INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, we present a study based on previous investigations carried out through a nine-year collaboration between the Open University, in the United Kingdom, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In this endeavour, we seek to understand as well as to promote diverse cognitive, discursive, and cultural processes involved in the social construction of knowledge in Mexican and British primary school children. The data reported here address the development and promotion of a particularly effective type of talk, called “exploratory talk,” as a discursive tool to facilitate social and individual reasoning in Mexican children.
Our research follows a sociocultural perspective, whose fundamentals are rooted on the seminal ideas of Lev S. Vygotsky (e.g., 1962, 1978), and which have given rise to several and varied developments that can be included in this approach, in spite of their heterogeneity (e.g., Brown and Reeve, 1987; Cole, 1985, 1996; Coll, 1990; Coll, Palacios, & Marchesi, 2001; Elbers et al., 1992; Lave, 1991; Light & Butterworth, 1992; Mercer, 1995, 2000; Newman, Griffin, & Coll, 1989; Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch, 1985a, 1985b, 1991). This perspective has produced a great number of theoretical and methodological contributions, including particularly fruitful applications to understanding development and learning, as well as promoting social and educational processes.
The sociocultural perspective assumes that cognition and other psychological phenomena are situated in and take their meaning from the social and cultural practices in which individuals participate.