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Far from following a linear process from its conception to its implementation, an educational design often involves discrepancies between what its promoters intended and what the participants actually do. In this paper, drawing from a sociocultural perspective to learning, we focus our attention precisely on some of the discrepancies observed during the implementation of a training program. We consider these discrepancies not as mistakes or misunderstandings, but rather as indicators of the communicative dimension of any intervention and as "windows" on the processes of change and on learning. The program we have studied here was set up in Madagascar and was sustained by a Swiss cooperation agency addressed to farmers in the field of forestry. In this research, we adopted an "actor-oriented perspective" in order to understand the promoters' and the beneficiaries' interpretation of the design and the way they developed innovative strategies to resolve the difficulties they faced. We chose some "critical incidents" from the data gathered through ethnographical research and show how the whole process of the conception and the implementation of the program was deeply affected by both the power dynamic embedded in the history of the relationship between the Swiss and the Malagasy groups and by their own cultural and institutional constraints. In conclusion, we discuss the significance of an actor-oriented perspective that contributes to a better understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of learning and allows us to relate the here and now micro-phenomena to the larger anthropological, social, and political scenery.

This paper presents preliminary findings of the project [name omitted for anonymity]. This interdisciplinary project builds on Argumentation theory and developmental sociocultural psychology for the study of children’s argumentation. We reconstruct children’s inferences in adult-child and child-child dialogical interaction in conversation in different settings. We focus in particular on implicit premises using the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) for the reconstruction of the inferential configuration of arguments. Our findings reveal that sources of misunderstandings are more often than not due to misalignments of implicit premises between adults and children; these misalignments concern material premises rather than the inferential-procedural level.

La recherche présentée ici se déroule dans le contexte de l’école obligatoire portugaise et des difficultés que connaît l’enseignement des mathématiques systématiquement confronté à une proportion importante d’élèves peu motivés pour cette discipline et en échec. Des interventions pédagogiques, construites comme des études de cas inspirées par un plan quasi-expérimental permettant des comparaisons, ont permis d’observer les réactions différentes d’élèves travaillant, seuls ou en dyades, à des problèmes d’algèbre. Il en ressort d’une part une meilleure compréhension du rôle de la modalité d’organisation des relations dyadiques dans la capacité à comprendre la tâche et à la gérer; et d’autre part une mise en évidence de l’engouement qui naît chez les élèves, embarqués dans des dialogues et des conflits socio-cognitifs, et qui alors modifient leurs attitudes à l’égard de ces mathématiques.

How can the advances of social and developmental psychology be integrated? This conceptual paper proposes to examine four basic theoretical models of social situations through which learning and development have been observed in the post-piagetian tradition: the psychosocial triangle, the frame, models of transfer and transitions, and models integrating the notion of cultural instrument. We show different dynamics highlighted by series of studies using these models. We finally discuss the notions of development and of the person emerging through such social developmental approaches. (Contains 4 figures and 1 note.)

This paper discusses the distinct meanings of "internalization" and "interiorization" as ways of rendering intelligible the social constitution of the psychological in a line of research that started with Piaget and extended into a post-Piagetian reformulation of intelligence in successive generations of studies of the relations between social interaction and cognitive development. While the same clarity cannot be found in Vygotsky's work, the emphasis on the cultural embeddedness of cognitive activity in contemporary cultural psychology has also been a significant influence on the evolution of this work. This paper proposes a further integration of these perspectives by developing the idea of "operativity-in-context" as a means of retaining the advantages of Piaget's structural analysis of cognition whilst recognizing the situational and cultural constraints on cognitive functioning.

ICT tools have been developed to facilitate web-based learning through and learning about argumentation. In this paper we will present an example of a learning activity mediated by Digalo--software for knowledge sharing through visually supported discussion--developed in a university setting. Our aim is to examine, in particular, socio-cognitive construction of knowledge and argumentation by students debating a controversial question in history. We propose a descriptive approach of understanding and meaning-making processes based on two levels of analysis: (1) a topic meaning-making process oriented level and (2) an argumentation oriented level. We focus our studies on how the participants--small groups of students--develop understanding of the topic, their arguments and their interactions through the use of different functionalities of this software. Our results show that interactive and argumentative processes are themselves objects of learning and develop through collective activity. Development of the understanding of the topic through argumentation is discussed and linked to the design of the activity and the affordances of the Digalo software.

O estudo da "cultura" remete às relações entre "significações coletivas" e "sentido pessoal" do conhecimento e da atividade. Identificamos quatro correntes recentes de pesquisa que têm abordado essas questões, examinamos suas escolhas teóricas e metodológicas, e realçamos pontos importantes para pesquisas futuras.The issue of "culture" addresses the relationship between "collective meaning" and "personal sense" of knowledge and activity. We identify four recent research trends which explored these issues, show their theoretical and methodological choices, and highlight important points for future research.

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