Uses and meanings of "Context" in Studies on Children Knowledge: A Viewpoint from Anthropology and Constructivist Psychology

Abstract

For more than a decade, our research team of psychologists and anthropologists has studied the construction of diverse types of social knowledge among children, focusing on topics like the building of religious knowledge and children’s idea of intimacy and justice. This work has involved an interdisciplinary dialogue between social anthropology and constructivist psychology that takes a critical approach to the contributions of Piagetian psychology (1997). In fact, we have addressed the relationship between children’s knowledge and social practices in both psychology and anthropology in several of our previous works, based on the idea that children construct diverse meanings about the social world and modify them as active participants in social practices (García Palacios & Castorina, 2010, 2014; García Palacios et al., 2015; Horn & Castorina, 2010; García Palacios et al., 2014, 2015). This work departs from the theoretical assumption that knowledge is constructed in context. However, although the vast majority of studies on children’s knowledge incorporate the idea of context, we found that the scope and limits of this notion are not unequivocally defined (with a few remarkable exceptions we will discuss in the following sections). In this regard, we believe that it is necessary to clarify how the myriad definitions of context influence research on cognitive construction. To paraphrase Althusser (2005), context appears to be a concept in a practical state. For this reason, an interdisciplinary dialogue is imperative to examining the meaning of this category and the unresolved issues it poses for psychology and anthropology researchers at the meta-theoretical, theoretical and methodological level...