Scaffolding a community of competent practitioners: positioning and agency in a training program for narrative counseling

This article explores the scaffolding of learning experiences in a postgraduate program in New Zealand that offers training in narrative counseling. The authors draw on positioning theory to identify student shifts in learning, and in agency, that help build an increasingly skilled and peer-generated context for learning. We describe a selection of exercises and one key assignment, introduced in the course in a particular order, that we believe enable students to step into positions of agency which ultimately allow a competent community of learner-practitioners to emerge. We also describe a dance of positioning for ourselves as teachers in this program. We suggest that, at any given time, our own positioning is tied up with possibilities for student positioning. Acknowledging relationships of power in classrooms, we explore ways to align poststructuralist counseling practices and the teaching of these practices.     

Scaffolding within the structure of Dialogical Self: Hierarchical dynamics of semiotic mediation

Scaffolding is a notion that allows us to conceptualize direction towards change. As a form of guidance, scaffolding may result in both change and non-change. In this paper I apply the notion of scaffolding by signs (semiotic mediation) to the theory of Dialogical Self (DS). The DS is a construct that brings into psychology a new way of theoretical thought—thinking in dualities. Dualities are systemic units of two opposites that are mutually related by functional dynamic relations. Within the theory of DS, human psychological functioning is explained by transformations of constantly changed I-positions that are mapped both structurally (internal/external) and temporally (past/present/future). Semiotic mediation within the DS guarantees the person's psychological distancing from the here-and-now setting. This distancing is guided by promoter signs—generalized meanings of field-like form that orient the self's transformation. These signs are parts of the semiotic mediating processes where higher-level signs guide the range of openness of the sign hierarchy itself for further transformation when that is needed.     

Learning from people, things, and signs

Starting from the observation that small children can count more objects than numbers—a phenomenon that I am calling the “lifeworld dependency of cognition”—and an analysis of finger calculation, the paper shows how learning can be explained as the development of cognitive systems. Parts of those systems are not only an individual’s different forms of knowledge and cognitive abilities, but also other people, things, and signs. The paper argues that cognitive systems are first of all semiotic systems since they are dependent on signs and representations as mediators. The two main questions discussed here are how the external world constrains and promotes the development of cognitive abilities, and how we can move from cognitive abilities that are necessarily connected with concrete situations to abstract knowledge.

Learning to learn from video? 30-month-olds benefit from continued use of supportive scaffolding

Young children struggle to learn new words presented on video, but adult co-viewers can support them by providing scaffolds that explicitly connect the video and real world. In this study, we asked whether scaffolding facilitates children’s symbolic understanding of the video, such that they will subsequently transfer labels from video to real referents. Sixty-three 30-month-olds and 61 36-month-olds participated in a series of three word learning trials in one of three conditions. In the supportive condition, an in-person adult explicitly drew connections between each on-screen object and the corresponding real object in the room with the child. In the unsupportive condition, the in-person adult provided similar-length statements about the objects but did not draw connections between them. In the partial scaffold condition, the in-person adult provided the supportive scaffolds for the first two trials and the unsupportive version for the third trial. At 30 months, children selected the correct object on the third trial more often in the supportive than the unsupportive scaffold condition, and performance in the partial scaffold condition fell in between. At 36 months, performance on the third trial did not differ across conditions. The results showed that experiencing the scaffold twice was not enough to reliably support 30-month-olds in learning to think symbolically on the third trial; rather, they appeared to rely on the adult to connect the video image with its specific real-world referent. At 36 months, however, children did not rely on the adult scaffold to apply the video label to the real-world objects.     

Associations between technoference,quality of parent-infant interactions,and infants’ vocabulary development

“Technoference” describes the distraction from interpersonal activities that can occur due to use of mobile screen devices. Focusing on parent-infant interactions, our study investigated the associations between potential sources of “technoference” and parental responsiveness, scaffolding and directiveness toward their infant, and coordinated joint attention (CJA). Previous research demonstrates that each of these dimensions is related to early language development. Potential sources of “technoference” employed in our study included the amount of time the parent spends on their mobile device per hour when with their infant; the number of audible notifications the parent receives per hour, the number of times per hour they check their device; and parents’ score on the Distraction In Social Relations and Use of Parent Technology (DISRUPT) scale. We investigated associations between our measures of parental “technoference” and infants’ language development, and whether parental responsiveness, scaffolding, directiveness or parent-infant CJA mediate associations between “technoference” and language. Frequency of audible notifications negatively predicted infant vocabulary, and this relationship was fully mediated by parental directiveness.     

Young Children's Help‐Seeking as Active Information Gathering

Young children's social learning is a topic of great interest. Here, we examined preschoolers’ (M = 52.44 months, SD = 9.7 months) help‐seeking as a social information gathering activity that may optimize and support children's opportunities for learning. In a toy assembly task, we assessed each child's competency at assembling toys and the difficulty of each step of the task. We hypothesized that children's help‐seeking would be a function of both initial competency and task difficulty. The results confirmed this prediction; all children were more likely to seek assistance on difficult steps and less competent children sought assistance more often. Moreover, the magnitude of the help‐seeking requests (from asking for verbal confirmation to asking the adult to take over the task) similarly related to both competency and difficulty. The results provide support for viewing children's help‐seeking as an information gathering activity, indicating that preschoolers flexibly adjust the level and amount of assistance to optimize their opportunities for learning.     

“Scaffolding” and “affordance” as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences

There are (at least) two ways to think of the differences in basic concepts and typologies that one can find in the different scientific practices that constitute a research tradition. One is the fundamentalist view: the fewer the better. The other is a non-fundamentalist view of science whereby the integration of different concepts into the right abstraction grounds an explanation that is not grounded as the sum of the explanations supported by the parts. Integrative concepts are often associated with idealizations that can successfully set the stage for different phenomena to be compared or for explanations of different phenomena to be considered as jointly increasing our understanding of reality beyond that which each explanation provides separately. In this paper, our aim is to argue for the importance of the notions of an “affordance” and “scaffolding” as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences. The integrational role of the concept of affordance is closely related with the capacity of affordances to generate the scaffoldings leading to the integration. The capacities of affordances that turn them into (stable) scaffoldings explain why such notions are often used interchangeably (as we shall see). On this basis, we aim to show that the concepts of affordance and scaffolding provide the sort of epistemic perspective that can overcome common complaints about the limits and unity of the cognitive sciences once claims about extended cognition are taken seriously.