Michael Joseph is currently an Associate Professor in the Education Department at Rhodes University, to which he moved after fifteen years at the University of Limpopo, where he helped to conceptualise the first dual-medium undergraduate degree using an African language as a medium of instruction and assessment. He has had a longstanding interest in Vygotsky’s work and has been teaching Vygotsky’s key ideas for several years in courses on the relation between language and cognition. His current interest is in the sociocultural analysis of children’s play with a focus on motivation.