Abstract
In Piaget’s developmental psychology, as in other approaches (e.g., constructivism), an intentional orientation towards the world is presupposed as an innate ability. Thought is self-sufficient, orienting to the world as it pleases. However, Vygotsky provides a generic description of how an intentional action such as pointing first exists as a social relation before a child intentionally points. Even though often cited for his interest in language, Vygotsky chose a vignette in which language plays no role at all to illustrate one of his most fundamental concepts. Rather, social relations are not grounded in language itself but in the immediacy of situations. In this chapter, we examine the sociogenesis of intention. We analyze how fourth-grade students engage in an inquiry-based curriculum designed to develop basic notions in algebra. We show how considering intention as a social achievement not only provides a way out of the classic learning paradox—the question of how learners can orient towards that which they have not yet learned—but also bears implications relevant to contemporary research on motivation in educational psychology
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Notes
- 1.
Readers certainly are aware that some aspects of the constructivist discourse are expressed in terms of the autopoiesis of the individual and development as an autopoeitic project (e.g. Maturana and Varela 1980).
- 2.
The issue is actually more complex because of the research that has exhibited the abyss between plans (intentions) and situated actions (Suchman 2007). Thus, for example, scientists have been reported to work an entire day thinking that they have acted according to a plan only to find out in the evening that what they had done was not what they had planned to do (Roth 2009). Whether people do what they have planned to do can be evaluated only afterwards. The cases described in Chap. 3 also testify to this.
- 3.
This may just be something similar to what adults are aware of when they doodle without a plan.
- 4.
We thank Jean-François Maheux for telling us this story.
- 5.
Even engineers might succeed in building some device only to find out that they are unable to build the same device a second time (Sørensen and Levold 1992).
- 6.
If the eye does not move with respect to an object, the visual field turns grey. To see a line, for example, the eye saccades back and forth from line to ground while doing a global movement from one end to another (Yarbus 1967).
- 7.
Neuroscientific research confirmed this by showing that the neurons mirroring the activity of those neurons that produce an action fire when monkeys observe the same action; these same mirror neurons are required to understand the intentions underlying the action (Fogassi et al. 2005). But those mirror neurons do what they do only after the individual can execute the action itself.
- 8.
A full transcription of the event in the original French and its translation into English is available elsewhere (Roth and Radford 2011). The transcription has been modified for present purposes.
- 9.
The kind of situation we are examining is typical of institutionalized schooling . Although this type of situations share with any other learning situation the fact that we are always confronted with the unknown in coming to know something new, the way in which {teaching | learning} is organized—and the kind of affects involved—may differ substantially from the type of learning situations observed in apprenticeship. In the latter type of settings, instruction often takes place without the curricular assumptions of “intentional transmission” (Lave 1996: 151) that underlie many of the experiences that take place in formal education.
- 10.
Transcription conventions are available in the appendix.
- 11.
In Chap. 12 we elaborate on how affects , such as those that we name “frustration,” manifest themselves such that they are witnessed.
- 12.
An analysis from a societal-historical perspective focusing on mathematics and affect, which the girl who abandoned repeatedly manifested in various ways, can be found in Roth and Walshaw (2015).
- 13.
- 14.
This kind of events constitutes “an experience.” In an experience, there is “something that stands out as an enduring memorial” (Dewey 1934/2008: 43), so that from now on events can be named and oriented to in the future. A meal, storm, or rupture of friendship them become “that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship” (1934/2008: 43).
- 15.
The evaluation fruitfully may be described as reply to a reply, consistent with the description of all actions as replies (Waldenfels 2006), where a (teacher) query then is a reply to the current state of {teaching | learning}.
- 16.
As noted above, the situation is the same as the one designers face at the beginning of a design project, where the outcomes of the work process cannot (and should not) be known in advance of the creative process. Yet, an important aspect of the craft of doing design consists in orienting toward this uncertainty in ways so that instrumental and cooperative work can go on successfully. How students in school settings come to master the craft of being subject to uncertainty in classroom situations, as craft, is seldom addressed in the educational research literature. A reason may be the tendency on the part of educational researchers to take the social context as an unquestioned given rather than as something that needs to be worked out.
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Roth, WM., Jornet, A. (2017). Intention—A Product of Joint Social Work. In: Understanding Educational Psychology. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39868-6_8
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