Learning – Viv Ellis

A Different Vygotsky: New Book on Drama, Learning and the Work of Classrooms

There are many different Vygotskies. There is the Vygotsky whose theoretical speculations on the relationship between thinking and speech have sometimes become barely recognizable justifications for ‘group work’ in schools. There is the Vygotsky whose experiments with stroke patients, among others, paved the way for a new methodology in psychology. There is the Vygotsky associated with the Russian field of ‘defectology’; the Vygotsky introduced to English teachers in England by James Britton; the Vygotsky wrongly accredited with term ‘scaffolding’. And the Vygotsky whose work was selected, translated and assembled in an idiosyncratic order by American cognitive psychologists in the 1970s, four decades after the man himself had died. Oh, and the philosopher’s Vygotsky, the one spoken about in connection with Hegel and Kant and, more recently, Brandom and McDowell.

But what of the Vygotsky who was, first, a humanities scholar, closely involved in his local theatre? The same Vygotsky who studied Hamlet for his doctorate and who borrowed concepts from the great Russian director Stanislavsky? It falls to a fascinating new volume edited by Davis, Fertholt, Grainger Clemson, Jansson and Marjanovic-Shane – Dramatic Interaction in Education: Vygotskian and Sociocultural Approaches to Drama, Education and Research – to show the life-long importance of drama and theatre in Lev Vygotsky’s work. The book’s great achievement over its 14 chapters is to show how the early interest in theatre set the ground for Vygotsky’s major theoretical and empirical studies of human development. And then how, in his final years (although still a young man: he died at 37) he turned once again to the drama of development and the importance of creativity and play throughout life. And, just for the purposes of full disclosure, Hannah Grainger Clemson (one of the editors and authors) was a doctoral student of mine and did a fascinating study in this area.

Vygotsky’s approach to human development is characterized by some particularly ‘dramatic’ dynamics. A key characteristic is the importance placed on social interaction and the ‘lending’ of consciousness between individuals in what he described as a ‘zone of proximal development’. ‘We become ourselves through others’ captures some of this dynamic between the inner self and the outer realm of shared experience. The role of artifacts in creating this dynamic is also key: a stick can prop open a door or it can become a horse or, for that matter, a light sabre. In other words, ‘things’ can have functional or symbolic meanings and symbolic meanings can open doors to new ideas and new ways of doing things. And in this process, imagination is central and exercised in the agentic engagement of people both with things and other people as they work together to solve problems or overcome crises. Thinking – cognitive activity, if you like – has a social and material basis for Vygotsky: it is a living and embodied performance that relies on people’s wants, needs and desires as motives. The drama of learning, then, is the drama of human development.

The book’s chapters are organized in four sections. The first takes a generally historical approach to Vygotsky’s life and influences, insofar as they show a relationship between the ‘problem of the actor’ and the problem of the learner’s work. A central concept is that of perezivhanie, a concept Vygotsky appropriated from Stanislavsky, meaning the frame of emotional experience through which we perceive our environments and their opportunities for our development. As with many chapters throughout the book, the contribution by Fertholt in this section draws on empirical research, in this case, an early childhood education setting. Section 2 consists of three chapters reporting on the transformative potential of classroom drama, particularly in connection to motivation and identity formation. The third section continues the emphasis on classroom studies of drama in education, across secondary education generally and with particular attention to second-language learning, multicultural classrooms and the use of new technologies. Section three is generally more successful than section two in integrating the Vygotskian theory with data analysis and Chapter 7 (by Ewing), in particular, offers a good example of how data can be used to illustrate and develop readers’ understandings of these theories. The final section includes two chapters by Jansson that bring together Vygotskian interests in the ‘drama of learning’ and development with the neo-Vygotskian, activity theoretical approach to intervention research in workplace settings, known as Developmental Work Research (DWR). Other chapters in this section (by Franks and Sawyer) draw on theories of multimodality and group creativity.

As an edited collection of 14 chapters, the editors have generally done a good job of building coherence across the whole book as well as within the four sections. This is particularly true of the first section and it is probably one of the reasons why it is so successful. There are one or two referencing issues that should have been picked up during production (missing or incomplete references, for example), especially for an academic book at this price. Personally, I would also have appreciated a final chapter (even if presented simply as an epilogue or ‘afterword’) that brought the whole book together and synthesized what the editors believed to be the key messages: how might we define specifically Vygotskian and sociocultural approaches to drama education and drama education research? These are small quibbles with what is an excellent book, however. It merits serious attention as a scholarly collection dedicated to revealing and explaining the Vygotsky for whom an early interest in theatre provided many of the concepts and underlying social dynamics of his later psychology, a psychology that – for all its limits – has become so influential in education.

A version of this post will appear as a review in Research in Drama Education this year.

Dramatic Interaction in Education: Vygotskian and Sociocultural Approaches to Drama, Education and Research

Edited by Susan Davis, Beth Fertholt, Hannah Grainger Clemson, Satu-Mari Jansson & Ana Marjanovic-Shame

London: Bloomsbury Academic; 290 pages

ISBN: 978 1-4725-7689-7

Learning Teaching from Experience: Multiple Perspectives, International Contexts

Learning Teaching from Experience is published by Bloomsbury today! The book came out of a Society for Educational Studies seminar I organised with Janet Orchard in Oxford. It includes chapters by many leading researchers in the field, including Ken Zeichner, Madeleine Grumet, Daniel Muijs and Anne Edwards, as well as newer scholars such as Lauren Gatti (winner of the AERA Division K best dissertation award 2012) and California school teachers Torie Weiston-Serdan and Sheri-Dorn Giamoleo.

The book will be launched at a seminar in Bergen on Thursday 23rd January and then again (!) in London on Friday 21st February, both followed by drinks receptions. And then probably in Bristol. And perhaps again at AERA….. Further details to follow.

Pre-publication reviews were stunning and exceptionally generous. Thank you to all the reviewers from us both:

“At last, a book which combines a breadth of cross-disciplinary education scholarship, a breadth of focus – across North America and Europe – and accounts of practice in a range of contexts. This is book goes beyond factional rhetoric while demonstrating passionate commitment to the education of our young people. It addresses the deepest questions of education for what purposes, for whom, how, and in what conditions teachers learn from their experiences. Read the book to understand the complexities underlying that widely used phrase ‘learn from experience’. Fascinating and enlightening.” – Morwenna Griffiths, Professor of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK.

“This book should be required reading for courses of teacher education, particularly in the current context in which ‘learning on the job’ and the craft idea of a teacher is increasingly the norm. In this context, the rhetoric of ‘learning from experience’ is frequently invoked. But what does it mean to learn from experience? Is understanding theory not experiential? The contributions in the book approach these questions with a wealth of research and applied knowledge, which at times challenge orthodoxy on learning theories and policy. The diversity of approaches, as well as the detail and exemplification they give provide a highly informative account of aspects of learning from experience from multiple perspectives, and give us pause for thought that there can be ‘a science of education’, a formulaic application of research data and policy borrowing. The book’s chapters invite us to think carefully about the best way to develop teachers. It provides a rich account of why ‘formation’ is required, not some kind of technical ‘training’.” – Dr. Ruth Heilbronn, Institute of Education, University of London, UK.

“An important, timely and challenging book; an essential resource for everyone interested in the future of teacher education.” – John Furlong, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Oxford, UK.

A sample chapter (our introduction) is available in the Chapters section.

Given that Tough Young Teachers is now showing on BBC3, this is an even more topical book than we expected.

The Uses of Poetry: New AHRC Project

The Uses of Poetry: Measuring the Value of Engaging with Poetry in Lifelong Learning and Development (Arts and Humanities Research Council; Cultural Value project)

With the wonderful Kate Rumbold (PI, Birmingham University) and Tricia Riddell (Reading University), I have started work on a new interdisciplinary research project that will bring together literary, psychological and educational interests to focus on the ‘uses of’, meanings and definitions of poetry – or the poetic mode. The research is part of the AHRC’s major Cultural Value project and will include public events for both data generation and dissemination purposes. Our guiding questions are:

What are the perceived benefits of poetry to people’s learning and development at all stages of their lives? How do researchers and practitioners in literature, education and psychology currently express the value of poetry in their separate spheres? How can we best combine those insights into a rigorous interdisciplinary approach that will more effectively measure and evaluate the value of engaging with poetry?

And our research will address the following questions:

What research exists across our disciplines about the value of engaging with poetry?
What constitutes ‘evidence’ in our respective fields?
What is the assumed value of poetry in our fields, and how can we test that assumption? How is ‘value’ defined?
Which of our approaches, from e.g. subjective well-being analysis to reader response, comes closest to being able to measure, evaluate and articulate people’s actual experiences of engaging with poetry? Can existing research techniques transcend individual experiences without simply aggregating them?
On what forms of measurement do we currently rely, quantitative or qualitative? How could these be combined?
Does our disciplinary approach tend towards understanding the affective, cognitive or aesthetic role of poetry? How could we better understand these from an interdisciplinary perspective?
How can we optimise the strengths of our approaches to pilot a new, truly interdisciplinary valuation of the benefits of engaging with poetry?

I will post about future seminars and related events about the next six months. I am particularly keen that we try to offer practical educational alternatives for working in the poetic mode that go beyond ‘feature-spotting’ and have the potential to transform young people’s engagement with the spoken and written word inside schools (just as so many things have outside).

‘So Much More Than Decoding’: Booklet to download

A practitioner guide to working with adolescents with reading difficulties – arising out of my recent Higher Education Academy funded project – is now available to download here.

The guide reviews the current state of research on adolescents with reading difficulties (sometimes known as Adolescent Struggling Readers – ASRs) and provides research-based recommendations for successful interventions at whole-school, subject and classroom levels.

The booklet was written with Henrietta Dombey, Professor Emerita at the University of Brighton, and Hannah Grainger Clemson, a former doctoral student currently a post-doc at Warwick University’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

Maths Talk Grant from London Mayor

Brunel colleagues Valsa Koshy (PI), Deborah Jones and I have been awarded £275,000 by the London Mayor’s Excellence Fund for the research and development project ‘Maths Talk at Key Stage 1’.

Building on Brunel’s strong tradition of practice-developing research associated with Valsa, the project will focus on the development of mathematical language and reasoning among very young children and their parents. Sociocultural approaches to concept development and talk-in-interaction will form the my main contribution to the intervention along with the analysis of language data. With Deborah and project Maths consultants, I am particularly looking forward to planning workshops for parents and carers. Fieldwork for the project will take place in the London Borough of Wandsworth.

For further information on the Mayor’s Excellence Fund, click here.

Learning and Collective Creativity: Activity-theoretical and Sociocultural Studies

New book published by Routledge in New York, co-edited with Annalisa Sannino from CRADLE at Helsinki University. This book is the only one currently available that brings together theories of human activity and studies of human creativity. The book grounds its interest in a variety of settings where people are learning and, specifically, learning to be creative. Creativity is defined, not so much as ‘little c’ creativity but as an integral aspect of learning that enables and promotes the exercise of learners’ agency.