Harry Daniels is Professor of Education at the University of Oxford. He previously held Chairs at the Universities of Bath and Birmingham. He is co-convener and Research Director of the Oxford Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research (OSAT).
It has often been claimed that the notion of mediation lies at the heart of Vygotsky's contribution to social science. However developments of his account of the social formation of mind have tended to have been empirically constrained by limitations in attempts to capture aspects of the 'social' which lie beyond the interactional.
In this session Prof. Daniels draws on a number of studies which provide glimpses of the need to nuance further the notion of mediation as part of the response to these limitations."