Interaction, Communication and Development

Psychological development as a social process

Charis Psaltis, Anna Zapiti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415643870
• eBook ISBN: 9781136162657
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For decades there has been considerable interest in the ways that interactions between children can provide a beneficial context for the study of cognitive and social development. In this book Psaltis and Zapiti use both theoretical and empirical research to build on the perspectives of Piaget, Vygotsky, Moscovici, and others including the legacy of Gerard Duveen, to offer a state of the art account of research on the themes of social interaction and cognitive development.

Interaction Communication and Development discusses the significance of social identities for social interaction and cognitive development. The empirical set of studies presented and discussed focus on patterns of communication between children as they work together to solve problems. Communications are examined in detail with a focus on:

• Socio-cognitive conflict, conversational moves and conversation types
• The way the different forms of the interactions relate to different sources of asymmetry in the classroom
• The way social representations and social identities of gender are negotiated in the interaction

This book provides an important account of how children develop through different kinds of social interactions. It will have considerable appeal for researchers in the fields of developmental psychology, socio-cultural psychology, social representations theory and education who wish to gain a deeper understanding of development and its relation to socio-cultural processes.

Chapter 1

A genetic perspective on interaction and development

The ways in which social interaction can be a formative experience for children’s cognitive development is both an intriguing and central issue. Piaget (1932/1965, 1977/1995) and Vygotsky (1934/1986, 1987), classical theorists in developmental psychology, both proposed distinctive accounts of this relationship, and it is a question which has been further explored in more recent work, both from the ‘social-Genevan’ post-Piagetian perspective (Doise and Mugny, 1984; Perret-Clermont, 1980) and from socio-cultural perspectives (Wertsch, 1984, 1985, 1991, 1998; Cole, 1996; Rogoff, 1990, 2003). But it is also a question that has a broader relevance for discussions of the social construction of knowledge because such interactions represent a microcosm in which the social processes contributing to the construction of knowledge can be explored.

A genetic, or developmental, perspective on the study of interaction and development not only takes up the approach of the classic authors, but also extends it to encompass wider influences. Central to this work is the question of how forms of interaction can generate new forms of understanding, that is, it poses the microgenetic problem of how new forms of understanding can arise within the communicative activities of interaction, and the consequences that participating in such interactions may have for the participants. In exploring the microgenetic construction of knowledge within interaction, the perspective developed in this book focuses on school-aged children and emphasises that all communication is a form of social influence and that a broad range of representations relating to asymmetries of society (like gender) and the micro-culture of a classroom (academic reputation or popularity, amongst others) also contribute to the structuring of interactions in school.

Piaget and Vygotsky in the everyday educational praxis

When the first author of this book (Charis Psaltis) was appointed as an elementary school teacher almost 20 years ago in 1995, thinking of learning and cognitive development as a social influence was inconceivable. In Cyprus, and probably also in other parts of the world dependent on English as the academic language in psychology, and a strong Piagetian influence in education (Smith, 1995; Cole and Wertsch, 1996; Hsueh, 2009), a pervasive view of cognitive development was that of a child moving up a ladder from one stage of cognitive development to the next, largely dependent on processes of biological maturation. Related to that was a widespread view of rationality and cognitive development as an individual psychological process (Smith, 1995), which offered no tools for understanding how the fact that students are social actors, with social identities, positioned in a societal field relates to learning and cognitive development.

These were, however, the days of the rediscovery of Vygotsky by Western psychologists, and it looked like his theorisation could be the remedy for the absence of the social in Piaget. After 1990, and the official end of the Cold War, there was a mushrooming of publications on Vygotsky’s writings (e.g. Van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991, 1994), applications of his theory in education (Moll, 1990) and the emergence of socio-cultural theories (Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1996; Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch, 1998). The echo of all these discussions for everyday educational praxis, however, often boiled down to a reiteration of the importance of scaffolding (Wood et al., 1976) and teacher–student communication as an educational method, which was seen as an application of Vygotsky’s idea of the zone of proximal development (Tudge, 1990).

From the perspective of everyday classroom practice, however, communication seemed like a much more complex process. It was a process where other asymmetries, beyond the asymmetry of expertise, appeared to be influential in structuring communication over collaborative problem-solving in particular, and classroom talk more generally. Gender, for once, seemed to be a very salient dimension of communication amongst children, so much so that the following question seemed logical: if gender appears to be structuring social interaction and communication, should we not expect it to have an effect on the learning of the students who always interact in both same- and mixed-sex settings? And are status asymmetries having a positive or negative role in the process of communication in the classroom? This looked like a problem that was unassailable for an educator back then.

Additional studies beyond education, in psychology, and postgraduate studies in social and developmental psychology made clear to the authors that in the educational world a social representation of Piaget and Vygotsky, anchored in a bipolar opposition of an individual–social antinomy (Cole and Wertsch, 1996) was almost hegemonic. This made revisiting Piaget and Vygotsky necessary in order to understand the role of the ‘social’ in their theories beyond stereotypes. Many lessons could be extracted from an understanding of how their theories managed a dialectical transcendence of this antinomy and how they understood the role of status and knowledge asymmetries in social interaction, learning and cognitive development, as we discuss in more detail in Chapter 2.

At the same time, the deeper understanding of Piaget and Vygotsky made even more clear an important theoretical lacuna in their theories concerning the absence of a role for social identities. Both Piaget and Vygotsky were discussing learning and the cognitive development of ‘the child’ as an undifferentiated entity. They were differentiating of course between younger and older children, and Vygotsky had a particular interest in children with disabilities. But they never studied the social psychological meaning of categories such as gender, the valorisations stemming from such belongingness and the shared social representations (Moscovici, 1961) of gender in our societies or their impact on the educational process.

Genetic social psychology and the work of Gerard Duveen

The authors’ sensitivity to gender as an asymmetry of status is largely attributed to the fact that both worked under the supervision¹ of the late Gerard Duveen. Duveen’s vision of a genetic social psychology was a particular form of social developmental psychology based on a dual commitment to think with and against Jean Piaget and Serge Moscovici (Duveen, 2001/2013; Moscovici et al., 2013).

According to Duveen, the problem with Piaget was not that he was asocial, although ‘the social is an unstable element in Piaget’s analysis of the development of knowledge’ (Duveen, 1997, p. 73). The way that Piaget understood the social was problematic, as we show in Chapter 2. His position did not allow for an examination of the role of social interaction as a formative influence in cognitive development, despite the fact that he accepted the social as a ‘necessary’ factor for cognitive development. As the social Genevans made abundantly clear, Piaget accepted social interaction as necessary, only as a mere postulate because he had never empirically studied this question (Doise and Mugny, 1984). The work of the social developmental psychologists of Geneva was a constant influence on Duveen’s vision of a genetic social psychology, beginning with his early work for his PhD (Duveen, 1984). What Piaget understood as universal structures, in Duveen’s (1997) opinion and following Moscovici (1998/2000), should be actually understood as social representations. This argument is largely based on the work of the social Genevans and Moscovici, which we discuss in detail in Chapter 3.

Duveen (2001/2013) was always fascinated by the similarities between Piaget and Moscovici. Moscovici (1976) in his work on social influence used the term genetic social psychology to emphasise the sense in which influence processes emerged in the communicative exchanges between people. In fact, the use of this terminology could be attributed to Piaget’s influence on Moscovici, as we show in Chapter 3. In this kind of psychology, social representations are structured and transformed through communicative exchanges.

This integration of Piagetian theory with social representations theory is clear, for example, when Duveen discusses with Barbara Lloyd (Lloyd and Duveen, 1990) the way in which social representations of gender are internalised, starting from the birth of the child. Newborns function as signifiers for others, but gender is not yet meaningful to themselves as actors. Their behaviour is recognised as a sign of gender by other people in their environment and, in that sense, a gender identity is at first extended to the child from others. The infant at the sensorimotor stage reacts to the behaviour of others but has not yet internalised a gender identity. By the middle of the second year, with the development of representation and language, children begin to make rapid progress in the internalisation of gender as a system of signs. As they become actors in the field of gender they start coordinating both the production and comprehension of signs to signify their membership of the gender category. They also respond to others as gender members of society, and they start resisting if others position them in a way that is not aligned with their gendered expectations. Resistance was a crucial notion in Duveen’s the-orising.² The reason that resistance takes place is because of the dual nature of identity, which is not only about the self making identifications, but also about the self being identified by others (Duveen, 2001b):

Resistance is the point where an identity refuses to accept what is proposed by a communicative act, that is it refuses to accept an attempt at influence … Resistance which occurs first in the microgenetic evocation of social representations can lead both to ontogenetic transformations (where identities themselves are reconstructed) and to sociogenetic change (where resistance becomes first a resistance to a change in identity, and then linked to an effort to influence the wider social world to recognise that identity).

(Duveen, 2001b: 269)

Closer to the educational context was Duveen’s ethnographic work with Barbara Lloyd in nursery schools and the first year of schooling (Duveen and Lloyd, 1990; Lloyd and Duveen, 1992). This work exemplifies the interconnection between the everyday microgenesis of knowledge, the constraints and possibilities contained within the ontogenesis of identities and the centrality of sociogenesis in framing the dialectics of social stability or resistance (Howarth, 2010).

As Duveen and Lloyd show, social representations of gender undergo a process of reconstruction, elaboration and development in their first year of schooling (Duveen and Lloyd, 1986, 1990; Lloyd and Duveen, 1990, 1991, 1992). These ethnographic and experimental studies generally uncover the important role played by schooling in amplifying or modifying the representations of gender that children bring to school. More particularly, it is shown that females and males share similar knowledge of the resources available for the expression of their social gender identities in the material culture of their classrooms (toys, story characters, pretend play), but when it comes to the expression of their social gender identities in activities, it is found that their gender membership influences the social organisation and activities through its effects on composition and size of self-organising groups, as well as their positioning in relation to the material culture. Lloyd and Duveen conclude (1991, p. 446), that ‘the assertion of social gender identity is the expression of a position in relation to a set of social representations and that this expression is mediated by membership in a particular social category’.

In this way, social gender identities in the everyday practice of education establish regularities, both in and out of the classroom. Many of these practices are explicitly gendered, but others are implicitly gendered in the sense that gender is ‘done’ as a performance in every engagement with the objects of our environment. From this viewpoint, gender doesn’t just exist, but is continually produced, reproduced and indeed changed through peoples’ perfo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Series editor’s foreword
• Preface
• 1 A genetic perspective on interaction and development
• 2 Varieties of the social
• 3 The development of representations through communication
• 4 Conversation types and interaction types: microgenesis of knowledge
• 5 From one interaction to another: from microgenesis to ontogenesis
• 6 Peer interaction and cognitive development: the role of gender at 6–7 and 10–11 years old
• 7 Conclusions: towards a genetic social psychology
• 8 Appendices
• Author Index
• Subject Index