Abstract
In this chapter we present the main ideas of an educational Vygotskian semiotic approach, emphasizing in particular some crucial questions about its methods of inquiry. We resort, on the one hand, to Leont’ev’s (1978) work on activity, and, on the other hand, to Vygotsky’s cultural psychology. Considering a theory as an interrelated triplet of “components” (P, M, Q), where P stands for principles, M stands for methodology, and Q for research questions, in the first part of the chapter we present a brief sketch of the Vygotskian semiotic approach through the lenses of the aforementioned components. We refer in particular to two methodological constructs that have been built to account for multimodal sensuous actions: the semiotic node and the semiotic bundle. To illustrate the semiotic approach, in the second part of the chapter we discuss an example from a classroom activity concerning pattern generalization. This example constituted an important step in developing the semiotic approach under consideration. The example is about the role of words, gestures, and rhythm in the students’ process of objectifying (i.e., noticing or becoming aware of) mathematical relationships. We discuss how a “crude fact” that was not anticipated led to a transformation of the theory, and in particular its methods and research questions.
Keywords
The critical issue, then, is method
Vygotsky 1987, p. 45
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Acknowledgments
This article is a result of a research programs funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada/Le conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada (SSHRC/CRSH). A previous analysis of the classroom episode was presented in the paper by Radford, Bardini, and Sabena (2007).
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Radford, L., Sabena, C. (2015). The Question of Method in a Vygotskian Semiotic Approach. In: Bikner-Ahsbahs, A., Knipping, C., Presmeg, N. (eds) Approaches to Qualitative Research in Mathematics Education. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9181-6_7
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