INTRODUCTION

Karpov (2005), in noting Hetherington and McIntyre's (1975) ‘expansive review of development’ (p. 2), suggests that dissatisfaction among scholars and practitioners has resulted from a longstanding reductionist research tradition. In contrast to this research orientation, he argues that

He also notes that different theoretical perspectives on learning (e.g., Piaget, Erikson, Freud) focus on only one aspect of the whole child, such as cognition or moral development. Even expanded developmental models (e.g., Kohlberg's use of Piaget's theory of cognition) ‘have not resulted in a holistic view of child development because they do not describe interrelationships of different aspects of child development’ (p. 8). This problem has also been identified by Kravtsova (2008c). Not only has Vygotsky (1998) studied the complexity of the many dimensions of development but his research also foregrounded the dialectical relations between the social situation and the biological child and the changing nature of the child's relationship to the material and social world (see Kravtsova, 2008c).