ABSTRACT
Roth challenges the idea that learning is interaction between separate, individual psyches housed in their respective bodies. In developing alternatives to this culturally entrenched view, Roth shows how learning is a transactional process in which person-environment interaction systems are enmeshed with and constituted by a diversity of entangled ecological scales. In the early 1930s, the cultural-historical psychologist L. S. Vygotsky denounced the fundamentally dualist nature of psychology and psychological theories. This dualism manifested itself in (a) the dichotomy of body (biology) and mind (culture), the psychophysical problem, and (b) the dichotomy of the person and its (social, material) environment.
During the final 18 months of his life, Vygotsky came to reject his previous work because of its dualist nature and began developing a Spinozist Marxian psychology. He considered the speech and consciousness to be the high road of a solution to the psychophysical (body-mind) problem. An early death, however, prevented him from working out where the approach would lead. Grounded in the analysis of design conversation between university students and professionals, Roth's study shows how the development of such an approach leads to a transactional (as opposed to interactional and self-actional) conception of communication.
