Buds, flowers and fruit: potentialities for guidance in collaborative argumentation-based learning

The title of this presentation is inspired from the following passage of Vygotsky's works, justly famous for the power of its imagery: "The zone of proximal development defines those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation, functions that will mature tomorrow but are currently in an embryonic state. These functions could be termed the "buds" or "flowers" of development rather than the "fruits" of development." (Vygotsky, 1935/1978, p. 86). Bruner's seminal work (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976) defined types of tutorial interventions that could guide (or "scaffold") and facilitate the processes whereby such buds could come to fruition. The relevant use of scaffolding strategies required the adult to be able to identify features of the individual learners' problem-solving behavior, such as focusing on the problem, progression towards the solution, motivation and emotion. The growing emphasis in the Learning Sciences research community on the study of collaborative learning in small groups raises problems for adaptive guidance of such groups of a quite different order of complexity from those encountered in individual learning. Whilst teachers guiding individual learning need to pay attention to problem-solving in specific domains, and individuals' emotional states, in group interactions, if there genuinely is collaboration, then problem solutions emerge from the interaction via processes that in some sense go beyond the sum of individual contributions. In many countries, teachers are simply not trained to be aware of and to identify the "buds" of potentially productive and constructive forms of interaction (Miyake, 1986; Baker, 1999).