Social Knowledge Construction and the Revisited Genetic Psychology

As it is well known, Piagetian theory was mainly dedicated to the explanation of the process involved in the passages from one lower level of physical or logical-mathematical knowledge to a higher level, and it is necessary to introduce the analysis of the delimitation of the “social” character of knowledge by revisited genetic psychology. This assumption must be made explicit, as it can acquire different meanings depending on the adopted disciplinary approach. It is a problem that requires conceptual discussion and the production of empirical evidence to be fully interpreted. Therefore, we will delimit from conceptual analysis the epistemological and methodological approaches that, for us, determine the specificity of the processes of social knowledge construction in a broad sense that encompasses different dimensions.

The constructivist epistemological perspective inherited from the Piagetian tradition, in which we critically inscribe ourselves, focuses on the constitutive relationship between subject and object of knowledge, understood as two inseparable poles of the activities carried out in the world. In knowledge development, the systems produced in subject–object interactions are not contained in the previous ones; that is to say, they allow for the construction of novelty.

In this framework, our perspective is inspired by Duveen (Reference Duveen, Guareschi and Jovchelovitch1994, 1998), who interprets social psychology from a relational worldview and critically approaches Piagetian tradition. In so doing, he affirms that the construction of individual theories or hypotheses is situated in the context of collectively constructed knowledge transmission. It is essential to clarify that foregrounding the social interactions in which knowledge construction processes take place and the appropriation of collectively constructed knowledge, such as ideological beliefs or social representations, do not imply neglecting the constructive processes that take place at the individual cognitive level. In other words, doing so does not imply abandoning the active character of the subject in this process, which is one of the central theses of Piagetian theory.

In this framework, the following questions arise: To what extent does the appropriation of collective knowledge processes involve a truly original construction of knowledge by individuals? What degree of freedom does someone who appropriates collectively constructed knowledge have? What is the dynamic through which an individual makes a collective belief or social representation his or her own? To answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate the relationships between social representations and the constructive dynamics of knowledge development – that is, to elucidate their ontogenesis (Barreiro & Castorina, Reference Barreiro and Castorina2017). In this sense, positing the existence of a process of individuation (Barreiro & Castorina, Reference Castorina and Barreiro2010; Castorina, Reference Castorina2017, Reference Castorina2010) in the framework of the ontogenetic process of social representations is not equivalent to the defense of an isolated subject or of an individual identity, based on the self and radically dissociated from society. On the contrary, our position holds that when a person appropriates the social representations constitutive of his or her social identity during interaction with others – both peers and adults – he or she engages in an individual cognitive activity. In other words, we highlight the constructive process widely recognized by Duveen (Reference Duveen, Guareschi and Jovchelovitch1994). From this perspective, we reject the idea that social beliefs are assimilated to an individual cognitive apparatus or are transformed by an individual subject detached from the social practices in which they participate. Foregrounding the existence of cognitive mechanisms, in line with the intra-individual level of analysis in Doise’s (Reference Doise1982) scheme, does not imply the existence of an individual subject apart from his or her cultural environment.

Basically, for the revised Piagetian developmental psychology in which we frame our work, as for genetic social psychology, the subject is a constitutive part of a relational triad composed of a social subject, the object of knowledge, and alter (individuals, groups, or educational and normative institutional practices such as schools). Thus, throughout the unfolding of the research program of constructivist developmental psychology, the epistemic subject of the classical Piagetian tradition was progressively abandoned in favour of a psychosocial subject. This subject is constituted by his or her participation in social practices where the relations between him or her and the others, rooted in collective beliefs and practices, play a constitutive role. As we have already pointed out, it is precisely this dialectical epistemic framework that makes revisited genetic psychology and genetic social psychology compatible (Castorina, Reference Castorina2017; Duveen, Reference Duveen, Guareschi and Jovchelovitch1994). Both share the relational and interactive character of the components of social experience – whether historical, moral, or political – assuming its components exist only in their interpenetration. As Psaltis and Marková point out in this volume, there was a theoretical shift from the dual subject–object dialectic in classic Piagetian works toward a triadic dialectical unity of analysis: subject–object–other.

Returning to Moscovici’s initial contributions (Marková, Reference Marková2010; Moscovici, Reference Moscovici1961), social knowledge is constructed in a dynamic semiotic triangle ego–alter–object (representation/symbol). From the point of view of revisited Piagetian developmental psychology, this triadic dialectical unity becomes specific in terms of the study of the constructive dynamics involved in cutting out the object of knowledge through the inferences that the subject makes during social practices (Barreiro & Castorina, Reference Barreiro and Castorina2017; Horn et al., Reference Horn, Castorina and Barreiro2023). This approach allows for studying the developmental processes involved in the individual appropriation of social representations. The inquiry focuses on the individual inferential activity aimed to make sense of the object of knowledge. However, the social interactions in which both are immersed constitute this process (Barreiro, Reference Barreiro2013a; Barreiro & Castorina, Reference Barreiro and Castorina2017).

The careful study of individual conceptualization processes amid social interaction, in which collective beliefs are constructed and expressed, is the object of the revisited genetic psychology study. In this way it coincides with genetic social psychology in the psychosocial character of the subject, leaving aside the decontextualized epistemic subject characteristic of Piaget’s classic works. From a microgenetic level of analysis as discussed by Psaltis and Duveen (Reference Psaltis and Duveen2006, Reference Psaltis and Duveen2007), to analyze the conversation types aimed at social recognition and cognitive change – for example, how social representations of gender modulate discussions about the conservation of quantities – social interactions are not only the context in which the equilibration process of cognitive structures unfolds but also provide the resources for them to emerge (Psaltis & Zapiti, Reference Psaltis and Zapiti2014). In this empirical and conceptual perspective, the psychosocial subject (the subject of genetic social psychology) in its conversational interactions with others about a social object is taken as the unit of analysis. Even the precedence of social interactions of cooperation or constraint over cognitive achievements pointed out by Psaltis, which Piaget (1932/Reference Piaget1948) studied as mutually necessary for moral development, does not prevent us from considering their cognitive specificity. The latter is expressed in the temporal duration and the cognitive effort that the ontogenetic process of appropriation of social representations requires, as shown by the studies from this perspective (Barreiro, Reference Barreiro2013a, Reference Barreiro2013b; Duveen & Lloyd, Reference Duveen, Lloyd, Duveen and Lloyd1990). Nevertheless, the progressive equilibration of cognitive structures was proposed by Piaget (1975/Reference Piaget1985) to explain the passage from structural preoperational thinking to operational. Therefore, the specificity of social knowledge brings us back to the question with which we began this section: If a psychosocial subject has replaced the Piagetian operational subject, can the equilibration mechanism be used to explain the development of social knowledge?

The Psychosocial Subject versus the Operational Subject in the Construction of Social Knowledge

At this point, it becomes necessary to reconsider the operational subject in the light of the postulate of a psychosocial subject whose development follows specific conceptual trajectories and who interacts with t polysemic objects of knowledge. On the one hand, in recent decades, a debate has occurred in Piagetian developmental psychology concerning the scope of the changes that lead to the construction of new acquisitions and knowledge: that is, whether development occurs in specific domains or is carried out by a general process of logical structure construction, affecting different knowledge domains as if they were isomorphic. In classical Piagetian constructivism, such a general process was the equilibration of thought structures culminating in formal operations. In Piaget’s theory, structures have been clearly differentiated from contents.Footnote ¹ It has been argued that the contents of knowledge are diverse, but the way of thinking about them is determined by the structures constructed by the subject, whether it is historical, physical, moral, or logical knowledge.

Thus, in a first and long period, the inquiries of Piagetian psychologists who dealt with the construction of social notions approached this process from a general domain perspective, focused on the study of a subject isolated from social interactions. Instead, the subject interacts with the object of knowledge in isolation, and cognitive development follows a universal sequence (Berti, Reference Berti, Carretero and Voss1994; Delval, Reference Delval, Carretero and Voss1994; Jahoda, Reference Jahoda1979). From this perspective, it is assumed that the social and cultural context exerts some influence on the content of knowledge from the outside but does not affect the form of the cognitive process. That is to say, from such perspective, context does not intervene in the increasingly complex trajectory of judgments and arguments elaborated by individuals and sustained by the operational structures (Castorina, Reference Castorina and Castorina2005).

By contrast, empirical research carried out in the past four decades (Castorina & Barreiro, Reference Castorina and Barreiro2023; Ferreiro & Teberosky, Reference Ferreiro and Teberosky1991; Martí, Reference Martí, Martí and Rodríguez2012; Smetana et al., Reference Smetana, Jabom, Ball, Killen and Smetana2014; Smetana & Villalobos, Reference Smetana, Villalobos, Lerner and Steinberg2009; Turiel, Reference Turiel1983) has highlighted the existence and centrality of the so-called specific domains of development. Domains are knowledge sets about a class of phenomena that share specific properties. These studies have shown that it is possible to distinguish different domains of knowledge (moral, mathematical, historical, physical, and several others) that are defined by their conceptual organization, assuming their constructive paths about a specific field of experience. For example, Turiel (Reference Turiel1983) identified three domains of social experience (moral, psychological, and conventional) based on the different characteristics of social interactions in each of them, together with the distinct developmental trajectories identified in children’s justifications about how and why not respecting a social norm in such social interactions could be okay. When considering knowledge from the point of view of the subject’s activity, the notion of the domain is distinguished from its interpretation in terms of biologically determined internal representations, as well as from the peculiarity of cultural instruments or from reality. In our view, a domain is neither contextually given nor internal to the subject, but is constructed – that is, it is modified through interactions with social phenomena. From this perspective, social knowledge is the field of phenomena and relations about which individuals formulate ideas during their social experiences (Castorina & Faigenbaum, Reference Castorina and Faigenbaum2003; Castorina et al., Reference Castorina2010). Thus, the social domain is not constituted by a particular application of general individual knowledge systems, as in the classical Piagetian tradition. Therefore, it is possible to identify constructive paths specific to each field of societal experience (Barreiro, Reference Barreiro2012, Reference Barreiro2013a, Reference Barreiro2013b; Horn, Reference Horn2021; Turiel, Reference Turiel1983). Individuals construct domain-specific conceptual systems about social objects of knowledge during their experience with them within institutional practices. In this way, social practices and the beliefs that are expressed and transmitted in them constitute constraints to the construction of social knowledge by individuals, as they limit and at the same time enable this process (Barreiro & Castorina, Reference Barreiro and Castorina2012; Castorina & Faingenbaum, Reference Castorina and Faigenbaum2003; Castorina et al., Reference Castorina2010). The latter implies affirming that they are neither external nor associated with a general process of knowledge construction; instead, they constitute it. The objects of social knowledge are constituted as such in the social practices of individuals; therefore, without them, thinking is impossible (Castorina et al., Reference Castorina2010).

On the other hand, if the epistemic subject of knowledge is thought of as the expression of a general logical cognitive structure, even if this structure is embedded in social practices (Psaltis & Zapetti, Reference Psaltis and Zapiti2014), we would be conceiving a subject with little flexibility to understand the social world. However, the knowledge necessary to live in a social world, particularly about others, is volatile, unpredictable, and variable. Similarly, if one adopts a classical Piagetian perspective, explaining the specificity of logical operational part–whole relations is problematic when it comes to knowledge about others in terms of the social groups to which they belong. In a pioneering study, Piaget and Weil (Reference Piaget and Weil1951) attributed the problems that children had up to the age of 10–11 in understanding the notion of homeland and the relations with foreigners to the development of part–whole logical inclusion relations and of the relativity or symmetrical character of relations that allows them to coordinate perspectives. Both capacities would be the result of operational activities that are based on reciprocity. On the one hand, understanding that one’s city is located within a country implies a process of cognitive decentering. Thus, the child would first understand the notion of the neighborhood, then that of the city, then that of the province, and finally that of the nation. Developing this intellectual coordination consists in mastering reciprocal operations. Piaget states that this understanding requires a cognitive effort and is slow to develop. Up to the age of 7–8, children think in terms of juxtaposed relations between their city and the country in which they live. Although they affirm that Geneva is in Switzerland, they still need to understand this affirmation in terms of the spatial and logical relations that it implies. Later, children can understand the spatial and temporal inclusion of Geneva in Switzerland, but this still needs to correspond to a relationship of inclusion, because they think that it is not possible to be Swiss and, at the same time, Genevan. In other words, the children do not accept the dual belonging to the city and the country. Regarding the construction of the notion of foreigner, Piaget focuses his analyses on the understanding of relativity (in this case, the symmetrical nature of the logical relations involved) as the result of an operational activity that allows the conversion operation to be carried out to transform A = B into B = A. In other words, it is an operation of symmetry.

Inspired by Piaget, Psaltis resorts to the operational construction of part–whole relations when considering the possible reduction of prejudice through intergroup contact. He analyzes the individual possibilities of generalizing a social/national group feature from a single case in the future without considering the variability of the objects (the others in this case) toward which thought is directed in the domain of social knowledge. Part–whole relations, defined by the functioning of operational structures described by Piaget, refer to a logical category that would homogenize and stereotype the diversity of singular identities within a social group. The relations of necessity between logical classes – for example, in a set of roses and daisies, there are more flowers than daisies, even if there are more daisies than roses – cannot be extended to social knowledge. The whole and inclusion in the whole seems to presuppose the diversity of individuals’ traits in that whole. People, even if they belong to the same national or ethnic group, are diverse and behave differently. More than operational arguments are needed to explain how subjects think about social phenomena such as nationality or homeland. It is necessary to appeal to the changing and diverse relations between individuals and social groups to conceptions that modify their meaning or specify it beyond operatory thought.

The logical necessity, the awareness of the necessity to which individuals arrive, is the indicator of logical operations in the logical-mathematical field. However, it is debatable whether its acquisition accounts for social knowledge development. Even if there were such a necessity in social thought, its transformation does not go in that direction – in other words, the genesis of social knowledge does not go in the direction of the conquest of logical necessity, but of conceptual systematicity. Developmental transformations in this field go toward social representations and other collective beliefs that circulate in individuals’ social groups, driving their cognitive development. We are not saying that operational logical thinking ceases to be part of social knowledge, but rather that its development does not explain the specific ideas of this domain. From the subject’s point of view, it is possible to speak of necessity retrospectively, but it is not a logical necessity. The subject who has advanced conceptually may believe that it is necessary to think in this way, but this results from a history characterized by its indeterminacy, much more significant than in the shaping of other knowledge domain, because of the nature of the practices in which he or she participates. Only once a subject conceptualizes a notion does it become the real object for them, and only then is it experienced as “necessary” by them. This necessity is very different from the one inherent to operational logic, according to which the nonexistence of a specific state of facts is not possible.

The indeterminacy and coexistence of the different meanings that an object of social knowledge can acquire constitute one of the basic principles of the social representations theory. Multiple meanings that can be given socially to the same objects because the social contexts in which they are included are also multiple, giving rise to a state of cognitive polyphasia (Moscovici, Reference Moscovici1961; Wagner & Hayes, Reference Wagner and Hayes2005). This implies that even contradictory meanings of the same object of knowledge can coexist. Thus, social psychologists explicitly criticize the postulate that thinking does not progress from pre-logical to logical states or from lesser to greater validity, but different logics of thinking coexist, even in adults. Everyday thinking involves the construction of representations with contradictory meanings to each other. However, such contradictions are not disturbing to individuals as long as the representations are locally consistent and not expressed simultaneously in their discourse (Wagner et al., Reference Wagner, Duveen, Verma, Themel and Hass2006). In this sense, the logical framework of commonsense representations is reminiscent of the transductive thinking described by Piaget (1959/Reference Piaget1999) in young children, whose reasoning goes from particular cases to particular cases without recourse to universality or logical necessity.

However, it is essential to note that when social psychologists speak of polyphasia, they generally compare scientific knowledge or disciplinary knowledge with commonsense knowledge (considered chiefly in terms of social representations) and contrast everyday thinking with scientific knowledge. Social psychologists do not generally accept individual appropriation elaboration of concepts, with the exception of Duveen, Leman, and De Rosa (Duveen & De Rosa, Reference Duveen and De Rosa1992; Leman, Reference Leman1998; Leman & Duveen, Reference Leman and Duveen1996). However, we have identified the existence of processes by which subjects construct their knowledge about the world that are not exhausted in a passive incorporation of social beliefs because this is not immediate; that is, it is needed to recognize that individuals carry out a process of conceptual elaboration (Castorina et al., Reference Castorina2010). The results of empirical research in developmental psychology show that the construction of social knowledge, from the perspective of individuals, requires a prolonged effort of intellectual elaboration and reorganization of the framework of ideas. Such studies point to a constructive process that progresses from states of lower to higher differentiation and integration of knowledge. For example, in studying the ontogenesis of the social representations of justice, we found that the initial independent utilitarian (what makes me happy) and retributive representations (punish who did wrong) were held by children from 6 to 9 years of age. From 10 to 17, such independent representations are integrated, conforming to the social hegemonic representation of justice that prevails in Argentine society: justice is what makes everyone happy, and the method to achieve this is to punish who did wrong and to reward those who did good (Barreiro, Reference Barreiro2013a, Reference Barreiro, Ungaretti, Etchezahar and Wainryb2020; Barreiro & Castorina, Reference Barreiro, Wainryb and Carretero2016).

Similarly, the appropriation of historical master narratives (Carretero & Bermudez, 2011) or children’s experiences with cultural artifacts charged with collective meanings cannot be explained by limiting them to logical structures. Moreover, Piaget described cognitive structures in analyzing the relations of people’s activity with the physical world. As we said earlier, we do not deny the existence of operational logic and its intervention in, for example, the classification of social phenomena, as in the case of the part–whole inclusion relations applicable to the categories of city and country. However, it is not only through these relations that it is possible to explain the transformation processes of the meanings given to the objects of the social world, including the others. In this way, the concepts of foreigners or nations studied by Piaget would be products of operational structures, losing their specificity as social concepts. Operational classification is ahistorical, but social knowledge is historical, variable, and unpredictable. In other words, this knowledge is situated in a world of contingency, of a changing intervention of others on cognitive activity (what Habermas [1987] called “the revenge of the object”), of historically constituted social practices that structure people’s knowledge. Therefore, operational relations cannot capture signification, since, in historical knowledge, conceptual formations cannot be reduced to operational logic.

The ontogenetic transformation of a collective belief cannot be understood in terms of the development of operational reasoning because it is not an inferential process about logical categories, but concepts with specific referents. By contrast, logical categories are generic and universal. The explanatory model that leads to the necessary relations between classes, elaborated by Piaget, does not capture the specificity of a concept such as justice, defined in terms of its relations with other concepts and materialized in the social practices in which children participate. The specificity of generic logical categories allows us to understand the world conceived as scientific knowledge based on mathematics and logic. But it is problematic to apply it to knowledge in the social world, which operates on other logics, whether narrative (Bruner, Reference Bruner1986) or commonsense representations (Moscovici, Reference Moscovici1961). In this sense, in order to account for the ontogenesis of social collective beliefs, it seems necessary to attend to the significant aspect of equilibration, considering the inferential processes named dialectical inferences that, according to Piaget (Reference Piaget1980), allow for novel articulations of meanings or concepts (Barreiro & Castorina, Reference Barreiro and Castorina2017; Horn et al., Reference Horn, Castorina and Barreiro2023).

Is It Possible to Change Social and Historical Knowledge through Educational Interventions? The Case of History Education

Does questioning the explanation of the progression of social and historical knowledge as a function of the passage from one stage or logic of thought to another imply abandoning the assumption of a greater complexity of knowledge? Our answer is no. Let us start with our studies on social knowledge, because history understanding is always intertwined with social issues. Different studies show that knowledge of the social world is transformed toward more complex and abstract forms. Still, such studies also show that more is needed to explain them than appealing to the differences between preoperational and operational reasoning (Barreiro, Reference Barreiro2013a, Reference Barreiro2013b; Horn, Reference Horn2021; Horn, Castorina & Barreiro, Reference Horn, Castorina and Barreiro2023). In the case of social knowledge, the progressive increase in abstract thinking in the passage from childhood to adolescence requires revising current explanatory models. For example, the meritocratic ideological belief in a just world (Lerner & Clayton, Reference Lerner and Clayton2010), which refers to people getting what they deserve according to their actions, would be false if analyzed through hypothetico-deductive thinking. Yet, it is present from childhood to adulthood in subjects. Such belief conforms to an overarching explanatory frame for the social process; for example, it becomes essential in commonsense understanding of historical conflicts. Despite its persistence in adulthood, when analyzing its ontogenesis, it was possible to identify inferential processes that indicate increasing levels of abstraction in children’s thinking (Barreiro, Reference Barreiro2013b). In Piaget’s (Reference Piaget1980) terms, its ontogenetic developmental process, referring to the elaboration of logical structures, was driven by dialectic inferences, different from logical inferences, since the conclusion does not reiterate the premises, explaining the construction of conceptual novelties. We have identified such processes in the processes of appropriation of the social representations of justice (Barreiro & Castorina, Reference Barreiro and Castorina2017), the ideological belief in a just world (Barreiro, Reference Barreiro2013b), and the children’s right to intimacy in school (Horn et al., Reference Horn, Castorina and Barreiro2023). In the appropriation process of the belief in a just world, appealing to such mechanism, we have identified transformation ranging from the idea that objects can punish wrongdoing in children from 6 to 9 years to justifications based on processes of social reciprocity, from 10 to 17 years. Thus, there is clearly a step from minor to major in increasing conceptual relativization and integration, expressed in a complexification of individuals’ arguments. Producing these more complex arguments involves processes of abstraction that reorganize previous ideas but cannot be characterized in terms of a sequence of general stages moving forward a single line of general development for all notions.

This way of understanding the transformations of social knowledge acquires great relevance for thinking about teaching processes. For example, in the processes of knowledge construction by students about historical processes, three different types of knowledge intervene: (1) commonsense knowledge (e.g., social representations, ideologies) proper to children belonging to social groups and which, therefore, are constitutive of their social identity; (2) school knowledge resulting from the didactic transposition (Chevallard, Reference Chevallard1985) of scientific knowledge; and (3) knowledge resulting from individual intellectual elaboration when appropriating both. Thus, teachers’ work with students’ commonsense prior knowledge is not reduced to identifying it to try to eliminate or correct it. Nor is it a matter of making a previous diagnosis independent of the teaching situation; instead, students’ knowledge emerges during the didactic situation. Students assimilate the knowledge to be taught according to the knowledge they have, facilitating or hindering their learning. At this point, didactic interventions on commonsense beliefs play a central role. The modification of collective knowledge in the learning knowledge in school depends on the nature of activities organized by the teacher, since the didactic situation defines the encounter between the different types of knowledge, enabling its reconstruction or problematization (Castorina, Reference Castorina, Roso, Guareschi, Novaes, Accorssi and dos Santos Goncalves2021b).

Now, we have characterized social domain knowledge as polyphasic, as a field in which different meanings coexist about objects of knowledge that may be contradictory to each other and that are highly resistant to change, since they involve the social identity of students. Thus, as we have stated when delimiting the concept of cognitive polyphasia, contradictory representations or beliefs about the same object of knowledge coexist without conflict among them, since they belong to different ways of thinking. The contradictions between them do not occur spontaneously but require the intervention of another, which makes it possible for them to become evident to the subject when they are expressed in his or her discourse. Therefore, constructing such contradictions may intentionally occur through teaching interventions within the framework of specific school contents – that is, in didactic situations. This process can be illustrated by the answers of María, an 8-year-old Mapuche girl, when asked about her knowledge of the Argentine historical process known as the “Conquest of the Desert,”Footnote ² a military campaign carried out by the Argentine state at the end of the 19th century to conquer territories inhabited by indigenous peoples (for further details on this research, see Barreiro et al., Reference Barreiro, Ungaretti, Etchezahar and Wainryb2020; Barreiro et al., Reference Barreiro and Castorina2017; Barreiro, Wainryb, et al., Reference Barreiro, Wainryb and Carretero2016, Reference Barreiro and Castorina2017). María tells us that the “Conquest of the Desert” was something that happened between the Indians [sic] and the people who lived there, and when asked if she thought it was right or wrong what each of those groups did, she answers the following:

In María’s answers it can be seen how the collective memory, typical of the official narrative of the Argentine state about what happened during the “Conquest of the Desert”, which presents indigenous people as violent and uncivilized, whose domination was necessary to consolidate the nation (“the bad Indians”), enters into contradiction with her own experience as a Mapuche (“the good Indians”). At the beginning of her arguments, she becomes aware of the contradiction, moving from one knowledge to another, successively alternating cognitive centrations. This movement leads her to resolve the conflict by differentiating between “two types of Indians”: the bad ones, who speak Mapuche; and the good ones, who do not speak Mapuche. María does not speak Mapuche, and although her family is fluent in this language, they do not use it in their daily exchanges. In this way she manages to integrate her previous knowledge into the dialogic intervention, thus constructing a new narrative about what happened during the “Conquest of the Desert.” This narrative allows her to coherently include both the existence of “good Indians” and “bad Indians,” thus preserving her social identity and the epistemic authority of the version of the past that she legitimizes by saying, “I read it in a book.” Both pieces of knowledge are transformed by being integrated into a narrative about the past, which can be interpreted as a “beta” compensatory reaction, taking up the progression of ways of compensating for disturbances identified by Piaget (1975/Reference Piaget1985) in the processes of cognitive equilibration. It is an incomplete compensation of the perturbation, which expresses the modification of the system to accommodate it. However, the integration of the disturbance occurs nonsystemically; therefore, it is a compromise solution that only works for a specific case, and does not imply a passage to a state of more stability in knowledge.

At this point, it is necessary to clarify that these interpretations diverge from the original Piagetian theory, given that we are using the theory of equilibration for explaining the process of appropriating collective beliefs, which is very different from the constructive processes of operatory thinking. In addition, the permeability of the knowledge to be taught and the collective beliefs could be more robust because students often tend to anticipate what teachers expect from them without committing or investing their personality in the didactic situation (Castorina, Reference Castorina, Roso, Guareschi, Novaes, Accorssi and dos Santos Goncalves2021b). It is difficult for students to take the necessary distance from their common sense to be able to problematize their beliefs to produce an epistemological rupture, since they are constitutive of their social identity. Thus, this kind of dialogical interventions on the students’ beliefs or social representations usually fails to achieve their modification simply and directly in the teaching process. Their transformation does not follow a linear path toward the knowledge to be taught, wholly stripped of common sense.

Even if they do not abandon their commonsense knowledge, students may reach more complex representations on social and historical processes or recognize the existence of multiple perspectives about them. Moreover, teaching interventions must be aimed at providing more than just new or contradictory information that students already have, since such contradiction does not necessarily imply overcoming it. People already have these contradictory representations; therefore, what is essential is the way of accompanying the problematization of this contradiction, putting it into words within the framework of a dialogic process of making explicit the representations themselves, and, once they have been made explicit, guiding the way to resolve it (Castorina, Reference Castorina, Roso, Guareschi, Novaes, Accorssi and dos Santos Goncalves2021b).

This example shows how a dialogical intervention aimed at confronting two alternative versions of the same historical process makes it possible for Maria to become aware of the contradiction between her previous knowledge, which she had previously held independently. Recent and extensive reviews (Luis & Rapanta, Reference Luis and Rapanta2020) and empirical work (Cantabrana & Carretero, Reference Cantabrana, Carretero, Carretero, Rodríguez-Moneo, Cantabrana and Parellada2021; Reisman, Reference Reisman2015) have shown the importance of adopting a dialogical approach in history education, emphasizing the potential of teaching historical issues in a context of constructive controversies and discussion in the classroom. Additional work has pointed to the success of this approach to civic, political, and historical topics (Freedman, Reference Freedman2020; McAvoy & Hess, Reference McAvoy and Hess2013). Reconstructing knowledge in this field means not having a version of history imposed on students but instead increasing critical thinking. The latter implies that students become aware of their prior knowledge and can integrate it and approach the different ways a historical process or event can be understood. History teaching should be directed not only toward the knowledge of the past but also allow students to understand how the interpretations of what happened intervene in interpreting the present, defining rights and obligations, and supporting the vindictive claims of a particular social group. In this sense, history teaching should be directed toward the relations between the past and the present, looking toward possible futures.

Finally, it is essential to point out that while cognitive polyphasia results from the appropriation of collective knowledge, the interventions carried out at the individual level (ontogenetic) aimed to produce representational changes in students require processes of change at the social level (sociogenetic) aimed to transforming the social representation present in the society in which the students live. It should not be forgotten that states of cognitive polyphasia are expressed in individuals but originate in social contradictions that must also be problematized. In this sense, the dispute between different social representations or ideological beliefs is part of the discussions to be promoted for the conceptual change of social knowledge, which involves teachers taking a position on them (Castorina, Reference Castorina2017).