Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

386 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
THE CENTRALITY OF CULTURAL MEDIATION IN LEARNING
AND DEVELOPMENT
Why does it matter that we undertake research that helps us better understand cultural
socialization and its mediating influence on, and consequences for, student learning? It matters
because social-cultural and cultural-historical psychology begins with the assumption of an
intimate connection between the special environments that human beings inhabit and human
psychological processes. In their work, James Wertsch and Michael Cole have explicated this
link by explaining that the special quality of the human environment is that it is suffused with
the achievements of prior generations in reified form. This notion is also found in the writings of
cultural historical psychologists from many national traditions. John Dewey, for example, wrote
that, from birth to death, we live in a world of persons and things which is in large measure what
it is because of what has been done and transmitted from previous human activities. When this
fact is ignored, experience is treated as if it were something that goes on exclusively inside an
individuals’ body and mind. According to Dewey, experience does not occur in a vacuum; there
are resources outside an individual that give rise to experience (Dewey, 1938 and 1963). The
early writings of Russian cultural psychologists also emphasize the cultural medium. They argue
that the special mental quality of human beings is their need and ability to mediate their actions
through artifacts previously shaped by prior human practice, and to arrange for the rediscovery
and appropriation of these forms of mediation by subsequent generations (Cole and Wertsch,
2001). In this regard, Vygotsky (1981) wrote: “the central fact about human psychology is the
fact of cultural mediation” (p. 166).
From the perspective of the centrality of cultural mediation in mind and mental development,
the mind develops through an interweaving of biology and the appropriation of the cultural
heritage. Higher mental functions are, by definition, culturally mediated, involving an indirect
action in which previously used artifacts are incorporated as an aspect of current action (Cole and
Wertsch, 2001).
This perspective has several implications for learning and cognition. First, cultural artifacts do
not simply serve to facilitate mental processes; they fundamentally shape and transform them.
Second, because artifacts are themselves culturally, historically, and institutionally situated, all
psychological functions begin and, and to a large extent, remain culturally, historically, and
institutionally situated. There is no universally appropriate form of cultural mediation. A third
implication is that context and action are not independent of each other. As Cole and Wertsch
put it, “objects and contexts arise together as part of a single bio-social-cultural process of
development.”
These implications suggest that mind can no longer be seen as located solely inside the head.
Rather, higher psychological functions include the biological individual, the cultural mediational
artifacts, and the culturally structured social and natural environments of which individuals are a
part. The positions of Dewey, Vygotsky, Cole, and Wertsch, and others on the centrality of cultural
artifacts in human mental processes has great resonance in recent movements in cognitive science,
and the position undergirds much of the emerging science on distributed cognition and situated
learning.
This primacy of cultural mediation in learning and development invites us as educators to
provide opportunities for our most disadvantaged groups to draw on their cultural capital—
what they bring from prior cultural socialization in their homes and communities—to support
and enhance classroom learning for them. Understanding how individuals or groups historically
engage in shared practices in their cultural communities may account for dispositions they may
have in new circumstances such as classroom learning.