Marxism in Vygotskian approaches to cultural studies of science education

Abstract

In this paper we initially address the main categories of Marxism, illustrating how Vygotsky has appropriated them as mediational meta-theoretical tools for building concepts for his psychological approach. In order to investigate the influence of Marxism in cultural studies of science education, we make an account of how current research, sustained by Vygotsky’s original and successor theories, has been appropriating meta-theoretical categories of dialectical materialism. Once we identified Cultural Studies of Science Education as a journal that would probably concentrate papers that follow these perspectives, we decided to take it as the context of this study. In the process of selecting the corpus to be reviewed from the editions published from 2006 to 2011, we have found that 16 % of the articles that matched keywords denoting frameworks related to the Vygotskian tradition developed and appropriated the categories of dialectical materialism. The quality and originality of contemporary development of CHAT denote that this framework has been playing a very important role in recent expansion of Vygotskian approaches to research in science education. Among the papers that we considered to develop and appropriate Vygotskian frameworks, incompletion in the appropriation of meta-theoretical categories of dialectical materialism and the misusage of dialectics intertwined with dialogism were highlighted. Our findings suggest that overcoming these limitations can enhance political analysis of sociocultural phenomena in the context of science education. It also represents a strengthening of the role of dialectical materialism in expanding sociocultural perspectives toward a better articulation between individual and institutional-centered analyses.