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Uses and Meanings of “Context” in Studies on Children’s Knowledge: A Viewpoint from Anthropology and Constructivist Psychology

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Abstract

Though context has yet to receive an unequivocal definition, it is a concept that frequently appears in research in children’s knowledge and its construction. This article examines the scope and meaning of context in genetic psychology and social anthropology in order to better understand the relationship between children’s construction of knowledge and the context in which it occurs. Meta-theoretical, theoretical and methodological complexities arise when the concept is analyzed in the two disciplines, and these will also be addressed herein. The fields of anthropology and constructive psychology are both affected by the relationship between the building of knowledge and the social practices surrounding this process. Finally, based on these empirical examinations, the article explores how research methodologies could incorporate the notion of context in research focused on the construction of knowledge.

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Notes

  1. Influenced by the development of pragmatics, the linguistic anthropologist Duranti (Duranti 2001; Goodwin and Duranti 1992) proposed rethinking the notion of context created by speech acts that not only involve saying things but also doing them. Along these same lines, the works by Hutchins and Goodwin (2011) introduce the category of embodied interaction to analyze social interaction and shared cognition, based on the assumption that contexts are comprised of these social interactions and the materiality of the bodies and cultural elements which form them.

  2. Postmodern anthropology appeared in the 1980s and took this interpretation to an extreme by affirming that every social interaction produces a context of meanings so particular that an external analysis becomes impossible. The context thus becomes a whole once again but for the opposite reason as the functionalism described earlier; here the individual subject becomes the epicenter where meaning is created outside any general social principles. This explains why “instead of context, postmodern scholars speak of intertextuality,” (Reynoso 1991, p.55) suggesting that ethnographic narrative is more of a literary work than a scientific text.

  3. As indicated earlier, there are mentions of context in other branches of psychology (such as discursive psychology) in which language is understood as constitutive rather than referential of knowledge constructions. This marks an important divide with genetic psychology that merits mention. One influential researcher in this area, Potter (2000), addressed the rhetorical nature of a world defined through the discursive practices among participants in a dialogue. Discursive constructions here are examined as situated constructions in the context in which they occur with a focus on the social action that researchers and participants are describing. According to this perspective, the analysis deals with the way an individual constructs a representation and then acts accordingly, obtaining an invitation, for example, or attributing guilt.

  4. Though he does not belong to the genetic psychology tradition, Engeström (1999, and Engeström and Middleton 1996) influenced the field with his situated cognition approach. According to this activity theory derived from Leontiev’s ideas, the activity components are the subject, the tool, the object, the community (those who share the activity), the division of labor and the community rules. Activity theory in this regard “is contextual and is oriented at understanding historically specific local practices, their objects, mediating artifacts, and social organization” (Cole and Engeström 1993, p. 377).

  5. In the field of anthropology and education, Rockwell (1995, 1996) proposed the concept of appropriation, which draws attention to the network of meanings constructed from the different knowledge circulating in a certain space (school, family, etc.) and to what subjects do with these meanings, consciously or otherwise, based on their own needs and possibilities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Mariana García Palacios, Paula Shabel, Axel Horn & José Antonio Castorina

  2. National Council of Scientific and Technical Investigations (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Mariana García Palacios, Paula Shabel & José Antonio Castorina

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  1. Mariana García Palacios
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  2. Paula Shabel
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García Palacios, M., Shabel, P., Horn, A. et al. Uses and Meanings of “Context” in Studies on Children’s Knowledge: A Viewpoint from Anthropology and Constructivist Psychology. Integr. psych. behav. 52, 191–208 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-018-9414-1

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