|
p.66 One of the key problems that will be raised in relation to Piaget's account, as Burman (1994) has suggested [JLJ - Erica Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, on order, by the way], is the way Piaget viewed children's development from the 'inside out'. In other words, children are viewed as independent entities whose cognitive development occurs naturally within their individual minds only to then find expression 'on the outside' through more complex forms of activity and behaviour... the course of their development remains largely unaffected by the social contexts within which they are located. Such an account therefore allows no space for considering how wider social relations and processes... can possibly influence bother rate and direction of particular children's development.
To counter the problem, there is a need to turn Piaget's approach on its head and to therefore focus on how development takes place from the 'outside in'.
p.66 we need to find ways of understanding how broader social relationships... come to be internalised by young children and thus influence and shape their cognitive development. It is precisely this approach to development from the 'outside in' that is the heart of Vygotsky's (1978) work... In discussing Vygotsky's work, however, it will be pointed out that there has been a tendency in Vygotskian research not to deal adequately with the complexity of the social relations within which young children are located and thus which they internalise. With this in mind, the chapter will conclude by suggesting that Vygotsky's overall approach can be usefully supplemented with the two sociological concepts of 'habitus' (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990) and 'figuration' (Elias, 1978, 1994).
p.67-68 Through self-directed exploration and play, children are forever developing ever-more complex mental structures – or schemes – to help them make sense of their environment and to guide their actions. Each scheme is not composed simply of a set of thoughts or memories but also of related actions and strategies. Schemes therefore not only help children to make sense of a particular object or event but also to guide them in terms of how they should behave towards it.
p.75 there is a need to develop an alternative understanding [JLJ - as opposed to Piaget's approach previously described] of the way children learn and develop - one which acknowledges the importance of wider social processes and contexts... in influencing and shaping their development and one that also focuses on the children's own experiences and perspectives... What I want to do in this and the next section is to propose an alternative theory for understanding children's development based on the work of Vygotsky.
p.75 As Resnick and Nelson-Le Gall (1997) point out, Vygotsky was the first modern developmental theorist to place social interaction at the heart of his analysis.
p.76 For Vygotsky, it is what goes on 'outside' - in terms of the wider culture and social relationships within which a child is located - that then structures what happens 'inside' (i.e. the child's subsequent cognitive development).
p.76 Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals. (Vygotsky, 1978: 57, original emphases)
p.78 Vygotsky... argue[s] that all higher mental functions... have their roots in social relations. They first exist as social activities that the child is involved in and then, second, become internalised as mental schemes.
p.81-82 there are still some problems with this overall Vygotskian framework that need to be addressed. They are problems that relate to the fact that such work remains embedded in psychological ways of thinking and, as such, has a rather limited understanding of the social (Smith, 1996). This is evident in three main respects. First, there remains an emphasis on individual agency underpinning these accounts... there is a need to understand how children are not just free-thinking individual agents but how their actual thoughts and behavior are influenced and shaped by the broader social and cultural contexts around them.
Second, there is a tendency to depict the social simply in terms of interpersonal relations... there is a need to make use of more sociological concepts to help understand the role that... the wider community play in influencing what children learn.
Finally, the type of Vygotskian approach outlined above tends to take culture itself for granted and provides little space for an analysis of conflict or power relations... lack... a recognition of the differential relations of power that exist... also no recognition of the power struggles that may exist... and the ways this impacts upon what the child learns and how they develop... there is a need to draw upon some of the insights provided by sociology in order to add this dimension to the understanding currently provided by Vygotsky.
p.82 The Vygotskian approach outlined above tends to take culture itself for granted and provides little space for an analysis of conflict or power relations.
p.82-83 In this section it will be suggested that the two inter-related concepts of habitus, as developed in the work of Bourdieu (1977, 1990), and figuration, as proposed by Elias (1978, 1994), help to address the three problems associated with current Vygotskian work as outlined above. Indeed, what will be suggested here is that the two concepts, when used together, provide a better way of understanding how children learn and develop through internalizing the sets of social relations that they are engaged in. In this sense, and as illustrated in Figure 3.3, it will be argued below that the concepts of habitus and figuration can be directly mapped onto Vygotsky's existing theoretical framework. Rather than representing an alternative to and/or replacement of Vygotsky's work, these two concepts should therefore be seen simply as a more appropriate way of applying the key insights he has offered.
p.83 Bourdieu's work and, particularly, his notion of habitus are now becoming increasingly popular in educational research... In relation to the habitus many of its traits are actually already evident in the notion of schemes as used by both Piaget and Vygotsky. It will be remembered that schemes are mental structures that children construct in order to make sense of their environment and to guide their actions. Each scheme is not composed simply of a set of thoughts or memories but also of related actions and strategies that they have learnt to guide their responses to particular objects or events... Vygotsky argued that these schemes derive from a child's involvement in social relations and thus can be seen as the eventual internalisation of the social activities they have been engaged in... once these schemes have been generated and internalised they tend to be represented as 'habits'... It is precisely this combination of habits as they are internalised within the individual child as a coherent set of schemes that are reflective of the broader social structures within which they are located, that forms the basis of the notion of the habitus.
[JLJ - humans are "programmed" to be programmed by (or to accept programming from) their social environment. Disagree with me? How often do you check your cell phone a day? Are you ever far from it? How many text messages a day do you receive?]
p.84 The habitus, as the word implies, is that which one has acquired, but which has become durably incorporated in the body in the form of permanent dispositions. So the term constantly reminds us that it refers to something historical, linked to individual history, and that it belongs to a genetic mode of thought, as opposed to essentialist modes of thought. (Bourdieu, 1993: 86)
p.85 But then why not say ‘habit’? Habit is spontaneously regarded as repetitive, mechanical, automatic, reproductive rather than productive. I wanted to insist on the idea that the habitus is something powerfully generative. To put it briefly, the habitus is a product of conditionings which tend to reproduce the objective logic of those conditionings while transforming it. It’s a kind of transforming machine that leads us to ‘reproduce' the social conditions of our own production, but in a relatively unpredictable way, in such a way that one cannot move simply and mechanically from knowledge of the conditions of production to knowledge of the products. (Bourdieu, 1993: 87)
…While individuals are free to make choices they can only do so within the parameters of ‘what they know’, i.e. the habitus they have internalized. In this sense, they are not separate from the social structures that surround them but are integrally shaped by them.
p.86 To speak of habitus is to assert that the individual, and even the personal, the subjective, is social, collective. Habitus is a socialized subjectivity. This is where I part, for instance, with Herbert Simon and his notion of ‘bounded rationality’. Rationality is bounded not only because the available information is curtailed, and because the human mind is generically limited and does not have the means of fully figuring out all situations, especially in the urgency of action, but also because the human mind is socially bounded, socially structured. The individual is always, whether he likes it or not, trapped – save to the extent that he becomes aware of it – ‘within the limits of his brain’. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 126, original emphasis)
p.86 the way that Bourdieu describes the relationship between the habitus and these broader external social structures (what he terms ‘fields’ of relations) has more than a passing resemblance to Vygotsky’s (1978: 57) explanation of how: ‘every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level’. Compare this with the following quote from Bourdieu:
The relation between habitus and field operates in two ways. On one side, it is a relation of conditioning; the field structures the habitus... On the other side, it is a relation of knowledge or cognitive construction. Habitus contributes to constituting the field as a meaningful world, a world endowed with sense and value... Social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside of agents. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 127, original emphasis)
p.87 As the quote from Bourdieu outlines above, it is not just a one-way relationship with social structures (fields) determining the habitus. Rather the habitus also, in turn, plays a central role in the reproduction of these social structures through the way it influences and shapes the actions of individuals. Second, the habitus also goes beyond a limited focus on the learning of discrete mental schemes as implied in Vygotsky's notion of internalisation. It also incorporated a more holistic understanding of the broader dispositions that individuals come to embody and which unconsciously shape and guide not only the way they think and behave but also the particular investments they have in certain forms of knowledge and ways of acting.
p.87 we can now see how the notion of habitus maps onto the existing theoretical framework offered by Vygotsky. In essence it can be seen as the collective term for all of the particular cognitive schemes that a child has internalized from their broader social environment. However, the habitus also incorporates the child as well – reflecting the fact that it is not possible to make an artificial distinction between the child and their cognitive schemes. Thus, the more the child begins to learn and internalize particular ways of thinking and behaving, the more these will inevitably become embodied in relation to their manner and physical appearance and the way they hold and present themselves.
The child, in terms of their physical body, is therefore simply the tangible expression of their mental schemes.
p.88 As was argued, it is not simply that a child’s behaviour is determined by their biology but that their behaviour can also influence the way their bodies develop… It is in this sense that the habitus… encapsulates not just the cognitive schemes of a child (their taken-for-granted ways of thinking and behaving) but also their actual bodies – the ways in which their very beings have come to incorporate and express these schemes.
p.88-89 a figuration is simply a term to describe all of the interdependent social relationships that the child is located within, and within which their habitus is formed. In this sense… the habitus does not exist outside of the figuration but is completely located within it… as Elias argues they [the ‘family’, ‘school’ or ‘community’] are all nothing more than particular figurations – composed ultimately of little more than interdependent networks of individuals. In this sense, ‘society’ is not something separate from individuals but is made up of a vast array of figurations that are, themselves, related to one another through chains of interdependence.
p.89-90 According to Elias the concept of figuration can be:
applied to relatively small groups just as well as to societies made up of thousands or millions of interdependent people… But the inhabitants of a village, a city or a nation also form figurations, although in this instance the figurations cannot be perceived directly because the chains of interdependence which link people together are longer and more differentiated. Such complex figurations must therefore be approached indirectly, and understood by analysing the chains of interdependence. (Elias, 1978: 131) [JLJ - corrected quotation from Elias]
The point here, then, is that there are no pre-given and fixed figurations that can be objectively defined. The concept of figuration is simply an analytical tool to be used flexibly to help understand particular social phenomena. It is therefore up to the researcher to decide which figuration(s) to define and study and at what levels… What all this shows, therefore, is that the habitus can only be understood in relation to a specific social context or figuration.
p.91 having established broadly what a figuration is and how it relates to the habitus, it is important to sketch out some of the key defining characteristics of a figuration. Elias identifies three that will be briefly outlined in turn. The first... is the interdependent nature of the relationships within the figuration. As Elias (1978: 134) contends: ‘the concept of figuration puts the problem of human interdependencies into the very heart of sociological theory’... what Elias is keen to do is to stress the fact that none of us is completely free to do as we choose but that, rather, our actions always depend upon and are influenced by those of others. The choices we make and the options open to us at any particular time are therefore dependent upon the actions and behaviour of those around us. In this sense we are never fully in control of the path that our lives take.
p.92 The second key characteristic that Elias stresses in relation to figurations follows on from this emphasis on interdependence. According to Elias, power lies at the heart of all relationships and thus figurations... this emphasis on interdependence requires us to think more in terms of balances of power and of power ratios. As Elias explains:
Balances of power… form an integral element of all human relationships… balances of power are always present wherever there is functional interdependence between people… Power… is a structural characteristic of human relationships – of all human relationships. (Elias, 1978: 74, original emphasis)
p.93 The third and final key characteristic associated with figurations that Elias has stressed is their dynamic nature… As Elias (1987: xvi) contends: ‘present social conditions represent an instant of a continuous process which, coming from the past, moves on through present times towards a future as yet unknown’.
p.93 an individual may justifiably be seen as a self-transforming person who, as it is sometimes put, goes through a process... it would be much more appropriate to say a person is constantly in movement; he not only goes through a process, he is a process. (Elias, 1978: 118, original emphasis)
p.94 a figurational approach also places the issues of power and conflict at the heart of the analysis and enables an understanding of how this also impacts upon the way that children learn and develop (through the development and reproduction of their habitus).
p.94-95 it is useful to conclude with an overall summary of the alternative theoretical framework adopted for the case studies to follow and especially an outline of the key concepts to be used and how they relate to one another... the starting point for the construction of an appropriate theoretical framework has been the pioneering work of Vygotsky and his stress on the social contexts of learning. The key concept is that of internalisation with its emphasis on how children's development is essentially characterised by the internalisation of the social relations that they are engaged in. Vygotsky's other concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) reinforces this key point by marking out the space in which children are actively learning at any point in time. In this sense, the ZPD is the distance between what a child can already achieve under their own initiative and what they can potentially achieve with the help and support of a more experienced person.
p.95 it has been argued that underlying all of this work to date has been a failure to fully understand the nature of the social contexts that children come to internalise through their development. It is with this in mind that the chapter has suggested an alternative way of thinking about Vygotsky's notion of internalisation through the use of the two sociological concepts of habitus and figuration. In this respect, each child is located within a number of different sets of social relations – referred to as figurations. For each figuration, the child is engaged in a number of complex interdependent relationships characterised by differing balances of power and undergoing processes of change. Their routine experiences of these relationships will slowly become internalized as a set of taken-for-granted predispositions to thinking and acting in certain ways. These particular predispositions – known collectively as the habitus – become second nature and unconsciously structure the child’s thought processes and guide their behaviour. In this way, the habitus provides a more comprehensive account of children’s development
p.211 Alongside his emphasis on social context, the other major contribution that Vygotsky has made of relevance to this current book is his notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). As explained in Chapter 3, this represents the space in which children are actively learning at any point in time.
p.212 Chapter 3… concluded by suggesting an alternative way of applying Vygotsky's overall approach through the twin concepts of figuration and habitus… It was argued that each child is located within a number of different sets of social relationships or what are referred to as figurations. For each figuration, the child is engaged in a number of complex interdependent relationships characterized by differing balances of power and undergoing processes of change. The child’s routine experiences of these relationships will slowly come to be internalized into a set of predispositions to thinking and acting in certain ways. It is these predispositions that make up the child’s habitus. The habitus is therefore not just composed of all the specific cognitive schemes that we traditionally focus on in terms of the early years… but is also includes more general perceptions and values – reflecting those of the community in which she or he belongs – that tend to influence their overall dispositions or motivations to education and learning… This broadly Vygotskian approach, enhanced with the twin concepts of habitus and figuration, therefore provides the theoretical framework with which to make sense of the two case studies that provide the focus for the third section of the book
|
