Language Ideologies & Learning Sciences

Language Ideologies & Learning Sciences As Marx Wartofsky (1983) famously pointed out, there is solid historical evidence of the world’s construction of the child as much as the child’s construction of the world: “Children are, or become, what they are taken to be by others, and what they come to take themselves to be, in the course of their social communication and interaction with others” (p. 190). I took this argument to provide a vital issue for human learning augmented with information technologies: According to this theory, human nature is not a product of environmental forces, but is of our own making as a society and is continually in the process of “becoming.” Humankind is reshaped through a dialectic, or “conversation” of reciprocal influences: Our productive activities change the world, thereby changing the ways in which the world can change us. By shaping nature and how our interactions with it are mediated, we change ourselves. (Pea, 1987, p. 93)

In  Pea, R. D. (2004). The social and technological dimensions of scaffolding and related theoretical concepts for learning, education, and human activity. The journal of the learning sciences, 13(3), 423-451.

Quoting Vygotsky, 1978: 

“The specialization of the hand—this implies the tool, and the tool implies specific human activity, the transforming reaction of man on nature…the animal merely uses external nature, and brings about changes in it simply by his presence; man, by his changes, makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals.” Vygotsky brilliantly extended this concept of mediation in human–environment interaction to the use of signs as well as tools. Like tool systems, sign systems (language, writing, number systems) are created by societies over the course of human history and change with the form of society and the level of its cultural development. Vygotsky believed that the internalization of culturally produced sign systems brings about behavior transformations and forms the bridge between early and later forms of individual development. Thus for Vygotsky, in the tradition of Marx and Engels, the mechanism of individual development is rooted in society and culture. (Vygotsky, 1978, Introduction, p. 7)