The Transformative Mind
Expanding Vygotsky's Approach to Development and Education

This book's innovative transformative stance revives the critical-activist gist of Vygotsky's project to move beyond theoretical-ideological canons in addressing the crisis of inequality.

Anna Stetsenko (Author)

9780521865586, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 December 2016

434 pages, 1 table
23.6 x 16 x 2.9 cm, 0.77 kg

The book suggests a transition from a relational worldview premised on the socio-political ethos of adaptation towards a transformative worldview premised on the ethos of solidarity and equality. Expansively developing Vygotsky's revolutionary project, the Transformative Activist Stance integrates insights from a vast array of critical and sociocultural theories and pedagogies and moves beyond their impasses to address the crisis of inequality. This captures the dynamics of social transformation and agency in moving beyond theoretical and political canons of the status quo. The focus is on the nexus of people co-creating history and society while being interactively created by their own transformative agency. Revealing development and mind as agentive contributions to the 'world-in-the-making' from an activist stance guided by a sought-after future, this approach culminates in implications for research with transformative agendas and a pedagogy of daring. Along the way, many key theories of mind, development and education are challenged and radically reworked.

Introduction: setting the stage: the paradox of continuity versus change
Part I: 1. Charting the agenda: from adaptation to transformation
2. Situating theory: the charges and challenges of theorizing activism
Part II: 3. Vygotsky's project: methodology as the philosophy of method
4. Vygotsky's project: relational ontology
5. Vygotsky's project: from relational ontology to transformative worldview
Part III: 6. Transformative activist stance: ontology
7. Transformative activist stance: agency
8. Transformative activist stance: encountering the future through commitment to change
Part IV: 9. The mind that matters
10. Illustration: memory and anticipation of the future
11. Implications for education: teaching-learning and development as activist projects
Concluding remarks: toward democracy and pedagogy of daring
Bibliography
Appendices.

Subject Areas: Teaching skills & techniques [JNT], Philosophy & theory of education [JNA], Education [JN], Psychology [JM]