Abstract
It can be argued that the appropriation of academic concepts provides students with powerful tools for understanding and improving their life conditions. Since the works of Davydov in the 1970s on the formation of scientific concepts in primary school children, studies on meaningful education debated how academically approved subject matter knowledge can be meaningfully integrated into primary school pupils’ learning. However, Davydov’s solution of going from the abstract to the concrete is disputable. Hedegaard (The qualitative analysis of the development of theoretical knowledge and thinking. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 293–325, 1995), Hedegaard (Learning and child development. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 2002) adjusted Davydov’s approach into a dialectic move from the general to the situation specific. This is now known as the ‘double move’. The reconciliation of a pupil’s personal notions and motives with academic concepts is, however, still an issue of struggle between researchers, teachers, teacher educators and curriculum developers. Recent re-conceptualisations of the notions of ‘the abstract’, ‘the concrete’ and the position of subject matter knowledge yield a revision of the double move. On the basis of our implementation of ‘Developmental education’ in primary schools, this article promotes the double move as a dialogic movement between meaning positions of novices and experts, prompting the recontextualisation of available knowledge and skills.
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- 1.
Davydov followed the ideas of a French collective of mathematicians, working under the name of Bourbaki, who were trying to reduce the whole of mathematics to a limited number of so-called ‘mother structures’: algebraic structures, ordering structures and topological structures (see Davydov, 1972, p. 262). This shows Davydov’s inclination towards structuralism and a universal abstract rationalism that we hinted on previously in Vygotskij’s work.
- 2.
In his later work, (Davydov, 1996) reacted to our 1993 article. It is interesting to note that he became more open to inquisitive work of pupils (as we argued). It is typical of his position in 1986 that he only picked up our argument for polylogue (i.e. the use of expert texts), which again can be used of an exposition of state-of-the-art scientific concepts. See, for example, Davydov, 1983. Although true, this was not our argument for the use of polylogue (elaborated later in this chapter). See Davydov (1986, p. 225–226).
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van Oers, B. (2019). The Double Move in Meaningful Teaching Revisited. In: Edwards, A., Fleer, M., Bøttcher, L. (eds) Cultural-Historical Approaches to Studying Learning and Development. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 6. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6826-4_8
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