A Sociocultural Psychology of the Life Course to Study Human Development

Abstract

This paper presents one line of sociocultural psychology aiming at a better understanding of people’s development in their courses of life, unfolding in changing social and cultural environment. Adopting such a position leads me to three core questions: First, if development occurs at the junction of the social and the psychological, how can we theoretically account for the guidance of the sociocultural world upon people’s learning and development, and people’s unique capacities to create and transform these environments? Second, if one adopts such perspective, how do we account for what it that people develop through life, as they move through a plurality of situations? And third, as people learn and develop through life, how can we account for what is unique and personal? To address these questions, I first situate the epistemological assumptions of sociocultural psychology in relation to the works of Piaget and Vygotsky. Second, I present the principles of a sociocultural psychology, and indicate the methodological strategies that I have adopted, together with a large group of colleagues over the years. The main part of the paper constitutes in responding to the three questions I raised. Finally, I propose a tentative synthesis.

Conceptual Commitments of Constructivism in an Age when Truth Matters

“…Infants thus have to learn to use the socially agreed function of objects in adapting to the world, a result of which is the idea of a functional, socially shared permanence of objects. Consistent with the family of sociocultural approaches to development, semiotic mediation also takes center stage in Zittoun's (2022) account (this issue) of life course development. Using a number of diverse examples, she demonstrates how sense-making occurs through semiotic mediation -from the construction of gender in kindergarten children to how adolescents engage with literary and philosophy school texts and come to use them as symbolic resources in their everyday lives.…”

Integrative Perspectives on Human Development: Dynamic and Semiotic

“…In other words, a sociocultural psychology complements the contributions of an evolutionary perspective both from above, and from below: from above, because it admits as a meta-theoretical frame open dynamic system approaches; and from below, because it does not have as unit of analysis people's goals or activities, but the dynamic of sense-making. Of course, then, to remain a psychology, it has to have a solid conception of the developing person, situated in her world of things and others -and that is, a person feeling, dreaming, hoping and imagining (Perret-Clermont, 1992;Zittoun, 2022).…”

“…We draw on our past work identifying rupture and transitions as catalysed occasions of development and sense-making (Zittoun, 2006(Zittoun, , 2012Zittoun et al, 2003). We have used the term "dynamic pattern" to account for people's unique style of acting, solving problems, imagining, or making sense (Cabra, 2021;Zittoun, 2019Zittoun, , 2022. These dynamic, psychological patterns precisely correspond to Allport's earlier proposition: people's way of acting or sensemaking may change object, move across situations, become more concrete or more abstract, change modality of expression, become generalised… Here are two succinct examples from our current field works.…”

School refusal as a representation of questioning normality: Understanding the richness of socio-cultural transitions

“…This theory takes the view that people live various spheres of experiences, such as doing housework at home, going to school or cram school to study, and playing with friends after school. The sphere of experience is a configuration of experiences, activities, representations, and feelings, occurring recurrently in a social setting (Zittoun, 2016). In addition, when "one sphere of experience, one bit of 'taken-for-granted' life disappears" (Zittoun, 2015, p.133), it is called a rupture.…”