INTRODUCTION

Through theoretical analysis and experimental research, Vygotsky argued that conscious awareness of concepts is only realised within a system that is ‘based on specific relations of generality among concepts’ (Vygotsky, 1987a: 197, vol. 1). In refuting Piaget's work on spontaneous concept formation, he suggested that the child's lack of awareness of concepts was not as a result of egocentrism, but rather of experimentation framed to remove the systems in which everyday concepts are embedded. He suggested that only within a system can concepts acquire conscious awareness. In the previous chapters, it was shown how important children's everyday conceptual system was as they pretended to cook and administer medicine. The conceptual system is kept intact and promoted through a play-based program.

In the first two chapters the research lens was predominantly on the children's thinking as they played. The children's thinking was analysed in relation to how the play had been pedagogically framed (or not) by the teacher. Through this relational analysis it was possible to show the significance of the teacher's philosophy in affording (or not) sustained shared thinking within the everyday conceptual system that was at the children's disposal (cooking, administering medicine). However, it is not just the children's conceptual system that is of importance here. In a cultural–historical view of learning, we cannot ignore the teacher's pedagogical system: they are dialectically related to each other.