114 Marie-Cécile Bertau and John L. Roberts
isolated individual that is focused upon, understood as a disembodied and
neutral (with regards to race, gender, and social class) organism that needs
to be educated for the sake of the overarching agenda of efficiency aligned
to the dominant economic system. Being efficient at school, college, and in
the work place, functioning as an autonomous individual without visible
external problems, and agreeing in principal to be tracked and controlled is
in accordance with this overarching agenda belonging to WEIRD societies
(Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies;
Heinrich, Heine & Norenzayan, 2010).
The next section provides an overview to four main learning theories.
The first two – behaviorism and cognitivism, addressed in this historical
section – are faithful reflections of the individualistic, non-situated, and
disembodied view of learning prevalent in general psychology and widely
found in textbooks introducing psychology as the only theories of learning.
The overview adds two theories – constructivism and dialogism – that
reach into the context of learning by including its situation, language-in-
use, and others. In section 4, we opt for the framework of dialogism as a
basis for a dialogic notion of learning.
3. INTERMEDIATE STEP: OVERVIEW
3.1. Behaviorism
For behaviorism, learning is a change in behavior where the process of
change itself is not researched, since it cannot be observed. As mentioned
in section 2, classical conditioning was introduced by Pavlov (1932); a
previously neutral stimulus (a tone) is changed into a conditioning stimulus
for an organism (a dog) by being paired repeatedly with a second
unconditioned stimulus (food): the neutral, now conditioned, stimulus
becomes a sign for the arrival of the second stimulus (food). North
American psychologists followed this lead: among others, Watson (1913)
worked on emotional conditioning, and Skinner (1938) on operant
conditioning. These approaches share the understanding of learning as