[Xmca-l] Re: Fun &Games

[mike cole]

Hi David--

I was just beginning to wonder if anyone had any interest in my question
about play and fun.

I found a lot interesting about your note, but I fear that, perhaps because
of the specific framework you are using to interpret the question, the
answer does not seem to help much. I was including preschoolers in my badly
formed notion of an age range of humans.

I had two 7 year olds over last weekend. They were adamently NOT interested
in doing any household chores, but they sure had fun shucking corn for
dinner and even want to wash the car, but drought conditions forbid
it. My wife and I have fun trying to finish the Times crossword puzzle,
congratulating outselves when we make it to Wednesday. And I often have fun
cooking snacks for kids at the afterschool center where I used to have a
presumably serious minded task at hand. Not play. Not a game. But fun.

It can happen, I surmise, during any part of a stable developmental phase
or at the beginning, middle, or end, of a crisis (despite the negative
emotional connotations of the word).

Maybe to vague a wondering to be useful.
Happy to discuss the topics you raise, but how about a header change?

mike



On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 2:24 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike:
>
> In our presentation over the summer in Kangwondo, we tried to consider
> various forms of the "next zone of development" as diagnostic rather than
> pedagogical devices. That is, we tried to take seriously the idea tha the
> Zoped is not a "zone of proximal development" or a "zone of pedogogical
> development" but rather a zone of pedalogical development, a way of
> diagnosing what the child's next zone of development. This seems like an
> important thing to do; without it, the tendency to reduce the Zoped to a
> teaching/learning device rather than a developmental diagnostic (as
> Vygotsky intended it) is hard to resist.
>
> When we read Vygotsky's unfinished papers on "Child Development" (Volume
> Four of the Russian Collected Works and also the 2001 "Lectures on
> Pedology" published in Izhevsk) we get the impression that the schedule of
> development that Vygotsky had in mind is both too delicate and not delicate
> enough. It's too delicate because, for example, you have the crisis at
> seventeen which occurs right in the middle of a stable age (puberty) after
> which the child apparently simply goes on with the stable age--we can only
> explain this by the circumstance, peculiar to the USSR of the time, that at
> seventeen youth were required to decide whether they were going to leave
> school and work or enter a preparatory school for higher education. It's
> not delicate enough because, for example, the Age of Infancy overlaps with
> the Crisis at One by at least two months (ten months to twelve months)
> during which time some very important changes are taking place in the
> child's semantics (according to Halliday, 2002, "The Language of Early
> Childhood").
>
> There's a way out. Vygotsky also says that the critical periods have a
> three part structure (pre-peak, peak, and post-peak) and the stable periods
> a two part structure (early and late).  In addition, the neoformation which
> defines each age period emerges at the END of the age period and not the
> beginning. So the next zone of development not only predicts the gross
> changes of child development which we now simply predict using the calendar
> (Infancy, Crisis at One, Early Childhood, Crisis at Three, Preschool,
> etc.) but also the next phase within each period. It can do this by tracing
> the child's progress along a main line of development (we called this a
> "central line of development" when you, me and Andy were working on Volume
> Four, but I notice in the pedalogical lectures that Vygotsky prefers the
> term "main line of development"). This means the diagnostic next zone of
> development (that diagnostic Zoped) actually predicts both the next age
> stage (the "objective" ZPD, to use Chaiklin's terminology) and the next
> step within each age period (what Chaiklin calls the "subjective" one).
>
> Speech is the main line of development only in early childhood. But after
> early childhood the main lines of development turn out to be various forms
> of verbal thinking (negation at three, play in preschool, "clowning
> around" at seven,  and conscious awareness and mastery at school age,
> concept development in puberty). This really makes perfect sense:
> development is, at least at the beginning of each period,  more about
> differentiation than about growth. So if we apply this little insight to
> the problem you name--the problem of having fun, play, and games--we obtain
> a process of differentiation: games are a form of play (but not all play is
> a game), play is a form of having fun (but not all fun is play).
>
> In our Kangwando presentation we used a rather course method to
> differentiate having fun, play, and games: rote, role, and rule. Rote play
> is "having fun", or what Vygotsky calls "quasi-play", that is, sensorimotor
> repetition, something which never goes away from play  but which transfers
> its functions upward to role play. Role play is the creation of an
> imaginary situation, but it is an imaginary situation in which the rules
> are imaginary and not explicitly stated and objectively shared. Only rule
> play--that is, formal games--represents the final form of preschool play:
> rote play (having fun) and role play (imaginary play) are transitional
> forms which do not die out but which transfer their functions to higher
> forms as they arise.
>
> David Kellogg
>
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 12:47 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>
> > I have been led to wonder -- what is the relationship between having fun
> > and playing.  How do they differ? Does their relationship, if they are
> not
> > reducible one to the other, change over the course of development? Odd
> how
> > the category of fun is absent from developmental discourse.
> > Mike
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
> > object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
> >
>



-- 

It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch