A Transactional Approach to Transfer Episodes

Abstract

In this article we present an analytical framework for approaching transfer episodes—episodes in which participants declare or can be declared to bring prior experience to bear on the current task organization. We build on Dewey’s writings about the continuity of experience, Vygotsky’s ideas of unit analysis, as well as more recent developments in continental philosophy to develop a transactional approach that involves reconceptualizing the notion of experience. In this view, experience is not something that individuals have but an analytical category that denotes the unity of whole persons, their material and social environment, and their changing transactional relations (mutual effects on each other) across time. In the 1st part of the article, we present the theory and contrast it with past and present literature on transfer. In the 2nd part, we develop the methodological implications and analyze an episode of transfer from a technology-enhanced science education curriculum in which students were presented with analogous models of scientific phenomena across different tasks. We describe instances of recognition, of analogical reasoning, and of how students applied theoretical knowledge in terms of transactional units of change. We conclude by discussing implications with regard to further theoretical development and educational practice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of the Learning Sciences for their thorough comments and thoughtful suggestions.

Notes

¹ Throughout the article, we use the modifier societal used by Leont’ev (1983a) to refer to the theory he was developing together with Vygotsky. The adjective highlights the fact that social events not only involve a single time scale (the relation here and now between two or more participants) but form part of larger courses of activity (such as doing school science lessons) that in turn are aspects of society at large. Psychological functions and personality are the result of societal relations (obščestvennix otnošenij; Leont’ev, 1983b; Vygotskij, 2005).

² An equivalent Vygotskian (1986) analysis would have followed “the first dim stirring of a thought to its formulation” (p. 217) and found that thought “does not merely find expression in speech; it finds its reality and form” (p. 219).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Grant No. 201332 from the Norwegian National Research Council.