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This article addresses a dilemma in relation to researching children's thinking and concept formation as an intentional process of competence acquisition and at the same time seeing children as persons in their life contexts, where the researcher also is a participant. Davydov's concept of theoretical knowledge and thinking helped me to tackle this dilemma as a dialectical process of moving from the general to the particular and back again by analysing children's concrete social situations starting from the societal conditions, then examining institutional objectives, and children's motive orientations in activity settings - in order to gain an understanding of children's social situations in their everyday activities. In this article I illustrate the problems of getting knowledge of children's conceptual and motivation development, by drawing on several of my research projects to illustrate, through my own biographic development, the dilemmas that psychology has to overcome in studying children's activities in their different social situations. The discussion particularly relates to the potential demands of the situation and children's motive orientations in these situations.

The aim in this chapter is to propose a way to conceptualize children’s learning through their participation in activity settings in everyday practices at home. I argue that children learn practice traditions and values through the demands that children experience both indirectly through the setting and directly from parents and siblings. Children’s also put demands on the setting and its participants and how these are met leads to children’s development of new forms of social interaction, new motive orientation, and competences. The argument builds on a research project following children through participant observations in their everyday activities in two families (Hedegaard & Fleer. 2013. Play, learning and children’s development. Everyday life in families and transition to school. New York: Cambridge University Press). The family members in the two families got an instant camera and were asked to take photos of what were important for them. In this chapter, the focus is on how demands and motives influence both parents and children at the dinner setting.

The main point in this article is to conceptualise how demands connected to children's life conditions influence both children and caregivers. To pursue this aim I advocate an extension of Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory of children's learning and development. Vygotsky pursued a wholeness approach to children's development with his concept of “the child's social situation of development” as the child's dialectic experiential and motivational relation with his or her surrounding. This conception I extend with the concepts of institutional practice and activity setting. The conditions for children's activities are the institutional practice and its activity settings. But a child's activities in these settings also has to be seen from the child's perspective, that is, his or her motive orientation. To focus on the child's motive within an activity setting—requires the researcher to focus on the child's social situation of development to discern how the dialectic between the child's orientation within a...

The aim of this article is to analyze how schoolchildren's thinking and concept formation generated in classroom teaching can relate to daily life situations. Situated thinking and learning and theoretical thinking and learning are discussed as learning forms that can accomplish this integration. According to Vygotsky, subject-matter concepts are transformed into personal concepts through children's ability to use them in daily life. The relation between skill and content has to be presupposed in this transformation of subject-matter concepts into everyday concepts, because everyday or daily-life concepts are learned through and interwoven with practical activities in cooperation with other people. The analyses are based on distinctions between (a) societal and personal knowledge, (b) subject-matter and everyday concepts, (c) subject-matter methods and content, and (d) thinking as related to subject-matter methods and concepts as related to subject-matter content. For the personal aspect of knowledge, eve...

This article focuses on variations in children' s understanding of the evolution of species and the origin of humans, and on how these variations are related to classroom instruction. In order to evaluate the children' s concept development as influenced by teaching method, children from two classes who participated in a teaching experiment throughout the third grade were interviewed. The teaching experiment aimed at teaching the children the theoretical concepts of evolution by teaching them to integrate their knowledge into coherent models. Two experimental groups from two different schools were interviewed during the middle of the fourth grade. A control group of children from a class that had not been taught the concepts of evolution were also interviewed. Analyses of the interviews showed that the manner of instruction influenced the children's conceptions, both in the area they were taught, the evolution of species, and a related area, the origin of humans.

The contributors to this collection employ the analytic resources of cultural-historical theory to examine the relationship between childhood and children's development under different societal conditions. In particular they attend to relationships between development, emotions, motives and identities, and the social practices in which children and young people may be learners. These practices are knowledge-laden, imbued with cultural values and emotionally freighted by those who already act in them. The book first discusses the organising principles that underpin a cultural-historical understanding of motives, development and learning. The second section foregrounds children's lives to exemplify the implications of these ideas as they are played out - examining how children are positioned as learners in pre-school, primary school and play environments. The final section uses the core ideas to look at the implementation of policy aimed at enhancing children's engagement with opportunities for learning, by discussing motives in the organisations that shape children's development.

[I]t is the knowledge systems that dominate the practices children participate in at different ages. If we want to give children conceptual competence that is more oriented toward theoretical knowledge, we must make this part of their everyday practice. So parents and educators should change the practice traditions that the children participate in to change the conceptual competence the child will acquire. Play, as the key activity for preschool children, offers the possibility for such a development where the motivational aspect is also involved. (Hedegaard, 2007: 275) INTRODUCTION In the previous chapter empirical knowledge and narrative knowledge were introduced, critiqued and contrasted to show how empirical knowledge and paradigmatic thinking in play may limit rather than expand learning opportunities for children. As was shown, empirical–rational thinking enables humans to group and classify things and phenomena within the world ‘by comparing and pointing out the interrelations of genus and kind’ (Davydov, 1999a: 131). Through this type of thinking, ‘it is possible to solve the tasks of relating things to a certain class (genus) or, vice versa, divide a class into certain subclasses or kinds’ (p. 131). However, Davydov (1999a) stated that humans have another kind of thought and knowledge – theoretical knowledge and theoretical thinking. Davydov (1999a) writes that people in society frequently meet demands that require a system analysis where it is necessary to understand the particular and the general simultaneously, a task that requires a different kind of logic.

[L]earners actively transform the learning material included in these [cultural–historical] programs by means of certain object-related or mental actions. In the process of this kind of transformation, learners discover and distinguish in the learning material some essential or general relationship , and when they study it they can discover many particular appearances of the material…Curricula that provide for such directions of thought help to establish relationships with integrated systems of knowledge. The leading role in the appropriation of such knowledge belongs to the learners' actions . (Davydov, 1999a: 135; emphasis in original) INTRODUCTION While a growing number of articles have been written about teacher knowledge of concepts (see Appleton, 2006), much of the research contained in them has concentrated upon discipline content knowledge devoid of the conceptual system in which the concepts were developed or are being used (Fleer, 2009b). In these articles, teacher knowledge of concepts in discipline areas has generally been researched against a checklist of concepts (e.g., Garbett, 2003), and great associated claims have been made about early childhood teachers' lack of knowledge. Research into teacher knowledge of subject matter concepts has not been examined in relation to everyday concepts and scientific concepts in specific subject areas (see chapter 3). Much of the research into early childhood teacher knowledge of concepts gives a rather limited reading of teacher concept knowledge within discipline areas (see Fleer, 2009b).

When schools in the United States use computers as part of their instructional practices with minority children, they tend to use the same practices that take place without the technology, namely, remediation (Boruta et al., 1983; Center for the Social Organization of Schools, 1983). Computers are used primarily as instructional delivery systems to provide drill and practice programs instead of as tools (e.g., word processors, databases, spreadsheets) to investigate problems in subject matter areas. In working with minority children, we believe enrichment is a better strategy for addressing academic achievement problems (Brophy, 1988). Our approach to using computers with minority children is to focus on enrichment. We have viewed

Two of Vygotsky's (1997) central theoretical points are that cultural- historically developed tools mediate the child's relation to the world and that the competence to handle such tools is acquired in social settings through guidance from others. His theory of concept formation for preschoolers, schoolchildren, and adolescents explains how the practice of institutional activities influences children's concept formation (Vygotsky, 1987, 1998a). Small children participate in the everyday activities at home; schoolchildren meet the academic world in school, which he points out as a necessity for schoolchildren's development of scientific concepts; and adolescents get acquainted with the activities in work life, a necessity for their development of dialectical concepts. Vygotsky describes how very young children appropriate concepts of tools and objects through interaction with their caregivers and, as an example, he exemplifies this with how a child learns to use a spoon in interaction with his caregivers (Kravtsov & Berezlizhkaya, 1999). In his theory, Vygotsky characterizes small children's and preschool children's concepts as everyday concepts developed spontaneously in collaboration with others through everyday activities. He contrasts these concepts to schoolchildren's concepts, which he characterizes as scientifically developed through systematic school instruction. Although Vygotsky describes the concept learning of preschool children as inscribed in the social practice of everyday activities, what he primarily draws on when describing preschool children's concept formation is an experiment with the double-stimulation method (Vygotsky, 1987 p. 130ff). In this experiment, children's task is to sort blocks that vary in form, size, and color, gradually finding the sorting principle because a meaningless label is attached to the bottom of each block that is turned over each time the child has chosen one.

Introduction Why is teaching history part of elementary education, and how does it become useful for children outside the school context? How can concrete events and abstract principles be related in history teaching, and how can history be a means of relating to the past and orientating toward the future? How can the child become explorative and active in history teaching? These questions are central for history teaching and have been approached in different ways within various traditions of instructional theory. In this chapter, I argue for an activity-theoretical approach to history teaching. The activity approach is characterized with the help of four principles. In the last part of the chapter, I use these dimensions to describe and analyze a history teaching experiment we conducted in Grades 4 and 5 in a Danish comprehensive school. In this experiment, historical knowledge was viewed as a tool for understanding the societies of today. The objective of history teaching has changed over time (Engelund, 1988; Sodring Jensen, 1978; Manifest, 1983). In Denmark schools became public in 1814 and in Sweden in 1842 (Ramirez & Boli, 1987). From the beginning, history teaching in the Scandinavian countries had the task of developing students' national identity and moral character. This last task coincided with the ideals of the obligatory teaching of religion, and the two were the main objectives in public school teaching besides teaching reading (Sodring Jensen, 1978). The task of history teaching was transformed in the late 1950s.

The aim of the project was to formulate a theory of children’s personality development that considers development from a comprehensive point of view in a cultural and societal context and to formulate a related theory of instruction. We based our work on the methodology of the cultural-historical school, as formulated for Vygotsky (1985-1987) and developed by Leontiev (1978, 1981), Elkonin (1971, 1980), Davydov (1977, 1982), and Lompscher (1980, 1982, 1984, 1985).