Intention—a product of joint social work

pp. 181-197

in: Wolff-Michael Roth, Alfredo Jornet, Understanding educational psychology, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

In Piaget's developmental psychology, as in other approaches (e.g., constructivism), an intentional orientation towards the world is presupposed as an innate ability. Thought is self-sufficient, orienting to the world as it pleases. However, Vygotsky provides a generic description of how an intentional action such as pointing first exists as a social relation before a child intentionally points. Even though often cited for his interest in language, Vygotsky chose a vignette in which language plays no role at all to illustrate one of his most fundamental concepts. Rather, social relations are not grounded in language itself but in the immediacy of situations. In this chapter, we examine the sociogenesis of intention. We analyze how fourth-grade students engage in an inquiry-based curriculum designed to develop basic notions in algebra. We show how considering intention as a social achievement not only provides a way out of the classic learning paradox—the question of how learners can orient towards that which they have not yet learned—but also bears implications relevant to contemporary research on motivation in educational psychology