| Summary: | The present study examines the relationship between the practices of schooling
and classroom teaching and learning on the one hand and learners’ cognitive
development and functioning on the other. The study uses innovative system of
ideas in developmental and educational psychology, originally formulated by Lev
Vygotsky to investigate the interrelations between learning, instruction and
development.
Carried out in a rapidly changing socio-cultural context of Venda, South Africa,
the study examines the realities of schooling practices that exhibit both continuity
with the past practices of society and some profound transformations that
together lead to a multi-dimensional and a complex picture of cognitive
development in learners. By examining the relations between the cultural
practices of schooling and its socio-historical context on the one hand, and the
consequent psychological process on the other hand, the present study offers an
opportunity for exploring processes that may be more opaque in relatively stable
socio-cultural contexts of schooling.
The observations on the history of schooling in South Africa in general, and in
Venda in particular, support the theoretical formulation that particular practices of
schooling, themselves originating from and continuing larger social-historical
processes, represent contexts in which learning and development take place and
are shaped. The empirical investigations revealed that even the socio-cultural
contexts of schooling characterized by strong ruptures, such as in South Africa,
nonetheless carry on some vestiges of their past practices that affect today’s
learning and development of learners.
The study concludes, extending the prevailing theoretical formulation, that the
social and cultural setting of schooling in Venda is multifaceted; manifesting
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instances of indigenous practices, the traditions of past missionary practices, as
well as the traditions of the past, apartheid schooling. By taking into account
these socio-cultural influences, the study provides crucial insights into the
regularities of cognitive and conceptual developmental processes taking place in
conditions of rapid social change in the course of the schooling of today’s
children in Venda. The study furthers our understanding about the regularities of
the socio-cultural and historical processes of schooling in conditions of rapid
social change, and concludes by proposing ways of improving contemporary
educational practice in South Africa, grounded in sound psychological knowledge
and research about school transformation and classroom teaching and learning
improvement.
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