

The role of gestures in communication is still debated: Some claim that gestures are merely ancillary forms of expressions, whereas others suggest a central role of gestures in the development of language. In this article, I provide data in support of the overarching hypothesis that gestures have a transitional function between ergotic/epistemic movements of hands and symbolic expressions. The context for the study of these transitions is constituted by school science laboratory activities conducted by students who are also asked to (...) describe and explain while still within proximity of the materials of their investigations. It is hypothesized that communication is distributed across the context (verbal, gestural, material) and shifts increasingly into a verbal modality as students become familiar with the phenomena they are to learn about. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that initial temporal delays between gestures and the corresponding words decrease and finally disappear so that gestural and verbal modalities coincide. It is suggested that engaging in communication in the presence of material has an important cognitive function in that it affords a distribution of cognition across different modalities until individuals have developed the competence to express themselves effectively in the verbal modality. (shrink)

Research into expertise is relatively common in cognitive science concerning expertise existing across many domains. However, much less research has examined how experts within the same domain assess the performance of their peer experts. We report the results of a modified think-aloud study conducted with 18 pilots . Pairs of same-ranked pilots were asked to rate the performance of a captain flying in a critical pre-recorded simulator scenario. Findings reveal considerable variance within performance categories, differences in the process used as (...) evidence in support of a performance rating, different numbers and types of facts identified, and differences in how specific performance events affect choice of performance category and gravity of performance assessment. Such variance is consistent with low inter-rater reliability. Because raters exhibited good, albeit imprecise, reasons and facts, a fuzzy mathematical model of performance rating was developed. The model provides good agreement with observed variations. (shrink)

Science literacy is frequently touted as a key to good citizenship. Based on a two-year ethnographic study examining science in the community, the authors suggest that when considering the contribution of scientific activity to the greater good, science must be seen as forming a unique hybrid practice, mixed in with other mediating practices, which together constitute “scientifically literate, good citizenship.” This case study, an analysis of an open house event organized by a grassroots environmentalist group, presents some examples of activities (...) that embed science in “good citizenship.” Through a series of vignettes, the authors focus on four central aspects: the activists' use of landscape and spatial arrangements, the importance of multiple representations of the same entity, the relational aspect of knowing and becoming part of a community, and the insertion of scientific into moral discourse, resulting in what they call a “stewardship triad.”. (shrink)

In this study, I describe a potential challenge to semiotics, which exists in the fact that no interpretation of an instruction can get us closer to doing what the instructional text describes. I provide a praxeological description of a situation in a software development firm where the instructions for a particular type of meeting are inscribed on the whiteboard in front of which the meetings were held. I discuss the gap between instructions and the behavior they describe and the moral (...) order of praxis that is not inscribed in instructions. (shrink)

The theory of knowledge objectification, initially presented and developed by Luis Radford, has gained some traction in the field of mathematics education. As with any developing theory, its presentation contains statements that may contradict its stated intents; and these problems are exacerbated in its uptake into the work of other scholars. The purpose of this study is to articulate a Spinozist-Marxian approach, in which the objectification exists not in things—semiotic means that mediate interactions—but as real relation between people. As a (...) consequence, the concept of mediation is unnecessary and can be abandoned. A concrete classroom example from Radford’s own studies is used to exemplify and develop pertinent issues. In particular, the societal nature of the ideal—a synecdoche of relations between objects that reflect relations between people—should be added and the notion of mediation no longer is required. (shrink)

Despite its advanced age of about 375 years, the mind–body problem is alive and well, in part because it is anchored so well institutionally in schools and in research. This continued presence is astonishing in the light of the fact that the seed for its solution, sown in Spinoza’s Ethics, is almost as old. The solution rests on the position that there is only one substance, which, invisible, manifests itself in two attributes, thought and extension. By thinking with Spinoza, especially (...) by following the ways in which Vygotsky and Marx think with Spinoza, we arrive at an approach suitable for a social psychological theory of learning that does not separate knowing from doing and emoting. A classroom fragment from a 10th-grade physics curriculum is used as the starting point for overcoming the body–mind problem by thinking with Spinoza. (shrink)

Although there are many points of continuity, there are also a number of changes in the pedagogical form of the anatomy lecture over the longue durée, over centuries of epistemic change, rather than over years or decades. The article begins with an analysis of the physical and technical arrangements of the early modern anatomy lecture, showing how these present a general underlying similarity compared to those in place today. It then goes on to consider examples of elements of speech and (...) presentation, description and illustration that are used in the biology lecture from the early modern (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries) and late modern (or contemporary) eras. The anatomy lecture thus demonstrates a basic physical and technical continuity in the classroom or theater, whereas the larger epistemic functions in which it is embedded have changed: from a descriptive, discursive function, focusing on individual organs and their physicality, to one that is more integrative, systemic and also performative in both form and content. (shrink)

To date, little is known about when and to what degree science students begin to participate in authentic scientific graphing practices. This article presents the results of a series of studies on the production, transformation, and interpretation of graphical representation from Grade 8 to professional scientific practice both in formal testing situations and in the course of field/laboratory work. The results of these studies can be grouped into two major areas. First, there is a discontinuity in the graph-related practices that (...) marks a boundary between people who engage in work that requires them to transform data into graphical representations and people who do not have such experiences. Second, the didactic practices of high school textbooks and university lectures exhibit a marked discontinuity relative to graphing practices in scientific journals. Graphs used in didactic circumstances may be associated with students’ difficulties in interpreting “real data.” It appears that school teachers and university professors do little to put their students on trajectories of increasing participation in authentic scientific graphing practices. (shrink)

This study is about the interaction of scientific expertise and local knowledge in the context of a contested issue: the quality and quantity of safe drinking water available to some residents in one Canadian community. The authors articulate the boundary work in which scientific and technological expertise and discourse are played out against local knowledge and water needs to prevent the construction of a water main extension that would provide a group of residents with the same water that others in (...) the community already access. The authors draw on an extensive database constructed during a three-year ethnographic study of one community; the data base includes the transcript of a public meeting, newspaper clippings, interviews, and communications between residents and town council. The authors show not only that scientists and residents differ in their assessment of water quality and quantity but also that there is a penchant for undercutting residents in their attempts to make themselves heard in the political process. (shrink)

Researchers in science and technology studies appear to be more concerned with descriptions and explanations of social phenomena than with the potential applications of their findings. Science and technology studies should strive to change society by contributing to the design of learning environments that form future generations of producers and consumers of scientific and technological knowledge. In this article, the authors illustrate how they used research findings from science and technology studies to design alternative learning environments and summarize their principal (...) findings from six years of ethnographic research in these learning environments. They conclude by pointing out some of the caveats inherent in theirapproach and by suggesting areas in science education of interest to science and technology studies. (shrink)

To be successful, collaboration at work requires its participants to have a common sense about what is happening and where things are heading. But how can collaborators have such a sense in common if what is going on continuously changes? This study investigates the joint communicative work participants in collaborative activity do to remain aligned on how things are going and where things are at for the purpose of maintaining a ground in common. Our test case for illustrating this joint (...) work is the fluid and constantly changing world of software development. Our study uses a transactional approach to show how software developers working together continuously make available what they are attuned to, which constitutes their common ground that allows actions and talk to make sense. The common ground enables a common, inherently shared sense of what is happening and how things are going. Rather than having “meaning” in themselves, signifiers (words, gestures, body movements, cursor movements) create and are part of the common ground against which they make sense. Signifiers are motivated by and produce an accented visible that is available to all group members; and this accented visible (including the signs) makes for the common ground. (shrink)

Signs do not only “represent” something for somebody, as Peirce’s definition goes, but also “mediate” relations between us and our world, including ourselves, as has been elaborated by Vygotsky. We call the first the representational function of a sign and the second the epistemological function since in using signs we make distinctions, specify objects and relations, structure our observations, and organize societal and cognitive activity. The goal of this paper is, on the one hand, to develop a model in which (...) both these functions appear as complementary and, on the other, to show that this complementarity is essential for the dynamics of scientific activity, causing a dialectical process of generating new epistemological and representational means. This will be demonstrated with an example of how two scientists with different background knowledge analyze educational data collaboratively. (shrink)

A central challenge for research on how we should prepare students to manage crossing boundaries between different knowledge settings in life long learning processes is to identify those forms of knowledge that are particularly relevant here. In this paper, we develop by philosophical means the concept of a dialectical system as a general framework to describe the de-velopment of knowledge networks that mark the starting point for learning processes, and we use semiotics to discuss the epistemological thesis that any cognitive (...) access to our world of objects is mediated by signs and diagrammatic reasoning and abduction as those forms of practical knowledge that are crucial for the development of knowledge networks. The rich-ness of this theoretical approach becomes evident by applying it to an example of learning in a biological research context. At the same time, we take a new look at the role of mathematical knowledge in this process. (shrink)