Introduction

Social interaction as a learning environment

Research and theory construction along neo-Vygotskian lines has presented cognition in a new light: as socially situated (a kind of production that makes purposive use of tools, including those others have made) and as transpersonal (a distributed phenomenon, not simply something residing within a single head). This makes for a profound change in how we think about thinking, about learning, and about teaching – participation by teachers and pupils in nonverbal interaction and in oral and written conversation – the interaction among people that fosters learning.

Learning becomes not simply the internalization of knowledge and skill by an isolated mind interacting with a physical surround or even with a surround containing humanly produced artifacts. Rather, the organism–environment relation is one of interpenetration and of reflexively constitutive activity. The learning environment is not one designed at a distance by a curriculum developer or by a teacher as a First Cause and Unmoved Mover, as if the educator were analogous to the eighteenth-century Deist's conception of a watchmaker God who builds the universe, winds it up, and then stands at the margins of Creation, letting it run its course.

This view of relations between teacher and learner, expert and novice, is a radically proximal one in which there is conjoint participation and influence, one in which no mover is unmoved. In such a view of teaching and learning the Word is indeed made Flesh, that is, immanence replaces distal transcendence in our understanding of the relations between teacher and learner.