Sociogenetic Perspectives on Internalization

Brian D. Cox, Cynthia Lightfoot, Brian D. Cox, Cynthia Lightfoot

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134789818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The issue of how the external world becomes part of the behavioral repertoire of children has been important to psychology from its very beginning, preoccupying theorists from Sigmund Freud to George Herbert Mead. But ever since Lev Vygotsky claimed that every function in a child's activity appears first as a process in the social realm between individuals and moves to a process that individual children can accomplish relatively independently, there has been increased debate as to exactly how this process of internalization happens. In contemporary developmental psychology, the process of internalization has become so important that the time is ripe for a book which explicitly addresses the problems it poses. Although the chapters in this book deal with age groups from preschool to adolescence, and topics from mathematics to storytelling and from taking risks to making moral judgments, there is one core question which unifies them all: If the growing competence of a child is truly sociogenetic, if it truly grows out from, is supported by, and is dependent upon the social, where is that competence truly located? Bearing a variety of labels--cultural-historical, co-constructionist, dialectical, contextualist, narrative, hermeneutic, and discursive psychologies--and analytic constructs--scaffolding, proleptic instruction, participation, appropriation, and situated activity--contemporary perspectives are showing clear signs of development and differentiation. This volume's goal is to help bring some order to these differences, without denying either the usefulness of this variety or the importance of the differences among perspectives. This new book illuminates these differences by collecting a select sample of theory and research into one of two major sections. The first section includes work undertaken from a social interactive perspective. The overarching aim is to identify processes of child-child or child-adult interactions as they emerge over relatively short periods of time. Typically, the methodology involves the microanalysis of videotaped interactions. Development is situated literally within social interactions which are considered directly responsible for children's development. The second section provides a sample of work representing a symbolic action perspective. This one is not oriented toward social interactions but toward the symbolic meanings that they express and that children impose on them. The dominant methodology is interpretive or hermeneutic, and the goal is to articulate the figurative (metaphoric) processes and narrative structures that inhabit social actions and from which they draw their meaning and coherence.

CHAPTER

1

LOCATING COMPETENCE: THE SOCIOGENESIS OF MIND AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERNALIZATION

Cynthia Lightfoot

State University of New York at Plattsburgh

Brian D. Cox

Hofstra University

This volume is intended to examine the many facets of work assembled under the broad banner of sociogenesis, with special attention given to the core construct of internalization. Although a large part of what it means to be sociogenetic is to hold to the premise that the development of action is inherently social, a diversity of perspectives is becoming increasingly apparent as scholars struggle with methodological implications and go about the business of examining exactly how the child’s encounter with the world precipitates development. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. The first is to identify, despite all this diversity, certain points of equinamity: to define what sociogenesis is and is not, and to sketch out in preliminary fashion its basic assumptions, history, and methodology. Second, because the process of internalization has become a pedal point of tension within the sociogenetic enterprise, we mean to provide an introduction to the various ways in which it has been approached, and to a few of the more contentious issues that have surfaced in the process of elaborating them.

In keeping these two promises, we hope to provide something of a map for the rest of the volume. Although the chapters here deal with age groups from preschool to adolescence, and topics from mathematics to storytelling, from taking risks to making moral judgments, there is one core question that unifies them all and made us want to write a book entitled Sociogenetic Perspectives on Internalization: If the growing competence of a child is truly sociogenetic, if it truly grows out from, is supported by, and dependent on the social, where is that competence truly located? As is seen here, some sociogenetic theorists would like to jettison the term internalization, largely because of the ease with which they believe it to support outmoded and dualistic assumptions regarding person–environment relationships. For others, however, the analytic separation of internal–subjective knowledge from that which emerges in the course of communicative contact with others is as fundamental as that between having competence and acquiring it, and the very meaning of development is understood to reside in the process of internalization. In either case, a more thoroughgoing analysis of how or whether social action and experience are internalized should benefit any theoretical or empirical effort that intends to address the psychological development of children.

WHAT SOCIOGENESIS IS NOT

No man is an island, but according to many theories in psychology, his (or her) mind might as well be. Social learning assumes a relatively passive child in an active environment: What is modeled externally often ends up merely copied internally, without a real discussion of how it occurs. Conversely, some cognitive approaches assume an active calculator in a sea of information, ever flowing, perhaps, through channels and inlets, but not in itself purposeful. Like Robinson Crusoe, the person is separated from others, except for what notes he or she can place (or “represent”) in bottles.

Although it makes good folk theory to understand the social basis of competence in terms of a tool kit—a neatly boxed collection of knowledge, beliefs, values, reasoning, and so forth—which is passed more or less carefully from the social environment to the mind of the child, critics have done well to steer us away from this particular geography of mind, and we are hardpressed to deliver examples of modern scholarship that take seriously such an outmoded and simplistic version of development. Even Piagetians, although more sophisticated about the separation and transfer, and cognizant of the active and constructive role of the child, still conceive of the task of bringing the outside world inside as a rather lonely one, as if the child is a curious but solitary explorer setting out into the unknown.

The sociogentic enterprise has always and explicitly moved against the grain of a geography of mind as it has been played out in social learning theory, as well as its ontological mirror-image, cognitivism (e.g., Arievitch & van der Veer, 1995; Lawrence & Valsiner, 1993; Rogoff, 1993, in press; Valsiner & van der Veer, Rizzo, & Corsaro, 1988; Wertsch & Stone, 1985; Wozniak, 1993). These researchers defined their work in opposition to both traditional social learning theory, which assumes a passive child in an active environment, and traditional cognitivism, which assumes an active child in a passive environment. Although admiring of the developmental perspective of constructivist approaches, sociogenesis avoids overemphasizing the child’s independent competence at the expense of surrounding cultural factors.

In contemporary discourse, in fact, it seems nearly obligatory to cast aspersions on spatial metaphors before detailing one’s position on the social origins of thought and action. For Shotter (1993b), for example, thought is conversation, whether with oneself or others: “reflection is the transfer of argumentation within.” But he is careful to deny the geographic meaning of transfer: “This does not mean, however, that the process of internalization involved is a simple transference of an already existing process from an external to an inner plane of activity” (p. 73). Rogoff (1990) framed internalization as “appropriation”: a child is never without a context and a past history, and never a self-contained island of competence in any situation, but a continual borrower from cultural context. To look only at the child is to misconstrue the action: “(T)he problem of internalization may be a problem only if priority is given to the internal or individual functioning, with the internal given responsibility for bringing something across a barrier” (p. 195). Arievitch and van der Veer (1995) defended the power of internalization for explaining the “inner plane of consciousness,” but cautioned: “In our view, in order to avoid the external–internal dichotomy (and the associated pitfalls of Cartesian dualism), we should reconceptualize the internalization concept in the context of a revision of the more general notions of internal and external in mental development” (p. 116).

The foregoing is only a sample. A general wariness of a geography of mind would also appear to underlie socially distributed cognition, collective memory, collaborative problem solving, situated activity, intermental functioning, and other vogue catch phrases intended to grasp and hold up for examination some concept of developmentally relevant social practice or communicative action (see also Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992). But washing our collective hands of the metaphor—declaring what sociogenesis is not—still leaves the important task of defining sociogenesis in positive terms.

BEYOND A GEOGRAPHY OF MIND

The common ambition is clear: to characterize the interdependence of the development of children and the cultural–historical contexts in which they live. It is universally recognized, or nearly so, that both are structured, both are organized, and both require formal analysis if we are to make headway in apprehending how social action becomes functional as a mechanism of ontogenetic, and even historical transformation. Thus, sociogeneticists take as a given that humans are born into a dynamic and structured matrix in which they are immediate, and fully active participants; that to be studied in its growth, action must be situated in time, be it microgenetic, ontogenetic, phylogenetic, or historic; and that the development of action is fundamentally about the construction of meaning. To put a finer point on it, sociogenesis can be defined as a position that is based on four interlocking assumptions: (a) the primacy of the social,¹ (b) the genetic approach to human action, (c) the active nature of participation of the child and the social, and (d) the inherent meaningfulness of action.

Various implied permutations of this quartet are heuristically useful, and evidenced in the chapters that are to come. For example, that meaning is social and expressed in action means that meaning is mutually constituted through social interaction; we disagree in instructive ways concerning where the meaning resides, as discussed in more detail later. That social action provides the motor for genesis of thought is implied in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD). The fact that both sides of the social interaction are active in their construction of meaning precludes, for example: (a) a strict copy epistemology implying that internalization is mere transfer of knowledge from an active teacher to a passive student; (b) a view in which the passive child is molded by an active social environment, as in behaviorist or social learning approaches; or (c) a cognitive view in which an active child encodes information from a stable, inactive, nonintentional environment of social (or nonsocial) stimuli.

VYGOTSKY’S LEGACY: MEDIATION, MASTERY, AND MEANING

Historically, some form of internalization has always been close to the surface, if not outwardly axiomatic, for virtually all accounts concerned with the social or cultural substrate of knowledge acquisition. Among the better known figures are Freud, who appealed to internalization in describing the emergence of self-regulated moral action from conduct controlled through the censorship of others; James Mark Baldwin, who claimed that social practice is the only conduit of agency, autonomy, and consciousness; G. H. Mead, who said much the same about the internalization of gesture as symbol; Piaget, who believed that thought was internal mental action, and reflective thought a form of internal argumentation; and Vygotsky, who identified collective life as the source of all higher mental functions.

It is the recent “discovery” of Vygotsky, however, which has vitalized interest in internalization, and fed the emergent diversity of perspective. According to his account, internalization precipitates conscious control and mastery over external (i.e., social) sign forms, as well as one’s own behavior, and indexes a radical reconstruction of individual psychological processes. The reconstruction defines children’s “cultural–psychological development,” the very essence of which is in the “collision of mature cultural forms of behavior with the primitive forms that characterize the child’s behavior” (Vygotsky, 1960/1979, p. 151). Understood to move from nonmediated (“natural,” “direct,” or “primitive”) to mediated (“artificial,” “indirect,” or “cultural”) activity, cultural development in children is closely connected to the cultural evolution of the species. Discussing the bifurcation of the organic and cultural-historical lines of development, Vygotsky wrote:

The use and “invention” of tools by anthropoid apes bring to an end the organic stage of behavioral development in the evolutionary sequence and prepare the way for a transition of all development to a new path, creating thereby the main psychological prerequisite of historical development of behavior. Labor, and, connected with it, the development of human speech and other psychological signs used by primitive man to gain control over behavior signify the beginning of cultural or historical behavior in the proper sense of the word. Finally, in child development, we clearly see a second line of development paralleling the processes of organic growth and maturation, that is, we see the cultural development of behavior based on the acquisition of skills and modes of cultural behavior and thinking. (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, p. 37)

According to Vygotsky’s account, the vast inventory of tools, devices, technologies, artifacts, signs, symbols, stories, and systems produced by cultural evolution mediate between persons and the worlds they live in. These products of human history organize and provide guidelines for acting, knowing, and understanding the world, and children’s development is all about mastering this inventory. But as Vygotsky quipped, “integration into the cultural context is no way similar to putting on a new dress” (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, p. 171). Rather, it entails deep psychological transformation such that the child becomes less driven to immediate reaction by external stimuli, and more inclined to mediated action—strategic, planful, and conscious.

Thus conceived, the internalization of social experience is indispensible to the development of consciousness and mastery, these being coterminous; and written in reverse, consciousness and mastery—the possession of experience in object form, as meaningful experience, and as stimulus for other experience—is indispensible to human society. In particular,

culture creates special forms of behavior, changes the functioning of mind, constructs new stories in the developing system of human behavior…. In the course of historical development, social humans change the ways and means of their behavior, transform their natural premises and functions, elaborate and create new, specifically cultural forms of behavior. (Vygotsky, cited and translated in Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992, p. 552)

According to several historical analyses (Valsiner, 1988; Wertsch, 1985; Wertsch & Stone, 1985), the concept of internalization represents an extension of Marx’s notion that the individual is an ensemble of social relations. Although the specific nature, origin, and function of the “ensemble” can be interpreted in a variety of ways (an issue to which we return shortly; see also Moll, 1994), Vygotsky’s dialectic is clear enough: To become human in society is also to generate individual consciousness. Indeed, social action is the seedbed for all higher mental functions, from the most imaginative and abstract reasoning of the scientist or the poet, to the most simple case of volitional memory—of a child trying to remember her sweater.

Because internalization is couched in terms of social action, it comes as no real surprise that understanding it is necessarily tied to managing child–environment relationships. Arguing against all projects that would dissolve or ignore the unity of personality, and environment, Vygotsky’s solution was to propose that the child and his or her environment are unified within the child’s “experience”:

The child’s experience is the kind of simple unit of which it is impossible to say that it is the influence of the environment on the child or a characteristic of the child himself. Experience is a unit of personality and environment as they exist in development…. Experience must be understood as the internal relationship of the child as an individual to a given aspect of reality. (Vygotsky, cited and translated in Minick, 1987, p. 32)

The problem of uniting persons and environments—of defining, to use Lewin’s (1933) distinction, the “real environments” of children as opposed to the “objective” ones as seen through the eyes of others—is perennial in developmental psychology, and is attended by the related and equally difficult matter of conceptualizing children’s action and development as both context-bound, and normative and universal (Lightfoot & Folds-Bennett, 1992). Lewin, in fact, was an early and especially vocal champion of the argument that fundamental laws and principles of development would only yield to scientific scrutiny when children’s behavior was examined in certain “total situations that are ‘simple,’ but well defined in their concrete individuality” (p. 212). Not surprisingly, Vygotsky praised Lewin’s child-in-structured-context approach, as well as Piaget’s clinical method, which he considered a particularly stellar and noteworthy example of the only methodological genre capable of giving insight into the emergence of new action structures (Vygotsky, 1934/1986).

CONTEMPORARY VIEWS AND CONTROVERSIES

Work of more recent vintage is motivated and perplexed by many of the same issues that typified early efforts, and that continue to be emblematic of sociogenetic theory. How, and to what extent, can the specific stand as an example of the general? How does one go about identifying a “pure, well-defined case” and remain commited to exploring the cultural contexts of children’s development? What are the generative connections between actions, meanings, and psychological development? What is the nature of the child’s encounter with the world? Contemporary sociogenetic theories, including those represented here, address these issues in a number of ways, and the cross-talk between them serves to underscore the currency and vitality of the sociogenetic approach.

Bearing a variety of labels (e.g., cultural–historical, co-constructionist, dialectical, contextualist, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Locating Competence: The Sociogenesis of Mind and the Problem of Internalization
• Part I: Mind as Internalized Social Interaction
• Part II: Mind as Internalized Symbolic Action
• Part III: Critical Overview
• Author Index
• Subject Index