Botswana Expansive School Transformation Project (BeST): A Response to Serpell’s Commentary

Those who are acquainted with Vygotsky's theory probably know that his publications were blacklisted in the Soviet Union from 1936 until 1956. Regrettably though, only a few adherents of Vygotsky in the West are informed about the great pains taken by the Russian Vygotskians to get hold of a firm position in the local psychological landscape between 1956 and the origin of the perestroika at the end of the 1990s. With this in mind, we here present Vasilii Davydov's vivid account of an endeavor to organize an open conference on Vygotsky's theory at the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1981. Ultimately, the Communist Party officials prohibited this conference. The story involved is actually an excerpt from an unedited audiotaped interview I had with Davydov in my residence on June 13, 1994. Davydov spoke in a flawless, sparkling Russian. Therefore, it was a great challenge to translate his narrative adequately. Elina Lampert-Shepel and I have done our best to render the subtleties that reverberate in Davydov's account of the event concerned.     

Reflections on the Use of DWR in Intercultural Collaboration

This article is a reflection on a Developmental Work Research project focused on the introduction of information and communication technology in schools in Africa. The longstanding project incited us to examine developmental research partnership as a joint mediated activity that takes place in a developing country. The data include several workshops, Change Laboratories (CLs) in three schools, and ethnography from these schools. By tracing the bottom-up approach of CLs, and to capture the complexity of the effects of related activities represented in the partnership, we were led to focus on dialogue where the dialectic of local and global forces evolve.