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TRAVELS WITH AUTHORS

Dr Susan Edwards, Faculty of Education, Monash University

Dr Susan Edwards is the author of Early Childhood Education and Care: A Sociocultural Approach. Published in 2009, the book provides a contemporary approach to understanding sociocultural theory in action and follows the experience of a group of teachers researching their own practice in Victoria. Follow this link to read Susan’s ‘postcard’ from the Vygotsky Summer School in Russia in June 2009.

I have been interested in using cultural–historical (sociocultural) theory in my research and teaching for a number of years now. In June of this year, I had the opportunity to travel to Russia as part of an international group of scholars attending the Vygotsky Summer School.
The Monash University contingent included staff from the Faculty of Education and a PhD student (Sue March), and was led by Professor Marilyn Fleer. We travelled first to Moscow, and then spent 26 hours travelling by train to Belaya Kalitva, a rural town where one of the schools using the works of Vygotsky is located. These schools are known in Russia as the Golden Key Schools and implement the ideas from cultural–historical theory in practice.

The Summer School was hosted by The Institute of Psychology at The Russian University for the Humanities, and was led by Elena Kratsova, who is the granddaughter of Vygotsky. Professor Fleer had previously travelled to Russia on two occasions and attended the Institute of Psychology, and so was able to introduce us to many of the scholars working in this area and was able to share with us her understandings of this important work.

The school that we visited used multiage grouping and focused on Vygotsky’s ideas around the dialectical relationship between emotion and cognition. We saw how teachers would work to connect with the children’s emotional response to a particular ‘event’ and use this to support their learning. We also had the opportunity to see children of many different ages working together to create artefacts related to their learning, to solve problems and participate in detailed discussions about what they were studying. It was very interesting to see how adept and sensitive the older children were at supporting the younger children to develop their ideas and create pieces of work that contributed to the work of the group. For example, one of the lessons was about the children creating artefacts that would help a lost wolf get back into his fairy tale. This lesson built on an ‘event’ that had been going all week, where one of the teachers had pretended to be a wolf that was not sure which fairy tale he belonged to and how he was going to return to his tale. In the lesson that we observed, the children had discussed a variety of magic items that might be of use to the wolf. As the children went to the table to begin their work, the older children automatically began to help the younger children. I watched as a girl of about 10 years of age helped her 4 year old classmate paint a picture of a magic wand. The older child actually held the younger girl’s hand, dipped the brush into the paint and helped her paint the straight line and then the star at the top. In one of the lectures we attended we heard how the Golden Key Schools believe that it is important for the older children to support the younger children as the sense of responsibility and achievement the older children receive from this contributes substantially to their developing sense of self within the classroom community.

Attending the Vygotsky Summer School was a wonderful opportunity, and I was enormously grateful to our beautiful Russian hosts who made us feel so very welcome and supported us to see as much of their town as possible. At the moment I am trying to follow up my experience in Russia with lots of reading and reflection on what I saw and learned. In late August of this year I travelled with my family to the United Kingdom where I will spend some time at the University of London and at the University of Oxford. I have been invited to speak about the work developed by the City of Casey teachers at Exeter University, and will also speak at the Association for the Training, Advancement and Co-operation in Teaching Young Children’s annual conference.

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