History, politics, and practice in knowledge construction

perceptions of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory – from scarce knowledge of it, to seeing it as one among many accounts of social factors in child development, and eventually, to a wide acknowledgment that this theory provides a unique perspective on human development and implicates profound changes in many fields of psychology and education. As this approach is rapidly gaining in popularity among psychologists and scholars in neighbouring disciplines, its general significance, meaning, and status need to be further explored and spelled out. This need is particularly acute because of the rather narrow interpretation of Vygotskian approach that came to dominate many of its accounts. Namely, this theory and its history so far have been approached mostly from the viewpoint of traditional – cognitivist and individualist – views on science that exclude analysis of moral, practical, and political dimensions and relevance of knowledge. Despite much progress achieved in bringing Vygotsky to the fore of contemporary debates, his approach is viewed as representing yet another theory valuable mostly in terms of its novel and abstract ideas that (a) explain autonomous, mental reality separate from broader contexts of life and (b) themselves are of little political relevance, standing only in a superficial relation to the context of life. In this sense, Vygotsky, not unlike Paolo Freire after him (cf. Glass, 2001), can be said to have been domesticated to suit the politics-neutral ideology that dominate psychology and education today. In this paper, an alternative view is explored, namely that Vygotskian approach represents far more than a set of neutral theoretical principles in that it goes beyond the confines of a mentalistically understood enterprise of science. This alternative view has been initially inspired by observations on a uniquely collaborative history of Vygotskian project and on impossibility to interpret it outside of the broader context of collaboration and practice (e.g. Stetsenko, 1988, 1993). Indeed, from its inception by Vygotsky and his colleagues in the early 1920s, this project has defied the traditional individualist and mentalist (and ultimately idealist) notions of science. Instead, it evolved as a value-laden collaborative project immersed into sociopolitical and cultural-historical practice of its time, came to embody this practice, and ultimately contributed to it through active participatory stance and civic-scholarly activism by its participants. Moreover, Vygotskian project stretched beyond the confines of science as such (in its traditional mentalist guise) and instead blended the dimensions of