Learning and Instruction: Social-Cognitive Perspectives

In this paper, we try to expand the lenses classically used in social psychology of development, and in particular, in the post-Piagetian tradition, to recent contributions of social and cognitive dynamics in development and learning. Psychological development has to be redefined as involving socially framed, culturally mediated and interpersonally negotiated processes, and the dynamic relation between the person, others, objects and instruments which are reconfigured through teaching-learning activities. The units of analysis, besides the traditional focus on the individual and/or isolated cognitive event, also includes nowadays peer interaction and partners’ roles, dialogical processes, argumentation, and specific institutional features of human practices, as illustrated through experimental social psychology. According to this general framework, learning and thinking appears more clearly as the collaborative result of autonomous minds confronting viewpoints and cultural artifacts (tools, semiotic mediations, tasks, division of roles) and trying to manage differences, feedbacks, and conflicts to pursue their activities. Moving from one activity to another, and from one space to another (pretest, joint activity, posttest), children have to reorganize their understanding, their language, and the organization of their social interactions. 1 PREPRINT of the paper published in James D. Wright, A.-N. (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, vol. 13, pp. 670-676, 2015, which should be used for any reference to this work From Individual to Collective Levels: The Social and the Psychological in Intellectual Development In discussions about learning in the 21 st century, there is a need for a better understanding of processes at the individual as well as at the collective level., At the same time, theoretical frameworks for learning have undergone several paradigm shifts from ‘cognitive revolution’ to more recent, various socio-cultural approaches that have an increasingly greater impact in research and in the wider discussion as well. The units of analysis, besides the traditional focus on the individual and/or isolated cognitive event, nowadays includes peer interaction, dialogicality, argumentation, roles of partner, and various institutional features of human practices. Another major issue is the status of knowledge in information society that, according to Engeström and Middleton (1996, p. 2), can be analyzed either by agency-driven microsociology-without-history or by historically relevant macrosociology-without-agency. A third way might be sociocultural approaches where human agency is a starting point and micro-macro-cultural dynamics are included as far as they become relevant for understanding the activities participants perform in situ and over time. In fact, the fruitfulness of interplay between 'the social' and 'the cognitive' was recommended a long time ago by Lévy-Bruhl who, according to Luria (1976), was among the first scholars to point out the qualitative feature of primitive thought and to treat logical processes as products of historical development. As Moscovici (1990) suggests, there are at least two ways of approaching the interplay between 'the social' and 'the cognitive' (i.e., between social and cognitive or developmental psychology) or, in other terms, how deeply social relations and social changes are accompanied by profound transformations of thought, with regard to the appropriation of cognitive instruments both in children and in adults. The 'Bartlett way' recommends the comparison of representations and beliefs of groups situated at different levels of evolution. In particular, Bartlett (1928) reminds us that the best introduction to the understanding of the social dynamics of cognitive constructions is to compare the novices and the experts within their own field or culture and not to compare the primitive and the ordinary member of a modern social group. Thus, the main aim of cognitive social psychology must be to carefully describe the modern and the normal in their milieu and in relation to topics which are significant for their common life. 2