Vygotsky chose Bacon's quote that heads this chapter, as his guiding metaphor, indicating his intention to incorporate Marxist theory of labour activity into his psychological theory. These ideas continue to be developed today, under the title of activity theory (Leont'ev, 1 978; Moll, 1 990; Wertsch, 1 985a). Vygotsky envisaged two levels of mind and two corresponding levels of physical activity: the first or natural level was the mind alone (the naked hand), the second, or cultural level, was the mind
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natural and the cultural are that the cultural is the natural "mediated by unique mental tools and auxiliary means" (Leont'ev, 1 978, p. 1 7). Here also is the link between the lower and the higher mental functions and between natural and scientific concepts, in that the higher mental functions are mediated by the use of psychological tools. Leont' ev believed the unique contribution of Vygotsky was his hypothesis of the mediation of mental processes through tools (Leont' ev, 1 978, p. 1 9).
In non-mediated learning, children interact directly with the environment, for example, in the form of observational learning, in what we would call trial and error, or free play. Mediated learning radically changes the conditions for interactin�. Vygotsky and his followers (Kozulin, 1 998; Vygotsky, 1 978a,b, 1 986; Vygotsky & Luria, 1 993) identified three types of mediating agents: material tools, psychological tools and other human beings, all of which work to bridge the gap between the learner's environment and her or his appropriating these sociocultural ways of knowing and behaving. Material tools do not exist as isolated, individual implements, but as objects with collectively understood use, interpersonal communication and symbolic representation. Clearly, the use of material tools influences human cognition and Dockett and Fleer ( 1 999) have advocated that early childhood centres be careful to assess their current provisions of equipment for children for relevance in today's society. However, it is the psychological tools that play a more dominant role in cognition because they bridge the stimuli of the world and the individual 's inner psychological processes (Kozulin, 1 998). It is with the "psychological tools" teachers use to support children's learning that this project'is especially concerned. The contents of each teacher's "tool-kit" demonstrates her or his specific commitment to beliefs abqut learning, and her or his articulation of practices and beliefs is the first step towards changing these beliefs.
In activity, the use of psychological tools is analogous to tools in physical labour, determining a person' s relationship with the environment and with himself or herself. Examples of Vygotsky's psychological tools are the spoken language, systems of notation, works of art, written language, schemata, diagrams, maps and drawings. Shared and collective tool use is a major way in which children both come ;to be socialised into their society, to appropriate signs and concepts for themselves, and to pass this learning on to the next generation. Where children are separated from the rest of society in institutions catering specifically for them, the equipment and routines
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provided, which are themselves cultural and historical developments, play a major role in what and how children learn. Early childhood centres are such institutions and as such they do play a major role in how children are prepared for their rol�s in society. It is difficult to justify the organisation of children spending large parts of their days divorced from their real world, yet expected to learn to use the tools of their cultures, when the major paradigm of learning is skills-based. A contention in this dissertation is that adults have a responsibility to construct programmes of learning in early childhood institutions that as nearly as possible approximate selected activities of the real world of children's homes and communities, and provide links between the various facets of children's communities.
The third class of mediating agent, people, is of central interest in this study. According to Kozulin, ( 1 998) in Vygotskian research, the role of the human mediator has often been reduced to that of a "mere provider of symbolic tools to the child"
(PA).
This quote could be used as a direct reference to the common early childhood practices of "free play", during which adults leave the children to complete their own investigations within a well-equipped environment. Since the process of children's learning has been shown to have as large an influence on the child as the content of that learning (Vygotsky, 1 978b; Wells,2000),
it is essential teachers do not abdicate from their important role as mediators for children of cultural understandings, and as the "senior semiotician" (Vygotsky, 1 926). Teacher-child interactions appropriate in this mediation of children's learning were identified during this research.The development of learning is "perceived not as a natural process of maturation and the acquisition of new information, but rather as an increasing ability to apply new cultural tools to one's own psychological processes" (Kozulin, 1 998, p.69). Rogoff ( 1 998) expresses this idea in her description of cognition as a collaborative process and learning as transformation in participation. Here learning is viewed as an expression of the learner's behaving differently in one situation because of previous appropriation of cultural tools.
Rogoff ( 1 998) described individual learning as occurring "in collaboration with a community of thinkers in which more than one person is working on a particular problem, with historical and material aspects of other people's solutions available to
each thinker in their extended conversation" (p.726). A baby born into our culture does not merely respond to stimuli, acquire socially determined skills and knowledge and adapt to the determining environment. The uniqueness of being human is that each of us, through our activity in the world, changes the very circumstances that determined us.
An example provided by Vygotsky ( 1 98 1 ) of others mediating young children' s learning i s that of a baby using the natural instinct to grasp at objects becoming transformed into a gesture of waving goodbye . Through the mediation of another individual, cultural meaning is given to gesture, which later becomes internalised and provides the child with inner commands to him- or her-self. Thus development is both the tool and the result of developmental activity, " ... only through the other do we become ourselves; this rule applies to psychological function as well as to the personality as a whole" (Vygotsky, 1 98 1 , p. 1 44).