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Introduction to Section Two: Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2009

By
Wim Wardekker
Edited by
Bert van Oers ,
Wim Wardekker ,
Ed Elbers  and
René van der Veer
Wim Wardekker
Affiliation:
Department of Theory and Research in Education, Faculty of Psychology and Education, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Bert van Oers
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Wim Wardekker
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Ed Elbers
Affiliation:
Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
René van der Veer
Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden
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Summary

In a recent publication, Kieran Egan (2002) has launched an attack on both “progressive” and “traditional” ideas about the goals of education: the first, because they depend on a wrong view of human development; the second, because they lead to a utilitarian view; and both, because ultimately they shortchange children's intellectual development. Egan also proposes an alternative (elaborated more fully in Egan, 1997):

The education of children today is a matter of ensuring that they make their minds most abundant by acquiring the fullest array of the cultural tools that can, through learning, be made into cognitive tools. I have drawn on Vygotsky in trying to make this argument, because he more than anyone seems to have had an understanding of the process whereby the cultural becomes cognitive and an understanding that it is the cognitive tools we acquire that most clearly and importantly established for us the character of our understanding.

(2002, p. 184)

Although the expression “the fullest array of the cultural tools” raises the not unimportant question of the contents of curriculum, we will not concern ourselves with that here. Instead, our focus in this section of the present volume is inspired by what Egan calls the making of cultural tools into cognitive tools, or appropriation. Or, to be more precise, the issue is how to understand the human mind as it becomes progressively informed by cognitive tools.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Transformation of Learning
Advances in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
 , pp. 157 - 162
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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References

Bauman, Z. (2004). Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
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Egan, K. (2002). Getting it wrong from the beginning: Our progressivist inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Egan, K. (1997). The educated mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Ten Dam, G., Volman, M., & Wardekker, W. (2004). Making sense through participation: Social differences in learning and identity development. In Linden, J. v.d. & Renshaw, P. (Eds.), Dialogic learning: Shifting perspectives to learning, instruction, and teaching (pp. 63–85). Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tharp, R., Estrada, P., Dalton, S. S., & Yamauchi, L. (2000). Teaching transformed: Achieving excellence, fairness, inclusion, and harmony. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
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