Cultural psychology and children’s understanding of institutional reality / La psicología cultural y la comprensión de los niños de la realidad institucional

Abstract

Spanish

This article will describe and illustrate an approach to empirical investigation that is grounded in a basic principle of cultural psychology: that culture is a constituent of human psychological functioning. Cultural artefacts provide the means by which people interact with the world around them and with other people. Humans live in artificial environments, and in a real sense humans too are artificial. Specifically, humans live in societies composed of institutions, such as family, school, workplace, and children must become able to assume roles in these institutions. To investigate children’s development, which is our interest, it is necessary not merely to study children in their cultural context, but also to design and implement changes in that cultural context. Untangling the complex, changing relationship between child and cultural context is greatly facilitated by actively transforming this institutional reality, in interaction with the children. We illustrate this point with descriptions of a project, five years in duration, in Ciudad Bolívar, Colombia, in which we established a small institution, a Fifth Dimension, in which children participated in playful and educational activities.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Baldwin

J. R.

Faulkner

S. L.

Hecht

M. L.

Lindsley

S. L.

(Eds.). (2006). Redefining culture: Perspectives across the disciplines. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Cole

(1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cole

The Distributive Literacy Consortium . (2006). The fifth dimension: An after-school program built on diversity. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Cole

Packer

M. J.

(2016). Design-based intervention research as the science of the doubly artificial. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25, 503–530.

Geertz

(1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Johnson

A. W.

(2003). Families of the forest: The Matsigenka indians of the Peruvian Amazon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kroeber

A. L.

Kluckhohn

(1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.

Mesoudi

(2016). Cultural evolution: Integrating psychology, evolution and culture. Current Opinion in Psychology, 7, 17–22.

Packer

M. J.

Cole

(press). Evolution and ontogenesis: The deontic niche of human development. Human Development.

10.

Rakoczy

Tomasello

(2007). The ontogeny of social ontology: Steps to shared intentionality and status functions. In Tsohatzidis

S. L.

(Ed.), Intentional acts and institutional facts: Essays on John Searle’s social ontology (pp. 113–137). Berlin: Springer Verlag.

11.

Searle

J. R.

(2009). Making the social world: The structure of human civilization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

12.

Vygotsky

L. S.

1986. Concrete human psychology. Soviet Psychology 27(2), 53–77. Written 1929.

13.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1987). Thinking and speech. In Rieber

R. W.

Carton

A. S.

(Eds.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky. Volume 1: Problems of general psychology (pp. 39–285). New York, NY: Plenum.

14.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1993). The dynamics of child character (J. E. Know & C. B. Stevens, Trans.). In Rieber

R. W.

Carton

A. S.

(Eds.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky. Vol. 2: The fundamentals of defectology (pp. 153–163). New York, NY & London: Plenum.

15.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1998). Lectures on child psychology. In Rieber

R. W.

(Ed.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky. Vol. 5: Child psychology (pp. 207–296). New York, NY: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

16.

Wikipedia contributors . (2018, May 15 ). Ciudad Bolívar, Bogotá. In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (p. 17). 27. Retrieved October 24, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ciudad_Bol%C3%ADvar,_Bogot%C3%A1&oldid=841316682