Thinking and Speaking: A Dynamic Approach

Abstract

Much of the work in science education today presupposes some stable entities (factors, variables), including conceptions, identities, opinions, views, attitudes, motivations, or emotions that are thought to be the origin of students’ observable behavior. In this chapter, I provide a careful, social psychological reading of concrete episodes from a course in thermodynamics in their historical context. The reading will show that—consistent with the ideas that Lev Vygotsky (1986) articulated in Thought and Language on thinking, speaking, and the relation between the two—actually observed behavior is incompatible with theories that hypothesize conceptions, views, attitudes, motivations as fixed structures that undergo (developmental) change as an individual develops. Vygotsky takes an absolutely dynamical perspective that is inconsistent with much of the work done on knowing and learning to the present day. He suggests that: “The connection between thought and word, however, is neither preformed nor constant. It emerges in the course of development, and itself evolves” (p. 255). In this, he is joined by others, including Bakhtine (1977), who holds that living speech undergoes continuous evolution and to really understand, we need to “understand the word in its particular sense, that is, to capture the orientation that is given to the word by a context and a precise situation, an orientation towards evolution and not immobility” (p. 101, my translation).