Relationship between Education, Development & Health from Cultural-Historical Perspective

Abstract

The article reflects on the authors’ professional journey to problematizing the relationship between Education, Development and Health. This journey consisted of 4 stages or steps: 1) from research on cognitions in creative problem solving in healthy and pathological samples to identification of the role of reflection in cognitive self-regulation and coping with challenges; 2) from the practice of helping to overcome learning difficulties and psychological maladjustment to making meaning of these practices using cultural-historical concepts; 3) from using the cultural-historical framework to understand the relations within the Education- Development and Health-Development dyads to considering complex relations within the Education-Development-Health triad; 4) from relations within the triad to “a new parallelogram of development”, i.e. creating the basis for helping practitioners’ (educators’; psychologists’; psychotherapists’) efforts that would account for “a tripartite goal” using a conceptual framework of cultural-historical psychology, including the reflection-activity approach (the zone of proximal development; the multidimensional model of the zone of proximal development; dual resource; collaboration; reflection; problem epicenter, a subjectness position; self-development). When discussing each step, the authors identify gaps in efforts invested by specialists working in every dimension and provide evidence to an essential contribution of cultural-historical psychology theory and practice to bridging these gaps and establishing an evidence-based practice of education aiming at students’ development and health enhancement.