[Xmca-l] Re: The Diagnostic Zoped

[David Kellogg]

I think that the Vygotskyan version of the Zoped differs from notion of the
leading activity and of scaffolding in exactly the ways that Seth Chaiklin
indicated in his 2003 article: it's much more precise. It's a "NEXT zone of
development" not a vaguely "proximal" one, where the next "fruits" of
development are stated twice: once as a process of maturing, and once as
the mature product. For example:

age period    PROCESS  (line of development)                 PRODUCT
(neoformation)

birth               instinctive forms of extrauterine mental life
physiological independence

infancy          primary intersubjectivity, imitation
Ur-wir (the "Proto-We", an undifferentiated "you and me")

crisis 1          autonomous speech,
locomotion                  babble? crawling?

early child-
hood            dialogue
          speech

In the leading activity interpretation, development is inherent in the
activity itself; there are essentially no internal products (what Chaiklin
calls the potential assumption). In the scaffolding interpretation, the
line of development is brought about by outside intervention and not by
internalization (assistance assumption, in Chaiklin). In both
interpretations, there is a zone of proximal development for everything
(generalization assumption in Chaiklin). In Vygotsky, the idea of a zoped
for everything is like saying that there has to be a blessing for the Tsar.

David Kellogg

On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:

> David,
> What is the relevance you see in showing the disparity between a
> scaffolding zoped, a leading activity zoped, and a diagnostic zoped?
> I have just read Andy's article on the "nature" of concepts  as always
> expressing disparity  This disparity is in their nature as concepts. Or in
> a metaphor you offered describing Vygotsky as like a crow using "words [as
> eggs] that are pilfered and filled with new "sense".
> Does this disparity in the various meanings of zoped "deepen" our
> understanding of the concept "zoped?  or are the scaffolding and leading
> activity versions of zoped "mis-taken" or "mis-guided" or inauthentic
> versions?
>
> Larry
>
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 4:16 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I've been comparing the 2001 Korotaeva manuscript of Vygotsky's final
> > pedological lectures with the version published in Volume Four of the
> > Russian Collected Works (Volume Five of the English). This kind of
> > textological comparison is fairly grueling work, and yields few dramatic
> > moments. But the section which is called "The Problem of Age and the
> > Dynamics of Development" (pp. 199-205) is an exception.
> >
> > First of all, the TITLE'S different! The CW has "dynamics", which makes
> no
> > sense, because the previous section was about dynamics. The Korotaeva
> > manuscript makes it clear that this is about diagnostics. Secondly, there
> > are two paras in the CW that don't appear in Korotaeva, and thirteen
> > paragraphs (!!) in Korotaeva that do not appear in the CW. Thirdly, the
> > word "pedology", which occurs 32 times in Korotaeva, does not appear once
> > in the CW.
> >
> > I've always thought of the Soviet and the Western distortions of the
> Zoped
> > as being symmetrical: the Soviets pretended that it was all development
> and
> > no learning, dissolving it into the notion of leading activity, while the
> > Americans pretended that it was all learning and no development,
> dissolving
> > it into the notion of scaffolding.
> >
> > But the Korotaeva manuscript really makes it clear that the Soviets and
> the
> > Americans really misconceived the Zoped in exactly the same way: both
> > ignored the pedological nature of the Zoped--that it wasn't a description
> > of dynamics at all but rather a diagnostic tool to be linked to very
> > precise ideas about how and above all when neoformations arise, through
> > lines of development, from the social situation. The Zoped wasn't a
> fever,
> > or even a temperature; it was a thermometer.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
>