As the editorial team of Mind, Culture, and Activity (MCA), we write with a sense of urgency in regenerating our commitment to our collective history while strengthening our efforts to welcome new voices into our pages. Given our understandings of development as temporally multidirectional, these goals of recognizing our collective history and honoring and engaging with the ways in which new voices interanimate old and new concepts are indeed two necessary directions of one and the same process. MCA originated as The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, and the Newsletter was often an excellent example of our commitment to working across methodologies, research methods, fields, disciplines, professions, nations, and many other boundaries. We can look back to the Newsletter in order to create a collective vision of a possible future for the journal. Thus, prolepsis and boundary crossings could be said to be at the heart of MCA’s endeavor then and now.
Looking forward to a future we are creating together in the present, we welcome Angela Booker as Editor and welcome Beth Ferholt’s move from Book Review Editor to Editor. We thank former Editorial Board Members for all of their important work in evaluating and supporting the development of the scholarship published in MCA. And we welcome and look forward to working with our new Editorial Board Members who are introduced on the masthead in this issue.
In 2013, the editorial team stated that MCA is/was interested in the relationship between human minds and sociocultural environments and the ways in which minds and cultures are constituted in a wide variety of human activities and practices (Cole, Göncü, & Vadeboncoeur, Citation2013). The editorial affirmed four commitments to inspire future research and scholarship: (a) bridging between disciplines and fields, (b) theoretical and methodological groundedness, (c) exploring the ethical impacts of our research, and (d) intergenerational engagement (pp. 316–317). We see engaging in and publishing dialogues and debates about what these commitments mean for us as individuals, scholars, and collectives as significant to our purpose as a journal. We recognize that how we work together and apart to enact these principles in our lives, more generally, is part of our ongoing work.
As we continue to construct the future, we aim to incorporate historical and current scholarship across disciplines, an aim also present in the five articles and one book review that make up this issue. In the first article, entitled “The Early History of the Scaffolding Metaphor: Bernstein, Luria, Vygotsky, and Before,” Anna Shvartz and Arthur Bakker trace the origins of “scaffolding” from Bruner (not Vygotsky), through Luria to the Russian psychologist N. Bernstein. Particularly interesting are two distinct meanings of scaffolding: (a) intersubjective scaffolding and (b) intrasubjective scaffolding “that is fulfilled by one person towards herself until the development of a fluent and automatized competency is reached and no scaffolding is needed” (p. 16). Central to the intersubjective work of educators and researchers is the significant role that can be played by children in learning from and by observing others (intersubjective) and then making their own scaffolding (e.g., using the furniture to enable a “walk around” the room), as well as abandoning the scaffolding when it becomes unnecessary (e.g., rambling across the room without the aid of furniture). But fading does not solely mean the removal of support. Fading in this case highlights the appropriation and abandonment of the support by the child as he or she resolves an issue independently. This interpretation seems quite a contrast to the way schools work to emphasize the role of the teacher as the person “in charge” of both scaffolding and its “gradual” withdrawal. Instead, an understanding of the learner’s agency in scaffolding redefines pedagogy as a process that would release power to the learner and encompass a relational shaping of the zone of proximal development.
In the second article, entitled “Who Wants to Keep Me a Puppet? Pinocchio’s Tale as a Metaphor of Developmental Processes,” Luca Tateo explains how Pinocchio is socialized to become the compliant “schoolboy.” Originally, the story of Pinocchio was published in a newspaper series, and when the story ended with Pinocchio’s punishment and death there was such an outcry that it had to be rewritten in the form in which it is now known. In this way the story itself was socialized while the free-spirited, asocial, rascally puppet ended up being socialized by his many experiences, internalizing others’ voices, and thus becoming human: a well-behaved, compliant schoolboy. This, metaphorically, constitutes a monological development: the gradual silencing of the free-spirited puppet as the boy internalizes the voices of authorities. In the end, Tateo asserts, “Pinocchio’s disappointing conclusion reminds us that ambivalence and tension between what are socially valued as positive or negative feelings is part of development: the puppet and the boy should dialogue” (p. 38). Literary analysis proves to be particularly useful here, as it has been for several key works within the Vygotskian tradition.
Tateo’s emphasis on ambivalence resonates with the third article by Claire Kinsella, Dave Putwain, and Linda Kaye, who build on Anna Rainio’s work on agency, with its appreciation of the role of ambivalence in agency. In “‘You Heard Me Swear but You Never Heard Me!’ Negotiating Agency in the Pupil Referral Unit Classroom,” Kinsella et al. examine dialogue in two “maker” classrooms in the referral unit, with a view to identifying the learners’ developing agency. They characterize three types of agentive speech acts: affiliative, transformative, and transgressive. They are able to outline students’ developing agency through engagement in their maker projects over time. There is speculation about the difficulty that ordinary school contexts have in affording such student agency, and the article concludes, “Comparing the ways in which different educational interactions enable and constrain student agency opens up many new avenues for future research” (p. 56). One possibility that the authors suggest for further study is that enacting resistance and opposition in school can actually help students to remain active and interested in their classes.
In the fourth article, “Designing for Identity in Game-Based Learning,” Matthew Gaydos and Benjamin DeVane question the goal of the pedagogical use of video games to transform identity, a common rationale for games in school settings. Games are often thought to provide opportunities for students “to become” adults in differing roles, such as “scientist” or “data analyst.” The article suggests that students already have their own legitimate identities and that gaming in school might help students further explore and shape those identities, including, as demonstrated in the empirical study, their development as social beings and interrogations of topics such as ethnic and racial bias, the ethics of cheating, and the importance of winning. These goals, though not always consistent with stated “educational” objectives, are also present if the pedagogy is well integrated into the game. The article argues for a broadening of our understandings of how video games can mediate learning and teaching in school settings and asks game designers to take into account the ways that students always already bring their own goals, related to their current identities, into gaming.
In the fifth article, “Portrayals of Parental Involvement: Descriptions of Family and School Relationships in a Low-Income African American Community,” Angela Clifford and Artin Göncü argue for an expanded conceptualization of parental involvement that takes into account the perspectives of parents, caregivers, and communities in relation to “the goals and values they have for their children’s development and education” (p. 75). Using qualitative interviews with 14 parents and caregivers, the authors describe four themes that demonstrate both the range of parental involvement (in homes, schools, and communities) and how they navigate barriers, supports, and partnerships with institutions. The rich description provided in this article highlights the various unique and situated ways in which parents work to create intersubjectivity in collaboration with schools and other institutions in their families’ lives. The shape and depth of the parental involvement documented here make visible the everyday practices parents and caregivers engage in to mediate the relationships between their children and schools.
Our book review of Negotiating Grasp: Embodied Experience With Three-Dimensional Materials and the Negotiation of Meaning in Early Childhood Education by Biljana Culibrik Fredriksen was written by Michael Parsons. Parsons shows how this unique study of the processes of meaning-making by young children who were engaged in playing with various three-dimensional objects contributes to our understanding of the value of placing Dewey’s scholarship, and literature from a variety of other sources, in dialogue with our readings of Vygotsky. Fredriksen’s research shows how such dialogue can be led by respectful and inclusive early childhood research and how young children’s perspectives contribute in unexpected ways to our studies of meaning-making and experience. The literature forming the basis of this research draws from children’s development, embodied cognition, creativity, social constructivism, metaphor studies, play, art education, and early childhood education. Fredriksen’s methods will also be of great interest to many of our readers, and Parsons discusses these in his review.
The five articles and one book review in this issue share common commitments to theoretical and methodological groundedness and to exploring ethical impacts of the research. This issue also takes us across many boundaries, including (including again, as they were included in the Newsletter) the voices of the youngest children, their parents, and fictional characters on our pages. Going forward then, we wish you a worthwhile 2019 with good readings, good colleagues, and good projects!