106 Marie-Cécile Bertau and John L. Roberts
a time-sensitive, socio-culturally situated and reciprocal process that
involves all participants in a specific way and needs the usage of
mediating semiotic tools, where language (e.g., as dialogues with others
or as texts to read and understand) plays a core role.With these key elements and the definition, we adopt an alternative
view to the one advanced by general psychology (Shweder, 1990) that is
widely found in textbooks introducing psychology. The focus of general
psychology in explaining learning is on behaviorism (with different forms
of conditioning) and on cognitive aspects of learning. In both cases,
learning is treated exclusively on the individual level—it is an isolated
individual that learns. Moreover, the individual is reduced to its organism
(behaviorism) and brain (cognitivism) as the sites where learning takes
place. Our alternative aims at re-situating learning within human-specific
environments as described previously: socio-cultural contexts shared with
others, where certain tools are employed and specific languages used.
Importantly then, brain and organism belong to a living person in a context
with others. As a consequence, learning takes place between several
individuals and is acquired by individuals on this basis. For this alternative
view, it matters with whom, where and by what kind of tools we learn, and
also according to what kind of agenda. An agenda is always tied to certain
societal and cultural aims for the learners to reach; this is known as a
developmental task (Havighurst, 1956).
This alternative view links to contemporary critiques of general
psychology as formulated for instance by cultural psychology (Shweder,
1990), transnational psychology (Bhatia, 2007), and cultural-historical
activity theory (van Oers et al., 2008), all aiming at de-colonizing general
psychology, its theories, research, and methods. In this vein, we aim at de-
colonizing learning and to shift the picture that views learning executed by
an organism and brain bare of context and without any others. De-
colonizing learning means to open it to its whole situation with its agents,
practices, and conditions for learning. It means to acknowledge power
structures; in particular those given by socio-culturally dominant forms of
formal learning that territorialize learning arrangements. It means to