cation systems. The argument will point to how teachers’professional learning at
every stage can be seen as knowledge work and how teaching can be defined as a
knowledgeable and informed profession engaged in responsive work with learners,
so meeting Evetts’criteria for an occupational profession. In doing so, I shall
suggest that aspects of teacher education may need to be re-thought in order to
create the conditions in which occupational professionalism canflourish.
The starting point is the premise that pedagogy, i.e. teaching to enhance learning,
is a relational and therefore responsive activity. That view holds whether we
examine relationships between student teachers, university tutors and school-based
mentors; teachers’professional conversations with each other; or teacher and pupil
interactions. In this chapter, the focus is thefirst two relationships, though the
arguments presented are also relevant to the third. I shallfirst suggest that the
relational aspects of professional learning will benefit from being labelled and
valued and will do so by drawing on the ideas ofrelational expertise,common
knowledgeandrelational agency(Edwards 2010 , 2012 ) which have been devel-
oped within a cultural-historical account of learning.
37.2 Cultural-Historical Approaches to Learning
Cultural-historical accounts of learning draw on the work of Vygotsky. Writing in
Russia in the 1920s and early 1930s, he was interested in how mind is shaped in
different environments. In brief, how does culture enter mind, how do people take
on what is important in the cultures they inhabit, how are concepts which carry
what matters culturally acquired and used? This recognition that mind and action
arise within societal conditions is the central thesis in the cultural-historical
approach to human learning, with implications for how we think about, for
example, concepts, practices, activities and actions. In this section, I focus on just
four aspects of cultural-historical theory: concepts as cultural tools; the dialectical
nature of human learning; mediation; and motives in practices, activities and
actions.
Vygotsky saw concepts as tools, which have cultural origins and are used in
ways which are valued by those who already inhabit cultural practices. For him
learning was not simply a matter of internalisation; his view was that learning
occurs through a process of internalisation and externalisation. In brief, a learner’s
ability to work with conceptual tools develops through a dialectical relationship
between the learner and the practice, where learners refine their grasp of concepts
using them as tools to work in and on the practice. The idea of the dialectic is
important, not only because it emphasises externalisation and the impact of the
learner on the world she inhabits, but also because it alerts us to the demands made
on learners for how tools are used (Hedegaard 2012 ).
The dynamic iteration between what the learner brings to the practice and the
demands in the practice is a key to how cultural-historical approaches to learning
are able to avoid an analytic separation of individual and society. The dynamic also
556 A. Edwards