Table Of ContentCultural Psychology of Education 9
Wolff-Michael Roth
Transactional
Psychology
of Education
Toward a Strong Version of the Social
Cultural Psychology of Education
Volume 9
Series Editor
Giuseppina Marsico, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy
Editorial Board
Jaan Valsiner, Department of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg,
Denmark
Nandita Chaudhary, Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
Maria Virgínia Machado Dazzani, Instituto de Psicologia, apt 501 Ed. Mon,
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
Xiao-Wen Li, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal
University, Shanghai Shi, China
Harry Daniels, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, United
Kingdom
Nicolay Veresov, Monash University, Australia
Wolff-Michael Roth, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, British
Columbia, Canada
Yasuhiro Omi, Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan
This book series focuses on the development of new qualitative methodologies for
educational psychology and interdisciplinary enrichment in ideas and practices. It
publishes key ideas of methodology, different approaches to schooling, family,
relationships and social negotiations of issues of educational processes. It presents
new perspectives, such as dynamic systems theory, dialogical perspectives on the
development of the self within educational contexts, and the role of various symbolic
resources in educational processes. The series publishes research rooted in the
cultural psychology framework, thus combining the fields of psychology,
anthropology, sociology, education and history. Cultural psychology examines how
human experience is organized culturally, through semiotic mediation, symbolic
action, accumulation and exchange of inter-subjectively shared representations of
the lifespace. By taking this approach, the series breaks through the “ontological”
conceptualization of education in which processes of education are localized in
liminality. In this series, education is understood as goal-oriented personal movement
that is at the core of societal change in all its different forms—from kindergarten to
vocational school and lifelong learning. It restructures personal lives both inside
school and outside the school. The cultural psychology approach to education fits
the global processes of most countries becoming multi-cultural in their social
orders, reflects the interdisciplinary nature of educational psychology, and informs
the applications of educational psychology in a vast variety of cultural contexts.
This book series:
• Is the first to approach education from a cultural psychology perspective.
• Offers an up-to-date exploration of recent work in cultural psychology of
education.
• Brings together new, novel, and innovative ideas.
• Broadens the practical usability of different trends of cultural psychology of
education.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13768
Wolff-Michael Roth
Transactional Psychology of
Education
Toward a Strong Version of the Social
Wolff-Michael Roth
University of Victoria
Victoria, BC, Canada
ISSN 2364-6780 ISSN 2364-6799 (electronic)
Cultural Psychology of Education
ISBN 978-3-030-04241-7 ISBN 978-3-030-04242-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04242-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966876
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Preface of the Series Editor
Overcoming Dichotomies: Transaction as a Core Issue
in Educational Processes
When Wolff-Michael Roth sent me the first proposal of this book, Transactional
Psychology of Education: Toward a Strong Version of the Social, I was positively
surprised. Little time had passed since he had published his previous volume in my
series, titled Understanding Educational Psychology (Roth and Jornet 2016). He
was again ready with another interesting editorial project. The book “smelled” good
even before reading it. In fact, after reading a few lines of the proposal, I was fully
convinced of the relevance of Roth’s line of argumentation. There was something
intriguing. Hereafter, the book went through the long procedure of double-blind
review, which allows this book series to be indexed in Scopus. Roth received many
good feedbacks and some criticisms that helped him to develop his ideas even
further.
The volume, eventually ready, kept the initial promise and offers the reader a
refined synthesis of theoretical and empirical aspects of inquiry into education.
Transactional Psychology of Education indeed combines the historical roots with
the contemporary educational practice.
Wolff-Michael Roth acknowledges the great legacy of Vygotsky, but he goes
beyond it in search of what has been not fully developed among the ideas of the
Russian thinker. He suggests how these embryonic theorizations can benefit by the
dialogue with other figures like Whitehead, Mead, Dewey, Mikhailov, and Ilyenkov.
Roth’s book aims at presenting the foundations of the transactional psychology
of education. As the author himself says:
Transaction means that there is a unity/identity of organism and environment, which leads
to the fact that neither one can be understood independently of the other. (Roth, this vol-
ume, p 23)
v
vi Preface of the Series Editor
It means that if we want to reach an in-depth understanding of human conduct,
we must keep together the individual and the environment. Dichotomic oppositions,
such as inside and outside, individual and context, are poor and misleading theoreti-
cal tools when it comes to understand human development and educational
processes.
Recalling Mead and Vygotsky, Wolff-Michael Roth proposes to overcome this
dichotomy by adopting the transaction as the inherent characteristic of person-
environment relationship. Transaction would be expressed in a way similar to what
chemistry does:
…is not so different from what chemists do when, for example, they write carbon dioxide
(CO) in the form of O = C = O, where each line represents a pair of electrons. Instead, we
2
have to think about person and environment as irreducible intertwined when we think them
as ingredient of events. What we need to do instead is to think {person | environment} as
unity/identity, which means, there is both unity and identity of the two phases (person, envi-
ronment) of the overall event. (Roth, this volume, 2019, p. 24)
I could add that interesting examples of what Roth defines as a “transactional
framework” of analysis have been provided also by modern biology. In Waddington’s
epigenetic approach (1940, 1957), the plasticity is related to the different possible
responses (more or less adaptive, active, predictable, or reversible) of one organism
to the various environmental conditions. Such fluid and open-ended plasticity is a
relevant feature of border-crossing conditions (Marsico 2011, 2016) that are at the
stake in any transaction.
Another example borrowed from contemporary theoretical biology is the
Rayner’s logic of natural inclusionality (2017), where natural inclusion is meant as
co-creative, fluid dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial con-
text. It implies a mutual adaptation between the living systems and the environ-
ments to which they contribute in return.
The transactional view could be found also in the cultural psychology of semi-
otic dynamics, proposed in the last decades by Jaan Valsiner (2014), and particu-
larly in the notion of inclusive separation (Valsiner 1987). This idea of a functional
relationship between person and environment, in which the organism creates the
context and the context creates the organism in return (even if they are not melted
into one entity), shows an intriguing similarity with Roth’s transactional proposal.
As the author points out in this volume, the transactional perspective has been
already outlined by Vygotsky himself in his notion of perezhivanie and in his reflec-
tion upon thinking and speech (Vygotsky 2010). This also reverberates in the more
recent reconceptualization of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (Moll
1990; Smagorinsky 2018) as a social system mutually created by teachers and stu-
dents in the school setting.
Life is transactional and so are the educational processes that indeed work in the
locus of transition, in the fuzzy “border zones,” between the previous state “A” and
the not-yet-reached state B (Marsico and Tateo 2018). This is the core issue of
Preface of the Series Editor vii
Wolff-Michael Roth in this book. Transactional Psychology of Education will pro-
vide the reader with a renewed way of thinking the interface between the individual
and the environment: something that is desperately needed today by educational
psychologists.
Salerno, Italy Giuseppina Marsico
October 2018
References
Marsico, G. (2011). The “non-cuttable” space in between: Context, boundaries and their natural
fluidity. IPBS: Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 45(2), 185–193. https://doi.
org/10.1007/s12124-011-9164-9.
Marsico, G. (2016). The Borderland. Culture & Psychology, 22(2), 206–215. https://doi.org/10.1
177/1354067X15601199.
Marsico, G., & Tateo, L. (Eds.). (2018). The emergence of self in the educational contexts (Cultural
Psychology of Education, 8). Cham: Springer.
Moll, L. C. (1990). Introduction. In L. C. Moll (Ed.), Vygotsky and education: Instructional impli-
cations and applications of sociohistorical psychology (pp. 1–27). New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Rayner, A. (2017). The origin of life patterns – In the natural inclusion of space in flux (pp. vii–
vix). New York: Springer.
Roth, W.-M., & Jornet, A. (2016). Understanding Educational psychology. A late Vygotskian,
Spinozist approach (Cultural Psychology of Education, 3). Cham: Springer.
Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Deconflating the ZPD and instructional scaffolding: Retranslating and
reconceiving the zone of proximal development as the zone of next development. Learning,
Culture, and Social Interaction, 16(2018), 70–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2017.10.009.
Valsiner, J. (1987). Culture and the development of children’s action. Chichester: Wiley.
Valsiner, J. (2014). An invitation to cultural psychology. London: Sage.
Vygotsky, L. S. (2010). Two fragments of personal notes by L. S. Vygotsky from the Vygotsky
family archive. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 48(1), 91–96.
Waddington, C. H. (1940). Organisers and genes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Waddinghton, C. H. (1957). The strategies of the genes. London: Allen & Unwin.
Preface
If change, which evidently is constitutive of all our experience, is the fleeting and elusive
thing about which most philosophers have talked and if tone does not see in it more than the
dust of states that replace other states, we are forced to re-establish this continuity between
the states by means of artificial links. But this immobile substrate of mobility retreats to the
same extent as we try approaching it because it cannot have any known attributes. (Bergson
1911, 34)
All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the world in terms of sub-
ject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. The result always does
violence to that immediate experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our
sympathies, our purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of phrases for its verbal
analysis. (Whitehead 1929/1978, 49)
Educational psychology traditionally has provided individualistic theories of
learning and development, which have their origins, among others, in Piagetian
constructivism and information processing. This is also the case for those forms of
educational psychology that avow a heritage in sociocultural and cultural-histori-
cal traditions but focus on the individualization (internalization) of knowledge and
norms of the community. Indeed, these theories are based in orthodox philosophi-
cal systems that are conceived with solitary substances (individuals, objects) as
their ontological presuppositions. The resulting individualism is the product of
thinking the world generally and human behavior specifically in terms of material
substances, things, distributed in space. Because each point in space is independent
of another point (i.e., the philosophical concept of partes extra partes), they are not
inherently related. Thus, the Cartesian identification of the body and (geometrical)
space splits the world into bodies inherently outside other bodies (Bergson 1911).
The mind becomes a substantive subject, and its contents are its predicates
(Whitehead 1929/1978). For Kant, that geometrical space would be an a priori of
experience and cognition, whereas for the process-oriented approach developed in
this book, “space, like time, would appear to be an abstraction from events”
(Whitehead 1920, 37). The geometrical approach to the body also splits the occu-
pants of bodies, minds, leading to the isolation of individuals into separate subjec-
tivities. Descartes does not question the subject-predicate approach, whereby
ix
x Preface
bodies are separate substances which have special qualities; and this led him into
theorizing perception in terms of representation. Typically, then, intersubjectivity
is a main problem of all epistemologies that are grounded on ontologies of geo-
metrical bodies as things. When the social enters the theoretical framework, then it
tends to be in a weak form: as a constraint or condition of individual learning.
Thus, “while the cognitive perspective has been identified mainly with individual
forms of learning, it is not inconsistent with the notions of group learning”
(Vosniadou 2007, 56). What happens in the group is essentially individual learning
that occurs in, and is shaped by, the social nature of the setting – but it is not social
from the beginning. In the transactional approach developed in this book, however,
every actual entity (theorized in evental terms) “is present in every other actual
entity” so that our main task is one of “making clear the notion of ‘being present in
another entity’” (Whitehead 1929/1978, 50). Being present in another entity means
sociality before any form of construction or thought has set in: the world generally
and the human world specifically thus are social in a strong sense of the word.
Classical approaches, psychological takes based on classical philosophical con-
ceptions, cannot solve the problem of intersubjectivity because the relations
between entities – for example, substances, individuals, body and mind, universals
and particulars – are external rather than internal.
As a resource for making the case for the social nature of things (generally the
social as a contingency), educational psychologists often draw on (an Anglo-Saxon
reading of) the works of Lev S. Vygotsky (1896–1934), who is the main and often
only representative of social and cultural psychology in the field. It is in and with his
works that a cultural approach to psychology generally and to educational psychol-
ogy particularly was born. Felix T. Mikhailov (2001), an important Russian philoso-
pher of psychology, suggested that even the most eminent of the cultural approaches
to the mind – he names Michael Cole and James Wertsch – emphasize internaliza-
tion and thus the individual as a theoretical element even though these American
scholars simultaneously emphasize the primacy of the cultural-historical determina-
tion of the mind. Other more recent evaluations of the ways in which the work of
Vygotsky was taken up – and falsified – in the West are concordant with this assess-
ment (e.g., Yasnitsky 2019). What remains in their work are all those features that
are typical of Cartesianism, the psychophysical or body-mind problem (typified in
the focus on meaning as separate from the sound), language and other signs as
mediators between the separate individuals, and so on. Interestingly, Vygotsky’s
recently published personal notes suggest that he had become aware of his intel-
lectualism (individualism) and the remnants of Cartesianism in his own earlier
work. He describes his own work as deficient, and its main problem is “the unten-
ability of the theory” (Vygotsky, in Zavershneva 2010, 54). He was on the verge of
a significant breakthrough, though, when he was beginning to think that he needed
to focus on “the movement of senses = their variation” (55). This meant he had to
“develop a unified perspective: because dynamics of the flüssig type” (49, original
underline and emphasis). He was on the verge of a solution to the perennial prob-
lems of psychology, one in which his basic ontology changed things to movement
and flow – flüssig is German for liquid, in flow. He did not have time to work out
