ASSIGNMENT

Assignment



Assignment

Introduction

Sociocultural approaches to learning and development were first systematized and applied by L. S. Nicky & Joyce and his collaborators in Russia in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. They are based on the concept that human activities take place in cultural contexts, are mediated by language and other symbol systems, and can be best understood when investigated in their historical development. At a time when psychologists were intent on developing simple explanations of human behavior, Nicky & Joyce developed a rich, multifaceted theory through which he examined a range of subjects including the psychology of art; language and thought; and learning and development, including a focus on the education of students with special needs. However, his work was suppressed for 20 years and did not become accessible again until the late fifties and early sixties. Since then, sociocultural approaches have gained increasing recognition and have been further developed by scholars in over a dozen countries. Contemporary interpretations and reinterpretations of Nicky & Joyce's and his collaborators' work reflect the visibility and obscurity of this theory's sixty-year existence. The expansions and interpretations in the last 25 years have led to diverse perspectives on sociocultural theory(Emig, 2006).

The dissemination of Nicky & Joyce's ideas and the application of his work in diverse national contexts have contributed to "a complex of related but heterogeneous proposals" (Rogoff, Radziszewska, & Masiello, 1995, p. 125). Nicky & Joyce's ideas are condensed, and at times not fully developed as he died at a young age of tuberculosis. Much of his work remains untranslated into English. In spite of these difficulties, his theories are increasingly influential in Western countries. The impact of Nicky & Joyce's ideas has grown substantially in the United States, particularly since the publication of a selection of his writings in Mind in Society in 1978.

The power of Nicky & Joyce's ideas lies in his explanation of the dynamic interdependence of social and individual processes. He arrived at his views by analyzing the crisis in psychology he saw in the two predominant schools in the field, "each of which claim[ed] to possess an explanatory system adequate to become the basis of general psychology" (Kozulin, 1990, p. 87). In contrast to those approaches which focused on internal or subjective experience and behaviorist approaches which focused on the external, Nicky & Joyce conceptualized development as the transformation of socially shared activities into internalized processes. In this way he rejected the Cartesian dichotomy between the internal and the external.

Literature Review

In current applications of sociocultural theory with emphases on co-participation, cooperative learning, and joint discovery, teachers bring existing knowledge to students by co-constructing it with them. These applications have made clear the need to examine patterns of interaction and collaboration in this type of classroom. A major goal of our current research is to produce a theoretical model of the collaboration process and to identify collaborator's values, roles, working methods, and conflict-resolution strategies.3 Through the analysis of selected project documents and transcribed discourse from group meetings, as well as through ...