Play and Toys as Cultural Tools and Practices: A Comparative Study

Toys As Cultural Tools

Cultural tools can be defined as the tools which shape cognitive development and can include both technical tools, which act on the environment and psychological tools, which are tools for thinking.

Cultural tools are needed to transfer culture qualifications to everyday life. Learning to play and toys in the social-cultural context in everyday practices is very important for cultural learning and language is one of the cultural tools to which Vygotsky attaches importance for use in a socio-cultural context. According to Vygotsky, games, toys, and language are all tools for the learning and transmission of culture. Tomasello, Kruger and Rather (1993) noted that cultural learning takes place in three ways in the following order:

• 1.

  Imitative Learning: The first type of cultural learning is clearly imitative learning, in which the learner internalizes something of the demonstrator’s behavioral strategies (Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner, 1993).

• 2.

  Instructed Learning: The second type of learning, that is essentially Vygotskian, is the learning in which learners internalize the instructions of the teacher and use them subsequently to self-regulate their own attentional, mnemonic, or other cognitive functions (Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner, 1993).

• 3.

  Collaborative Learning: The third type of learning; that is collaborative learning, does not involve transmission from mature to immature organism in the classic sense because, by definition, the situation consists of peers collaborating to construct something new that neither had before the interaction began (Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner, 1993)

Figure 1.

Direction of intentionality in the three cultural learning situations

Source: (Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner, 1993)