Development As Breaking Away and Opening Up: A Challenge to Vygotsky and Piaget

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Title: Development As Breaking Away and Opening Up: A Challenge to Vygotsky and Piaget
Abstract/Description: Recent work based on dialectics and the cultural-historical theory of activity points toward three major challenges to the developmental theories of both Vygotsky and Piaget: (1) instead of just benign achievement of mastery, development may be viewed as partially destructive rejection of the old; (2) instead of just individual transformation, development may be viewed as collective transformation; (3) instead of just vertical movement across levels, development may be viewed as horizontal movement across borders.
In this paper, I will examine each of the three challenges, using Peter Høeg's autobiographical novel Borderliners (Høeg, 1994) as an appropriate case to concretize and illuminate the challenges. I will suggest three theoretical concepts - contradiction, zone, and mediation - as potential tools for mastering the three challenges. I will discuss the place and meaning of these concepts as resources embedded in Vygotsky' and Piaget's theories.
I will conclude by questioning the explanatory potential of developmental theory in the face of transformations such as the ones described by Høeg.
The question is, indeed: Does development explain anything significant happening outside the developmental psychologist's carefully chosen and
constrained "natural" settings?
Author/creator: Engeström, Yrjö
Date: 1996
In publication: Swiss Journal of Psychology
Volume: 55
Pages: 126-132
Resource type: en Background/Context
Medium: en Print
Background/context type: en Conceptual
Open access/free-text available: en Yes
Peer reviewed: en Yes
ISSN: 1421-0185
URL: Full-text PDF (UCSD Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition)
Citation: Engestrom, Y. (1996). Development As Breaking Away and Opening Up: A Challenge to Vygotsky and Piaget. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 55, 126–132.
Cited in: The Work of Improvement

Item sets: Open Access Resource (IRE); Handbook Chapter 2 Citations

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