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Reader in Elementary and Social Education at the Department of Education, University of Delhi

CULTURE, COGNITION, AND PEDAGOGY: EVOLVING A DISCOURSE OF POSSIBILITY

Gaysu R. Arvind

Nonnegotiable agenda of any contemporary psycho logical theorizing should be to promote human dignity and dismantle the theoretical constructs that affirm the existing social order. However, it is well documented that empiricistpositivist methodology was originally designed precisely to make social transformation and equalization difficult. Research projects are conceptual ized to substantiate the prefigured ethnocentric deduc tions that till today continue to hold, 'those people suf fer from general cognitive deficits as a consequence of cultural inadequacies'. Evidences can be garnered to substantiate that mainstream psychological theorizing is still elitist and skewed against the nonCaucasian modes of thought and social relations. For instance, Galtonian axioms are still sought to justify the prevail ing social distribution of cognitive and personality traits across class, gender, and ethnic groups.

Rise and support to the IQ testing movement fur ther edged out the humanity from the agenda of psy chological and educational theorizing. Contextualist voices pointing at the erroneousness of the IQ tests in equating cultural difference with cultural deprivation were muzzled by the political declarations of the posi tivists that children of the lower classes and the despised ethnic groups share and perpetuate the men tal characteristics of their classes and groups, while children of the superior classes and favoured ethnic groups share and reproduce the traits of theirs. (Joravsky, 1989; Cole 1996). Widespread endorsement of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve further con solidates the unabated continuance of the racist ideol ogy in contemporary human science theorizing. Feuerstein and Kozulin (1995) strongly contested the veracity of such sociopolitically motivated claims: «to present intelligence in this reified way -- as a concrete stable quantity -- is a scientific anachronism». Challenging The Bell Curve's pessimistic prognosis, they advocate that intelligence is a propensity, a ten dency or the power of the organism to change itself to adapt to a new situation. It is multidimensional, mod ifiable and amneable to change, the very qualities that have enabled humans to adapt so effectively to a mul titude of environments. Reifying psychological phe nomena not only disavow the possibility of social change and transformation, but also serves the rightist agenda of maintaining existing social hegemony.

However, what is more worrying is that in its most frightening form, such spuriously generated myths not only tend to get legitimized at the national policy level but continue to have wideranging bearing on political ideology, social reform and praxis, and educational the orizing. It erroneously interprets the education prob lems of failing children of the poor and working classes in terms of competencies or incompetencies of children, not inadequacies or adequacies of schools and other societal institutions, national educational policies and goals. Projected crises in the successive public budgets can further attest the diminishing economical support to the social welfare policies of the State, including that of the provision of public education for underprivileged or excluded groups, and hence the unequal access to accompanying opportunities of upward mobility from birth to achievement criteria in determining status and life chances.

Locating 'Subject' in Social Theorising: Evolving a Discourse of Possibility

Most of the officially sponsored and available studies tend to reduce the working child1 to a socially disem powered 'nonactor', a deterministic product of statisti cal combination of hereditary and environment, instead as an active agent and self conscious organizer of his socio -- economical conditions. The present research study was conceptualized to construct a more encom passing social theory that can be developed in a chain of interconnected conceptual propositions like: that in order to gauge how working children behave, think, and act, 'they' should be regarded as legitimate subjects in their own right and not in comparison with their supe riors and norms; analysis should be grounded in the sub jects' 'life -- spaces' -- in their homes, schools, streets, and working places; working children are active agents in their own development; mind emerges in the joint activity of people and is an important sense, 'cocon structed'; and any critical theory of education in its explanatory framework should create space for transac tion of education processes that legitimizes rather mar ginalizes the working children's lived -- world. Implicit in the social construction of experience is the 'discourse of possibility' that offers hope for emancipatory forms of social research that could eventually lead to a more egal itarian and democratic social order. For then, each human being is a source of cognition, of conscious rela tion, and of action, all of which constitute the central characteristics of subjectivity.

The more pressing strategic need in the discourse of possibility is to develop theoretical frames and research methodologies to comprehend the complex inter rela tionships of all aspects of human cognitive engagement with their worlds. If thinking is produced in practices, we need to understand what practices are and how par ticipation in social interactional processes promotes individual knowledge production. To achieve this, two bodies of work were drawn upon: Vygotsky inspired CulturalHistorical Activity Theory (Cole, 1996; Engestrom, 1999; Leont'ev, 1981; Scribner 1984; Wertsch, 1981) and Lave's notion of Practice Theory (Lave, 1988, 1991) as grounded in critical anthropology and informed by Bourdieu (1977, 1984). Combining of these two mutually informing perspectives has provided an enhanced theoretical language for studying cognition as it gets culturally and socially constructed (Fig. 1).

Activity Theory: CulturalHistorical Activity Theory (CHAT)2 is an interdisciplinary approach to human sci ences that has its threefold historical origins in classical German philosophy (from Kant to Hegel), in the writings of Marx and Engels, and in the Soviet Russian cultural historical psychology of Vygotsky, Leont'ev and Luria. It is fundamental to activity theory that the relation of indi viduals to every aspect of the world around them is essen tially societal. Focus is on the societal nature of the human individual, as distinct from the social. Leont'ev elaborated upon human societality by stating that «in studying development of the child psyche, we must …start by analyzing the development of the child's activ ity, as this activity is built up in the concrete conditions of its life (Leont'ev, 1981, p. 395). The societal nature of the individual human being, as engaged in cultural practices constitutes the concrete conditions of life. This approach necessitates shift in focus from either the individual or the larger social context to an activity system that allows an examination of the inter relationship between the indi vidual and the cultural setting. With culturally organized human activities as the primary unit of analysis, social set tings are not viewed as discretely circumscribed phenom ena but instead occur as a part of interwoven social phe nomena that occur in the moment and across time and space (Gutierrez et al., 1995; Putney et al., 1995). Engestrom (1987, 1999) has defined activity system as a social practice that includes the norms, values, division of labour, and goals of the community.

Another essential tenet of the culturalhistorical school is that the process of the historical development of human behaviour and the process of biological evolu tion do not coincide; one is not a continuation of the other. Rather, each of these processes is governed by its own laws (Cole, 1999, p. 90). For Valsiner (1989), «the historical portion of the label cultural -- historical refers specifically to the developmental nature of all psycho logical phenomena«, along with the recognition that historical thinking implies a connection not just with the past, but with the present and future as well (p. 60). In addition, the forms of activity associated with labour, as well as the resultant material conditions of the encap sulating context, serve to situate development. For Portes and Vadeboncoeur (2003), «the cultural portion of the term refers to the dialectical nature of instrumen tal human activity, in particular, the way in which peo ple act upon their social contexts aided by cultural tools« (p. 374). Action is thus dialectical and shapes the environment while it transforms human development across various fields and contexts.

Practice Theory: Lave's (1988) social practice theory symbolizes a struggle against the academic posturing of the mainstream individualistic psychology that is entrenched in mindbody dualism. Viewing the world of a person's ideas, beliefs, and (intellectual) knowledge as autonomous -- essentially disengaged from their bodily (i.e., lived) experience, and hence from their sociocul tural context provides broadly for a devaluing of lived experience in favour of 'higher' (abstracted) con templative activity (Kirshner and Whitson, 1997). Lave offers a cogent critique of conventional cognitive theory by moving out analysis of cognitive activity from labo ratory into the domain of everydaylife. The result is a new way of understanding human thought process, a view of cognition as the dialectic between personsact ing and the settings in which their activity is constitut ed, a subtle interaction that shapes both the human sub ject and the world within which it acts. Knowledgein practice, constituted in the settings of practice shaped by rich experience generated over time, is the site of the most powerful knowledgebility of people in the livedin world. Practice theory, in short, suggests a different approach to cognition and to schooling than that entailed in individualistic functional -- schooling theo ries, educational ideologies and cognitive theory.

Practice theory has eclectic roots in the work of Marx, Bourdieu, Sahlins, Giddens and other critical social theorists and anthropologists. Theorizing about social practice, praxis, activity, and the development of human knowing through participation in an ongoing social world is inspired by Marxist tradition in social sciences. Lave has further advanced the discourse with the infusion of Bourdieu's central organizing principles of capital (accumulable socialsymbolic resources), field (the arenas of social life and struggle), and habitus (embodied social structures).

Thus expanded framework entails a crucial possibili ty to break from the dualisms that have kept persons reduced to their minds, mental processes to instrumental rationalism, and learning to the acquisition of knowl edge. For Lave and Wenger (1991), a theory of social practice emphasizes that «learning, thinking, and know ing are relations among people in activity in, with, and arising from the socially and culturally structured world. This world is socially constituted, objective forms and systems of activity, on the one hand, and agents' subjec tive and intersubjective understanding of them, on the other, mutually constitute both the world and its experi enced forms. Knowledge of the socially constituted world is socially mediated and open ended« (p. 51). Emphasis is on the inherently socially negotiated char acter of the thought and actions of personsinactivity. This implies that understanding and experience are in constant interaction indeed, are mutually constitutive.

Postmodernism, Knowledge and Education: Streaks of the postmodernism constructs can be visualized in the theorizaton of knowledge construction as explicated in the practice theory. However, juxtaposition of the post modernism ideas into the social practice theory is provisional and needs to be treaded with caution. Bauman (1992) while critiquing the universal rationality, knowl edge and truth of modernity had agued that «the post modern perspective reveals the world as composed of an indefinite number of meaninggenerating agencies, all relatively selfsustained and autonomous, all subject to their own respective logics and armed with their own facilities of truthvalidation. Their relative superiority may be argued solely, if at all, in pragmatic and overtly selfreferential mode, with no claim to supracommunal authority« (Bauman as quoted in Usher and Edwards, 1994, p. 198). According equal value to the experiential and learning engaged in as part of everyday life, knowl edge validation cannot be judged merely in the valency of what is 'right' or 'wrong' learning; all is contingent on an individual's situatedness in the social formation and the sense an individual brings to and appropriates from it, their context, pretext and subtext. There is no sin gle, ordered view of the world to be imparted, but multi ple 'realities' to be constructed through an already inter preted experience (Usher and Edwards, 1994).

Need is to reconfigure discourses in social science that tend to underplay what Foucault called 'subjugat ed knowledges' or local, unelaborated knowledge and experience because it was considered as having failed to pass the test of universality and scientificity. Knowledge constructed through participating in practices at work place is an instance of a 'subjugated knowledge'. From disciplinary standpoint, this knowledge is judged as anecdotal, situationallyspecific (and hence ungeneral isable), lacks scientificity and thus not worth research ing about. In other words, practitioner knowledge is excluded from the agenda of mainstream theorizing.

Education as a socialcultural structure and process, in all its various forms, intimately connected with the production, organization and dissemination of knowl edge tends to uncritically accept assumptions grounded in the modernist discourse. Even within this modernist perspective where education is seen as inherently eman cipatory and empowering, it is unwittingly becoming the site of social control through its 'uniform view of schooling'. According to the uniform view, as much as possible all students should study the same subject mat ter, that ought to be conveyed in the same way to all stu dents and progress in school ought to be assessed by for mal tests administered under uniform conditions (Gardner, 1999). This homogenized view of the practice of education, its theorization, structures and processes based on only one perspective or mode of rationality needs to be contested.

Henry Giroux (1988) and other critical education theorists have maintained that schools can become institutions where forms of knowledge, values, and social relations are taught with the objective of educat ing young people for critical empowerment rather than subjugation. He criticized Marxist scholars like Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis for their view that schools are capitalist agencies of social, economic, cultural, and bureaucratic reproduction. From Girouxian perspec tive, schools could become sites of resistance and demo cratic possibility through concerted efforts among teachers and students to work within a liberatory peda gogical framework (Kincheloe and Mclaren, 2000).

• Activity theorists (Engestrom, Leont'ev)

• Situated Cognitists (Brown et al, Forman, Minick and Stone, Pea, Salomon)

• Vygotskians (Cole, Davydov, Kozulin, Scribner, Van der Veer, Wertsch)

• Post Modernists (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard)

• Practice Theorists (Bourdieu, Giddens, Lave, Wenger, Walkerdine)

Fig. 1. Zone of theorizing subject: A critical social theorist perspective

An Interpretive Framework: Essential Features

Need is to strategically blend theoretical constructs from the Activity and Practice theories to create a theo retical platform that can further advance the understand ing of learning and knowledge as processes that occur in a local, subjective and socially constituted context. Social construction of knowledge has implications for how one views the nature of knowledge, the context of learning and the assessment practice. The resultant syncretic framework, having postmodern moments then, is depend ent upon a rich theoretical network that evolves from the goodness of fit between proposed theoretical constructs and the complexity of social phenomena. (Gutierrez and Stone, 2000). This goodness of fit allows us to examine naturally occurring cognitive activity not as it appears through isolated mental tasks, but as it unfolds in situ, functions in the larger, purposive life activities that are carried out in constant interaction with social and mate rial resources and constrains. This syncretic perspective allows us to move across and within various levels of analysis in the activity system. The crux of the synthesis is that it recognizes individuals in all of their complexity, while simultaneously crediting the intrinsically social nature of cognition and learning. Essential tenets of this interpretive framework are:

• ChildInActivityInContext is the unit of study. There is a strategic shift in focus from the child as the unit of analysis towards the view that childincontext partic ipating in some event is the smallest meaningful unit of study. The socialculturalhistorical context defines and shapes any particular child and her experience. At the same time children affect their contexts. The child and the context are mutually coconstitutive or dialectically related. The context is conceptualized as a system of nest ed structures, ranging from the immediate facetoface interaction with another person to general all encompass ing cultural practices. Cultural practices are meaningful activities that occur routinely in everyday life and are widely shared by members of the group. Culturally organized human activities are enduring, intellectually planned sequences of actions that are directed towards specific objective. They can be analyzed on a molar level as for instance, artistic activities, work activities, play activities and they can also be analyzed in terms of their lower levels the goaldirected actions that constitute them or the specific operations by which actions are car ried out (Scribner, 1985/1997).

• The economic practices determine children's work ing conditions and social interactions, which is turn influence their cognitions. In this formulation, thinking is no longer located exclusively within the human sub ject. It is distributed across minds, persons, the symbol ic and physical environments, the social and economic practices. The whole activity system constituting the subject and the available cognitive tools realizes the thinking process. The economic collectivist principal of shared goods is paralleled by socially shared cognition.

• Rather than a single, universal and invariant mode of rationality, there is a need to see rationality as having many forms, validated in many different human prac tices. We are all producers of knowledge, but through participation not disengagement. Knowledge generated from a wide number of sources, including everyday life should be accorded equal status. Work is an educational site in which pedagogical and learning practices have always taken place.

The Project: Site, Participants and Method

The study is localized at Jehangirpuri, one of the biggest cluster of slums at outskirts of the North Delhi. Inspite of a fairly good accessibility to education in terms of availability of state schools, incidences of educational failure, nonenrollment, school exclusion, and children engaged in labour activities of various sorts are alarmingly high in Jehangirpuri. The socioeconomic identity of these children is not difficult to discern: they are children of landless agricultural labourers, subsistence peasants, vil lage artisans, urban workers, employed in household industries, informal jobs and building construction activi ties. Generally, the basic earnings of a family are insuffi cient to cover even the most basic daily subsistence needs, let alone saving for unexpected emergencies. Thus, many children resort to informal work practices whenever the economy of the household needs them. cognitive thinking mathematical knowledge

Over the years, the Jehangirpuri has become the dumpingsite for refuse generated by the nearby com mercial and industrial setups. Hence, the most pre ferred work practice for children is selling the scrap col lected by scouring through the streets and dumping sites. Scrapselling entails many advantages over the other workpractices: an instant generation of much needed cash, its unskilled nature, convenient timings, investment and stake free practice, an abundant avail ability of raw material i.e. refuse, and an allowance for an occasional, freewilled, or limited engagement. Because of these features, this work activity can be undertaken with the schooling. However, a sizable number of chil dren never survive the schooling beyond gradetwo.

There are two polarized thoughts of school on why child works and forgo schooling. The views child work as primarily a family's response to poverty and hence no space for schooling processes. The education school views a dysfunctional education sys tem as the main hazard in the way of schooling.

The study attempted to empirically contest the most widely held apriori notions like: working children lag

Gaysu R. Arvind y and hence are incapacitated to benefit from formal schooling; institutional arrangements (such as schools) are the only sites to inculcate legitimate knowl edge, and practical knowledge produced and acquired at work place is different, inferior by the normative stan dard of the social science theorizing. By combining ethnographic studies with simulated experiments across settings, framework of this prototypic research was designed to create data sets that describe life trajecto ries of working children in terms of their relationship among cognitive development, indigenous literacy, schooling, and work practices.

The study generated the data to explain thinking pat terns of outof school, working children (10 to 14 years old) in the context of nature of street games played by them; their ability to solve algorithms in the videogame mode; problem solving strategies used in everyday rea soning; and to map the characteristics of working chil dren's mathematics. Data was obtained by employing quasiexperimental research methodology that entailed ethnographic analyses of naturallyoccurring cognitive activity as manifested by working children in their engagement with socioeconomic practices, combined with experimental cognitive tasks designed according to analyses of socioeconomic practices. Children were test ed on practicerelated mathematical problems that are meaningful and relevant to them, something significant for their daily survival. A preliminary analysis of data is being attempted to unfold the cognitive, educational, economical and sociospatial dynamics of working chil dren in the complex nested systems of social processes, and the social order as a whole.

Data Analysis and Result

Mathematics as a social construction

The study is guided by a basic assumption: Working children's participation in economic practices creates a context for children to construct their own understand ing of what counts as mathematics. To examine mathe matics as a social construction, children's actions spread over all artifacts constructed on that day (for particular students) were documented. This was enabled by an intensive period of participant observation that was undertaken that day, followed up by focused periods of data collection across distinct phases of activity. Through data analysis, an attempt was made to identify what meanings, processes and forms count to working children, how they construct form, process, and meaning; and how meanings are related to, and constituted by, the forms of interaction constructed (Putney et al., 2000).

Example 1:

If 1 kg of Iron Scrap costs Rs. 15

Find the cost of 4 kg

Solution: Cost of 1 kg Iron = Rs. 15

Cost of 4 kg Iron = 15 Ч 4 = Rs. 60

Or alternatively

Question: Cost of 7 kg of Iron Scrap is Rs. 105

Find the cost of 4 kg of Iron

Solution: Cost of 7 kg = Rs. 105

Cost of 1 kg = Rs. 105 + 7 = Rs. 15

Cost of 4 kg = Rs. 14 Ч 4 = Rs. 60

Table 1: School mathematics versus Working mathematics

Legend: Kg -- Kilogram; Rs. -- Rupee: the basic monetary unit of the Indian currency.

Working Mathematics

Units and Method devised by children

Solution Example 1:

Rs. 50 is equal to 3 kg of Iron +Rs. 5

Rs. 20 is equal to 1 kg of Iron +Rs. 5

=> 4 kg of Iron = Rs. 50 + 20 5 5 = Rs. 60

Example 2: How much money will be obtained

Step 1: Rs. 20 appro[imates 4 kg of Paper

Rs. 20 appro[imates 4 kg of Paper

Step 2: 25 + 25 + 25 + 25 = Rs. 1

25 + 25 + 25 + 25 = Rs. 1

Step 3: Rs. 20 + 20 + 1 + 1 = Rs. 42

Scrapgathering' practice has three distinct activity phases: sourcing, sorting and selling. During the sourcing phase, the children scour through the trash in garbagedumping sites and collect an assorted mass of scrap items that are saleable. During the sorting phase, the undifferentiated collected refuse is organized into groups as per the market specification entailed in their saleability. For instance, the plastic refuse is further organized into: plastic bottle (cosmetic/drink/medi cines), plastic tubes and pipes, plastic parts obtained from white goods, polythene packaging. During the selling phase, the specifically organized items are sold to a scrap dealer at the prevailing market rate.

The study further supports the researches on every day math initiated by Acioly and Schliemann (1985), Carraher, Carraher, and Schliemann (19821983), de la Rocha (1986), Lave (1988), Saxe (1989,1994) and Scribner (1984). However, what is intriguing in the present study is the ability of working children to devise their own units for calculation. These devised units are grounded in the organization practices of their work rather than in the domain of mathematical specificity.

To elaborate, working children tend to peg the value of scarp to be sold to the scrap dealer in terms of the cur rency bills of denominations of Rupees (Rs.) 10,20,50 and 100 rather than cost calculated on the basis of rate per unit. For instance, iron scrap gets sold Rs. 15 per kg. For children, rate per unit is not the calculating unit, rather the currency bills of denomination of 10,20,50 and 100 are the benchmarking units against which the scrap is to be sold.

These examples illustrate that ballpark strategies devised by working children entail calibrating their measuring unit in terms of the money value of currency bills against which the value of scrap is to be assessed. This ability of 'mathematizing' the problem and a ball park sense of its solution lie in the socioeconomic com pulsions and context of the children. When availability and management of economic resources is the constant pressing problem, money value then tends to become the more tenable unit to trade goods. How much wheat flour, rice sugar or tea can be procured in Rs. 20 makes more sense then calculating cost in terms of rate per kg. of essential commodities. This is in sync with Lave's (1990) view that «when people own problems about quantities and their relations, they act to relate them in ways that make sense within ongoing activity. They do not 'pop out' to represent them in mathematical formu las, which furnish only an impoverished representation when the world is available as a 'model' of itself» (p. 27). In this formulation, knowing and doing mathematics is an inherently social and cultural activity entailing both a process of active individual construction and a process of enculturation. Mathematical learning occurs as stu dents develop effective ways to solve problems and cope with situations.

From this perspective, there is a basic structural dif ference between formal, academic thinking and practical thinking at work. Textbook notion of school mathemat ics is essentially that of a domain -- specific algorithmic competency concerned with abstract conceptualization of number, quantity and space. However this research suggests that quantitative relations are constructed inventively and effectively in everyday situations. Working children's ability to free themselves from rules, and to invent flexible strategies stands in sharp contract to the kind of 'schooled' thinking exemplified in the use of a single algorithm to solve all problems of a given type.

Play and its cognitive consequences

For Vygotsky, play is not the predominant feature of childhood but it is a leading factor in development. Through play, a significant shift is engineered in child's thought process that consequentially gets changed from predominance of the imaginary situation to predomi nance of rules in the development of play itself. This tan tamounts to internal transformation in the child's cog nition development that essentially moves the child for ward. The defining character of play is that at the end of development, rules emerge, and the more rigid they are, the greater are the demands on the child's application and regulation of activity. It is incorrect to conceptual ize play as an activity without any meaning as simply running around without purpose or rules does not appeal to children. For Vygotsky (1978, p.103), «a com plex of originally undeveloped features come to the fore at the end of play development features that had been secondary or incidental in the beginning occupy a cen tral position at the end, and vice versa». Thus, play con tains all potential tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of cognitive development.

Play is a social activity in which human relations are essential and are expressed together with peers. It paves the way for the child's transition to a new level of devel opment (Leont'ev, 1981, p. 369). All three mediating fac tors, that is, tools, signs, and other people are active in the child's play activity. Children are engaged in an interaction with peers and adults; they use tools and arti facts, and represent the culture through signs and sym bols. From this perspective, in play children raise the demand on themselves and with that bring themselves into the zone of proximal development (zpd). Play's con text raises children's action to a more advanced level, which in turn initiates a new process of development. For Vygotsky (1978, p.96), «the development from games with an overt imaginary situation and covert rules to games with overt rules and a covert imaginary situation outlines the evolution of children's play».

In play activity, children often overshoots the cur rent contextual frame. Children not only appropriate the social surrounding world, but they also make unex pected creative changes (Brostrom, 1999).

Observations of play indicate that children not only adopt to and internalize the local institutional culture but expand beyond it as well. Through this activity new knowledge, skills, and actions often emerge. According to Engestrom (1987), this kind of activity is dramatic and radical for the future life of the individual; it is a turning point, a revelation. Engestrom calls this kind of learning activity learning by expanding. It takes shape as if it is a «voyage through the zone of proximal develop ment» (Engestrom, 1987, p. 175).

Bagh -- Bakri (Tiger -- Goat): the streetgame

With this conceptual background, an attempt is made to analyze the defining features of the rulebound game activity -- BaghBakri scripted by the working children. The game is played on a ground and its contours are sketched by a chalk (see figure 3). The game contour is punctuated by 36 holes, where the marbles rest. Two play ers can play the game with each player's home at star base, each having 18 samecoloured marbles.

Rules: The goal is to move all marbles of your colour from your starting point to the positions on the opposite side. A marble can move by rolling to a hole next to it or by jumping over one marble, to a free hole, along the lines connecting the hole. The player can make several jumps in a row, but only one roll. The player cannot both roll the marble and jump with it at the same turn. When the player has moved one of his marbles, the turn passes on to the next player. Since it is allowed to make sever al jumps in a row, it is strategically important to make it happen. By building structures for the marbles to jump on, it is possible to quickly move a marble to the oppo nent's side. The ability to recognize the opportunity to make a long jump is critical for playing a good game.

In this turnbased game, when one player had made his move the other player has some time to think before making his move. The value of each possible move is cal culated and the move that gives the best result is select ed. For instance, it is equally important not to leave any marbles behind when the others have been rolled ahead. The marbles left behind will need more turns to cross as their opportunities to make long jumps will be fewer.

Scripting and playing this rulebased game is a no mean cognitive act for outofschool children. It signi fies an intricate organization of thought processes in which abilities to think algorithmically, strategies for planning and making a successful move, and construc tion of complex rules have come into an active play. It is in the context of play that a dialectic engagement with others, artifacts and symbols has led to the emergence of a higher level of cognition.

Cognition in videogame setting

For recreation, the working children frequently visit the videogame parlours. Working children's engage ment with videogames further supports the claim about sophisticated facets of their mental processes. The abili ty to manipulate and transform symbols into a rule bound cognitive form propels children further in con text of videogame and cognition entailed in it, i.e., lev elsofdifficulty in videogame tends to engineer corre sponding levelsof higher mental organization. From this perspective, videogame creates a zone of proximal development for the child. Children try out various rules or strategies in their attempts to attend to, com prehend and undertake task analysis entailed in that particular setting of the videogame. They learn how to select the most efficient routes to solving a problem. Rejection of useless methods and retention of efficient ones signifies emergence of evolved cognition. The ease and speed with which children dealt with multiple, simultaneously acting stimuli in videogame mode tends to dismantle the widely held misconception that the ability of such children to engage in complex multi causal reasoning is limited. Analysis of rule bound 'street games' that children themselves have scripted further confirms that some settings (street games vs. schooling context) result in more effective forms of cog nition than others because they elicit different strate gies or activate different knowledge structures that allow for more efficient processing.

Working children and school practices

School observations and interviews with outof school children suggest that socioeconomically disad vantaged children in Jehangirpuri are compelled to seek admission into resourcestarved, understaffed, academi cally ineffective schools. If, for the disadvantaged chil dren, the school remains one of the few mechanisms to offset the negative impact of the other adverse societal pressures by providing a compensating boost then, it is ironical, that selective access to a dysfunctional school will further cumulate their already handicapped situa tions. How do sociodisadvantaged children in Jehangirpuri experience schooling: in the primordial phase of children's implantation and acclimatisation to the school culture, many teachers and educational per sonnel instead of chalking out compensatory strategies to facilitate children's social, psychological, and cognitive adaptation, assign them labels on the basis of their socio ethnic origin. Labelling not only infringes on certain basic rights of children but also massively damage their future prospects in life by tracking them into a virtual situation where they begin to accept the predetermined status that the dominant culture of society has decided that they will fulfil as adults. Schools, instead of liberating and destig matizing children, have further formalised their ethnicity by stamping them as culturally different, deprived or dis advantaged. Strategically, such institutionalisation of labelling keeps the forces of social homogenisation at bay. That is to say, the nondisadvantaged develop an explicit set of beliefs, images and expectations about the 'disad vantaged', and very often the disadvantaged confirm their labelling by developing a similar set of beliefs about themselves. Thus, the existing social arrangements and stratification continues unhindered.

At the level of tices, many schools invariably tend to compound the handicap by themselves providing experiences that are similar to the disadvantaged homes in terms of impover ished language and near absence of strategies for devel oping critical thinking skills. The incredible irony is: schools, instead of compensating for the lack of appro priate experiences to anchor and sustain the prerequi site of formal academics, themselves have adopted the interactional patterns so often attributed to disadvan taged homes. The deprived ethnic background of the children which is at variance with the middleclass ethos of school is often evoked as a cover to hushup the administrative failure to seed and nurture such children. Reiteration of dominant culture's images, messages, rep resentations and modes of knowledge construction are

Working children seem to be very well capable of sensing the real world, handling/coping with uncertain and unpredictable environments, often relying on approximate or qualitative data and reasoning to make decisions and to successfully accomplish their objec tives. They seem to gather information in what can be referred to as the 'approximate first' fashion : they look for and/or perceive first some 'generaltype' informa tion, of a symbolic, iconic, approximate, or even 'blurry' nature, and then progressively focus their attention on details, or further precision as they judge necessary to supplement the 'general' information. This is quite con trary to the conventional atomistic form in which school knowledge is dispensed and cognition is structured.

Conclusion

The study illustrated the negotiated and constructed nature of working children's consciousness as it gets unfolded in their work, play and education practices. Children do not passively grow into a preexisting world; rather they construct the world in which they live and the opportunities for learning within this world. From the perspective of the syncretic activitypractice frame work, the formation of working children -- their identi ties, cognition, and knowledgeable skills had occurred through their participation in some subset of these.

Note

1 Children who do not survive initial years of school ing often tend to get engaged in labour activities preva lent in the neighbourhood in order to contribute to the household income.

2 For a historical theoretical analysis of the evolu tion of the concept of activity in Soviet psychology, its revisionist version by Leontiev, and its contemporary epeistomological positioning as a generator of con sciousness, refer to Alex Kozulin (2005). In context of the present study, Cultural -- Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) is used as a generic framework that has scope to extend the work of Vygotsky, Leont'ev and Luria. Emphases on mediated activity, dynamic devel opmental analyses, as well as the role of activity setting in the coconstruction of mind are the focus.

5. Brostrom S. 1999. Drama games with 6year old children. In Engestrom et al (eds.), Perspectives on Activity Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

6. Bruner J.S. 1987. Prologue to the English edition. InL. S. Vygotsky. Collected Works (V. 1, p. 1--16) (R. Rieber & A. Carton, eds.; Minick N., transl.). N.Y.: Plenum.

7. Chaiklin S. and Lave J. 1996. Understanding PractisePerspectives on Activity and Context. N.Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press.

8. Cole M. 1996. Cultural Psychology. CambridgeHarvard Univ. Press. 49

Annotation

The article addresses the problem of cognitive development in working children from poor Indian families. There are still many erroneous notions in contemporary human science concerning this issue; for instance, it is assumed that children of the lower classes and the despised ethnic groups share and perpetuate the mental characteristics of their classes and groups, while children of the superior classes and favoured ethnic groups share and reproduce the traits of theirs. The study attempted to empirically contest the most widely held apri ori notions like: working children lag cognitively and hence are incapacitated to benefit from formal schooling; institutional arrangements (such as schools) are the only sites to inculcate legitimate knowledge, and practical knowledge produced and acquired at work place is different, inferior by the normative standard of the social science theorizing. The study generated data to explain thinking patterns of outofschool working children (10 to 14 years old) in the context of nature of street games played by them; their ability to solve algorithms in the videogame mode; problem solving strategies used in everyday reasoning; and to map the characteristics of working children's mathematics. Basing on culturalhistorical activity theory, practice theory and postmod ernist constructs, the author shows the specificity of working children's cognitive development arguing against ethnocentric deductions that these children lag cognitively as a consequence of cultural inadequacies.

Key words: cognitive development, ethnocentrism, play, school education, culturalhistorical activity the ory, practice theory, postmodernism.

В статье поднимается вопрос об особенностях когнитивного развития детей из бедных районов Ин дии. По утверждению автора, в современных науках о человеке попрежнему господствует мнение, буд то дети из семей, принадлежащих к низшим слоям общества (и к притесняемым этническим группам), заведомо отстают в когнитивном развитии от своих сверстников из более благополучных семей. Иссле дование, представленное в статье, ставило своей целью выяснить, правомерны ли подобные утвержде ния. Для этого были собраны данные, характеризовавшие образ мышления работающих детей 10-- 14 лет, не посещающих школу: информация об уличных играх этих детей, о том, как они справляются с заданиями в видеоиграх (это распространенное среди работающих детей развлечение), об их стратегиях в решении повседневных задач, а также о специфике их математических познаний. Опираясь на теорию деятельности, культурноисторическую психологию, теорию практики и постмодернистские концепции знания и образования, автор анализирует полученные данные и приходит к выводу, что, хотя когнитив ное развитие работающих индийских детей и обладает своей спецификой, говорить о запаздывании или отставании в развитии было бы в корне неверно.

Ключевые слова: когнитивное развитие, этноцентризм, игра, школьное обучение, теория деятельно сти, культурноисторическая психология, теория практики, постмодернизм.

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