Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Learning, Culture and Social Interaction
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/lcsi
Dual-eye-tracking Vygotsky: A microgenetic account of a teaching/
learning collaboration in an embodied-interaction technological
tutorial for mathematics
Anna Shvarts
a,
⁎
,1
, Dor Abrahamson
b
a
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Mokhovaya st., 11, bl. 9, Moscow, 125009, Russia
b
University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Education, 2121 Berkeley Way, Office 4110, Berkeley, CA 94720-1670, United States of
America
ARTICLEINFO
Keywords:
Attentional anchor
Dual eye-tracking (DUET)
Joint attention
Mathematics education
Micro-zone of proximal development
Teaching/learning process
ABSTRACT
Vygotsky conceptualized the teaching/learning process as inherently collaborative. We extend
prior evaluations of this claim by enlisting eye-tacking instruments to monitor the perceptual
activity of four teacher–student dyads, as the student solves a challenging manipulation problem
designed to ground the scientific notion of parabolas in their new sensorimotor routines.
Analyzing each dyad’s gaze paths led us to model the teaching/learning process as the emergence
and dynamic transformation of intersubjective coupling between the student and tutor percep-
tion–action systems. While the student’s sensory-motor coordination gradually gravitates toward
an effective routine, the tutor’s perception is iteratively launched from the student’s current
action, until the tutor detects an optimal moment for verbal intervention. In this micro-zone of
proximal development, the student’s motor action comes to align with the tutor’s cultural-per-
spective strategy. Our elaboration of the cultural–historical approach to teaching/learning draws
on research on joint attention and joint action from the cognitive sciences as well as the em-
bodied-design approach from the educational sciences and demonstrates a compatibility of
Vygotsky’s heritage and complex dynamic systems theory. Finally, we discuss the educational
value of the observed student–tutor intersubjective coupling phenomena, thus grounding the
contribution of this multidisciplinary study within educational concerns.
1. Overview
The objective of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the teaching/learning process. Our approach is to evaluate
and elaborate on Vygotsky’s historical assertion that learning is a student and a teacher’s irreducibly collaborative achievement,
through which the student develops existing naive forms of perceiving and acting on the environment into cultural forms (Vygotsky,
1935/2001). One major challenge of this enduring effort to evaluate Vygotsky’s model has been the lack of research instruments for
making evident how the student and tutor are perceiving the world as they act upon it. Now, almost a century since Vygotsky first
articulated his model, we are equipped with technological instruments and analytic methodology for tracking people’s gaze direction
at a high sampling frequency and searching for patterns in this sensory activity as they relate to co-performed physical actions. Recent
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2019.05.003
Received 28 November 2018; Received in revised form 21 April 2019; Accepted 8 May 2019
⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: a.y.shvarts@uu.nl (A. Shvarts), dor@berkeley.edu (D. Abrahamson).
1
Currently works at: Freudenthal Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, Utrecht University, PO Box 85.170, 3508 AD Utrecht, the
Netherlands.
Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 22 (2019) 100316
2210-6561/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
T