The role of the teacher was to facilitate learning by directing the dialogue and confirming contributions in an effort to further motivate the students. The primary role of the teacher in the educational context is to act as a facilitator for learning. Guided exchanges, comprehensive discussions, and the creation of an engaging community are valuable strategies for cognitive development. See also: Inclusive Teaching Strategies. Fundamentally, Vygotsky recognized that social settings and learning were closely entwined.
Therefore one must identify and implement strategies that are effective in a social context. It is also important to note that the culture of each individual is created by their unique strengths, language, and prior experience. One of the ways that students gain knowledge is when they collaborate with their peers or mentors on activities that involve problem-solving skills and real-life tasks.
Vygotsky maintained that the social world is not only the interactions between peers and their teacher but also consisted of outside influences within the community. Prior knowledge, such as learned behaviors at home, impact learning in the classroom environment. As such, Vygotsky outlined three main concepts related to cognitive development: i culture is significant in learning, ii language is the root of culture, and iii individuals learn and develop within their role in the community.
Culture can be defined as the morals, values, and beliefs of its community members, which are held in place with systems and establishments.
Acceptable attitudes and conduct are communicated by the use of language. Culture is shaped over time as the result of specific events, whose messages are then conveyed to its members. Vygotsky explained that culture consistently affects cognitive development by affecting human behavior. He wanted others to realize that there is a complex relationship between culture and human development.
It is a cycle; at the same time that the culture is influencing an individual, that individual is in turn creating culture. Vygotsky used the stages of childhood development to further explain the relationship between culture and learning. These displays gradually fade out as a result of external stimuli: imitating, consequences, and conditioning by others.
It is replaced with problem-solving skills such as reflection, bargaining, and reasoning. This higher-level thinking is influenced by cultural factors.
That is to say that the use of artificial means acquired socially transforms psychological operations. The world of experience needs to be simplified, related and generalized before it can be translated into code, implying a breakthrough in the development stage of thought.
If language has the power to create more complex forms of thought, and if its origin is subject to the need for dialogue and agreement among humans, it can be said that individual consciousness arises from relationships between humans. The psychological phenomenon stops, accordingly, to be taken as an abstract entity, and starts to be understood as built and builder of concrete social relations of existence.
Studies in neuroscience, in the area of brain plasticity, have collaborated to ratify the idea proposed by Vygotsky about the social construction of mind. According to Johnson , plasticity is regarded as a property inherent to brain development that involves a process of increasing specialization in morphology and function of tissues and neuronal cells.
For both, just one genetic plan for brain development is not enough, plasticity ensures that there needs to be more complex interactions to enroll new functions. Plasticity means that the brain is not "ready", it is not given in advance, but there is a space to be worked on and built that provides an increase in its functional extension, and such space refers to the influences of the environment, the interactions that the subject performs in the postnatal period.
Thus, social interaction is necessary in order to establish new structures of thought, as Vygotsky proposes in his work. In this sense, biology and culture are in a reciprocal relationship of determination. We then have a compatible explanation which somehow integrates Vygotsky's theory on development of thought and the biological nature preparing the cortex for roles to be filled, thought the insertion of the individual in social interactions. That argument seems to point efficient possibilities for solutions to the dead-lock between nature and culture, faced by psychology as a science since its founding.
For it does not place the individual as predominantly cultural nor as entirely programmed by nature, but rather as a being that is formed by the dialectical relationship between these two poles of development. Based on this view, it is believed to be possible to make some observations on the character and development of human emotions, complying with the new studies produced in this field, creating thus a possibility of producing integrated knowledge of the phenomenon.
We can say that emotions are not unique because we are able to classify different emotional states, therefore they are also a universal psychological process, since they are inherent to all human beings. Here lies its great importance in the study of humanities and more particularly, in psychology. However, the consensus ends there, for defining and establishing the nature and limits of emotions has been a complex task of multiple and often incongruent results Evans, Studies with children, who less "contaminated" by symbols, values and cultural meanings, can provide a good explanation for the natural character of emotions.
And what can be seen, according to Parkinson, Fischer and Manstead , is that children have a limited repertoire of emotions visibly manifested.
Ekman's research , cited by Evans, are congruent with the idea of an innate and restricted emotional repertoire, they propose six universal basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust.
The methodology of this study used facial expressions corresponding to each emotion and there was a consensual recognition by adults of diverse cultures. Although there are disagreements about what are the basic emotions, as Evans points out , the idea that there are innate emotions that were selected during the evolution of the species, and therefore common to all humans seems to prevail.
Now, speaking of innateness and universality, opens up space for an understanding of the evolutionary phenomenon, concerned with the beginning and the functionality of behaviors acquired by the species. According to Oliva et al. Yet according to the authors, the evolutionary bias understands emotions play an extremely important role, acting as a "super-ordered programs" that coordinate other cognitive functions efficiently and smoothly.
Thus, we can say that emotions act as filters that guide attention and select the inputs required for the regulation of adaptive behavior. In line with this thinking, researchers Wentworth and Ryan argue that emotions were the original mode of communication between our immediate ancestors, with two powerful features for the survival of the species: quickly warn and guide us and strengthen social ties through emotional identification.
Turner and Stets present three recent studies on evolutionary theory and emotion and they all agree that emotions are a key force in maintaining and forming social bonds. And, to resume Vygotsky's theory about the importance of social interaction in the formation and development of the human psyche, we find, again, a dialectical relationship of determination between nature and culture upon which such evolutionary studies confirm. Wentworth and Ryan , for example, emphasize the socially constructed character of emotions, but at the same time, recognize the physiological basis of emotional systems.
In other words, emotions are meant to meet social demands, but are supported by a biological basis. Further according to the authors, the cognitive abilities of humans let us able to construct an emotional repertoire which goes beyond the primary.
And we can say that this game of social interactions, placed in a dialectical understanding, leads to the establishment of new social needs that require the perpetuation and complexity of emotions. The study by Turner confirms, in some sense, the idea of the necessity of the emergence of emotions for the species and its dialogue between nature and culture. According to the author, living in society would be an alternative for humans to survive, hence, natural selection re-arranged the human brain to highlight the emotions and these can be used in raising the level of social organization.
Evolutionary theory has made important contributions on the functionality of primary emotions, which may have a predominantly universal character, regardless of culture. However, Niedenthal, Krauth-Gruber and Ric , when addressing the possibilities for studies of general emotions and not just the basic or primary , problematize, too, the difficulty of evolutionary psychology to explain how the same phenomenon can cause different emotions in the same species. Empirical findings, systematized by Niedenthal et al.
In reviewing research on linguistic framework, they also observed cultures that have less semantic repertoire to describe emotional states and others with more. Supporting this research, studies raised by Parkinson et al. The analysis of cultural differences in the language of emotions, as a rule, shows that most human states serve the goals of each society. Thus, there is an inexorably intrinsic character between emotion, the words used to designate them and the historical-cultural reality.
For Parkinson et al. Elfenbein and Ambady found that recognition of expressions of fear and disgust are more subject to cultural variation than, for example, happiness. These findings lead to the reflection that, even as a mental phenomenon, expressed by the subject, emotions need rules of social use words and meanings to be capable of understanding. Thus, in studies of emotions, there is also room for the changes, when they are seen as dependent on each individual's particular history and social development.
This issue drives the understanding of emotional phenomena as closely dependent on the cultural, detaching it from an understanding merely based on genetics. There is still a polarized debate between the relationships of emotional experience and its representation to a culture; this remains as an issue not fully understood.
Some psychologists, favorable to universal emotions, do not believe in cultural variation, restricting its influence only to ideology and interpretation of emotion, but not the emotional experience itself, as highlighted Manstead and Fisher Accordingly, Manstead and Fisher point out that the main concern should be on the extent to which cultural variation occurs in the emotional field, instead of the impasse between innate or acquired.
The fact of thinking in affections, placing them in other relationships with my intellect and elsewhere, consistently changes my psychic life. In simple terms, our affections act in a complicated system with our concepts, and one who does not know that the jealousy of a person related to Mohammedan concepts of fidelity regarding women is different from one coming from other people related to a system of opposing concepts about the same thing, does not understand that this feeling is historic, that it actually changes in different psychological and ideological means although in it remains undoubtedly a certain biological radical under which this emotion arises.
According to Manstead and Fisher , there is growing consensus among psychologists that the emotional language is an important issue in cross-cultural research. That is, we can argue that the proviso that Vygotsky made about the symbolic apparatus, interfering with specific emotional experiences, is still an idea that remains current and corroborated by further studies.
According to the author, it would not be possible to reduce emotions to a biological usefulness, because by doing so it would not be possible to explain how the world of emotions is modified at each new step in the historical development of humans. Confirming these ideas, Elias , in his sociological study of what he termed the "civilizing process", argues that inasmuch as societies dense relations among their subjects, creating more interdependence between them, a gradual process of increasing the control of emotions was observed.
Following the reasoning proposed by Elias , emotional states have a markedly social and historical origin. The possibility of understanding emotions only thorugh an innatist view, from which all mankind would have the same emotional framework, is placed in check,. What can be argued, therefore, is that there is an intrinsic character between emotion and historical-cultural reality, which is pervaded by specific modes of thought. She never managed to fully acquire verbal language as a result.
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