Learning as the Evolution of Discourse: Accounting for Cultural, Group and Individual Development

摘要

Anna Sfard s [2008] book Thinking as Communicating is broad in scope and has far-reaching implications for sociology, anthropology and education as well as for psychology. Her book is ambitious and aims to place investigations of human thinking and learning on a fully operationalized foundation while simultaneously doing justice to their richness and complexity. She develops the rationale for this project by introducing 5 quandaries that, she contends, continue to plague research on cognition. One of the quandaries or controversies that Sfard identifies centers on the range of disparate proposals that have been made to account for the well-documented dependence of human actions on aspects of the situations of action. A second controversy concerns the failure to reach consensus on the meaning of the term understanding despite the numerous attempts to pin it down. Sfard argues that the long list of unanswered questions spawned by the 5 controversies indicates that research on thinking has a long way to go. Her fundamental claim is that little progress will be made in addressing the 5 controversies unless we reconceptualize what we mean when we speak of thinking. In the first half of the book, Sfard delineates the key tenets of the reconceptualization that she proposes. In the second half of the book, she focuses specifically on mathematical activity and learning, and frames this as a context in which to introduce analytical constructs and to address methodological issues.