[Xmca-l] Re: Experienced Thinkers and Perezhivanie

[HENRY SHONERD]

Thanks to Robert for asking this question posed in this thread, and to Christopher Shank for Vera’s obituary. 

I have been thinking about what constitutes trauma. A single traumatic event may be responded to in very different ways by different people. PTSD for some, much less harm for others. Also, a single event may not be traumatic for a given person, but over time, like water torture, similar events may take a big toll on that person. Consider domestic abuse and other kinds of bullying. Vygotsky’s example of the severity of effect on three children of having an alcoholic mother seems like this.  

And how does teaching and learning play into resilience, both for big and small insults? And what part does teaching, in the broadest sense, not just in school, play in what comes from the expert, in the academic sense, and what comes from peers who have learned what they know “in the streets” so to speak? Of course a teacher can be both expert and peer, which may be the best support.

I am going to make a leap and share with the chat something that was posted by a colleague of mine at the University of New Mexico who attended Vera’s funeral. Vera was a private person, so might have been uncomfortable sharing this. But I think that the attached notes on things said of Vera at her funeral capture much better than my words what an experienced thinker in the academic sense could also be a person who has responded to trauma in a most courageous way. Someone who might help us deal with the trauma of everyday life. 
Henry

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> On Dec 11, 2017, at 4:03 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> 
> Yes, I presumed that that was what was intended - i.e., that
> a person manifests different aptitudes in the context of
> different activities. To me, introducing the phrase
> "person-environment units" is not helpful here. "Aptitude"
> is an abstraction from "person" and "activity" but one which
> forms a normal part of our perception and cognition of our
> fellow humans, and it probably takes us many years to see
> that a person is not the same person, when they are put in a
> different activity context. In "The Problem of the
> Environment," Vygotsky deal with the fact that traumatic
> experiences impact on the development of the entire person,
> that is, they will impact on a person's actions in different
> environments, beyond that in which the traumatic experience
> was survived, and that is something which would be ruled out
> by taking "person-environment" as a unit.
> 
> Andy
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 12/12/2017 2:07 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil wrote:
>> Snow is interested in measuring aptitude taking a transactional perspective, and talks about person-situation units; person-situation units are therefore units of Aptitude. 
>> 
>> Snow then says that "there is therefore no detached or abstracted list of qualities of instructional treatments that will be equally important for all persons or similar list of qualities of persons that will be equally important for all treatments. Aptitude is the unique coalition of affordances and effectivities in particular person-treatment systems" (Snow, 1992, p. 25).
>> 
>> It makes sense to me, and sounds extremely close to what Vygotsky was saying in his lecture on "the environment". Obviously, this is not an orthodox Marxist take, or else the investigation would take us to some unit particular to a given historically developed (in this case, person-treatment) system. But so neither was VYgotsky's perezhivanie, if only because he had not the time to work it further (although others like Leont'ev and Sasha had less hopes on that possibility). Yet, both ideas seem to me quite inspiring and informative as general heuristics with regard to how to proceed methodologically: if I am to studying intelligence, or aptitude, or experience, and I am doing so in terms of a unit that does not integrate within itself a transaction between person and situation, then I am probably going to have troubles to put back together what my   analyses has dismembered. Also, note that I had written "environment," where Snow had written "situation". I like the latter better. 
>> 
>> Snow, R. E. (1992). Aptitude theory: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Educational Psychologist, 27, 5–32. 
>> 
>> Alfredo
>> ________________________________________
>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
>> Sent: 11 December 2017 15:22
>> To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Experienced Thinkers and Perezhivanie
>> 
>> Alfredo, what on Earth does it mean: "'aptitude' precisely
>> in terms of person-environment unit."?
>> 
>> Surely the term "unit" implies a relation: A is a unit of B.
>> Yes? What is the A and B here? I don't doubt that there is a
>> perfectly coherent idea behind this, but I find this kind of
>> formulation mystifying.
>> 
>> Andy
>> 
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> Andy Blunden
>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>> On 11/12/2017 7:01 PM, Alfredo Jornet Gil wrote:
>>> In a book Wolff-Michael Roth and I wrote last year (http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319398679), as well as in a paper that we are co-writing right now on how a group of kids and a teacher get better at reading/performing theatre scripts, we seek to examine trajectories of development in terms of person-environment units—which is how Vygotsky defined perezhivanie. In both cases, we find recourse in the work of educational psychologist Richard E. Snow, who worked towards a definition of the notion 'aptitude' precisely in terms of person-environment unit.
>>> 
>>> Snow would define aptitudes as "initial states of persons that influence later developments, given specified conditions... the are ... not merely correlates of learning, but rather are propaedeutic to (i.e., needed as preparation for) learning in the particular situation at hand" (Snow, 1992, p. 6). To me, this definition comes very close to what Dewey referred to as continuity of experience, the basic principle that "every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and undergoes, while this modification affects, whether we wish it or not, the quality of subsequent experiences" (Dewey in Experience and Education). It was Dewey who, together with Arthur Bentley and while critiquing empiricist approaches,  asserted that,
>>> "The word experience should be dropped entirely from discussion unless held strictly to a single definite use: that, namely, of calling attention to the fact that Existence has organism and environment as its aspects, and can not be identified with either as an independent isolate". With Snow's notion of aptitude, then, we are not dealing with a dualistic view on intelligence, but with an attempt at a monistic approach to what it means becoming skilled, a skilled thinking body one may add.
>>> 
>>> And so, if I wonder on the relation between "experienced thinkers" and "perezhivanie" that Robert proposed, I think that an experienced thinker is she who finds herself at the verge of an open path upon which walking further presents as an immediate possibility, for her way of walking has become more path-like; or her path has become more walk-able. Say path, say math, say dealing with messages at a list server.
>>> 
>>> Others?
>>> Alfredo
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ________________________________________
>>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
>>> Sent: 10 December 2017 18:57
>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Experienced Thinkers and Perezhivanie
>>> 
>>> Coincidentally, I met a man from Belarus last Wed, Vera's day, but before I knew it would be.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> He moved here with his wife and they will soon have a child.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Once I learned from where he hailed, I said, "Oh Vygotsky is from there!"
>>> 
>>> 
>>> After seeing confusion on his face, I had to remind him who he was... the famous Russian psychologist?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> The light went off and he said he had studied him 20 years ago.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I told him that I only knew a few Russian words one of them being "perezhivanie" and the others "znachenie slova." These are words Holbrook Mahn had taught me about. Two great gifts.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> The man from Belarus seemed perplexed about my definition of perezhivanie when I'd said I understood Vygotsky used it in regards to instruction, that had to do with the emotional content of the environment for teaching and learning.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> For him, it meant "frustration". Not as a resulting expression, but as a process, or perhaps another way to say it, as activity not an end. It was a new word meaning for him, and for me. So together we came to appreciate why Vygotsky used that word.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Additionally, I learned that in our circle on the listsev, it has been used as a technical term specific to instruction, but perhaps I am wrong. I did not have the space to read the recent thread on perezhivanie, so I may be speaking out of time with recent developed threads and my advanced apology if that is the case.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> This now makes me think about controversy, such as what is happening concerning last year's election, but also in the US government these days, and tension between the media, the president and the people.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I have been watching TURN, which is a TV series drama about the American Revolution and the spycraft of that time. There was a lot of perezhivanie going on.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Perezhivanie seems a very democratic word.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> So to answer the question, I find the relationship between an experienced thinker and perezhivanie is timing. A choosing words appropriately.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Vera was excellent at that.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Kind regards,
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Annalisa
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>
>>> Sent: Saturday, December 9, 2017 1:08 PM
>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The illuminance that was Vera
>>> 
>>> I have a question for the listserve. How would you envision
>>> or connect  the notion of "experienced thinkers" with perezhivanie?
>>> Can anyone share a few thoughts in along this line?
>>> RL
>>> 
>>> On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 12:48 AM, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hello colorful fish of the XMCA pond,
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Vera's friendship was a thing nontrivial, as ontologies go.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Her academic sensibility was excellent and demanding. At the same time,
>>>> her pathos for the world swam deep. We know from recent experience that
>>>> although she did not post frequently on the list, she dearly valued the
>>>> intellectual exchange that we all enjoy here. It nourished and populated
>>>> her mind. To the end, I believe this was the case.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> My personal sense of Vera is that few people were privy to the world she
>>>> witnessed, through her eyes. I'm one who could not perceive this world
>>>> directly, but I could tell that she perceived much differently than many of
>>>> us, if only because she had witnessed a wide variety of human activity
>>>> during her long, sometimes unyielding life. I was kind of standing on a
>>>> hill beneath her vantage point and observing that she could see farther
>>>> than I could, without the means to detect what she could see vividly. She
>>>> could be silent in her thoughts and those pregnant pauses could be so
>>>> meaningful, even powerful. Wide vistas. I mean to say that these silent
>>>> pauses were almost words unto themselves. Can a linguist be a linguist of
>>>> no words?
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Most people who met Vera and had the opportunity to spend a little bit of
>>>> time with her, as a student or otherwise, came to love her. My opinion is
>>>> if you could not love her, then you were left to admire her mind, work
>>>> ethic, and academic accomplishments, no small crumbs; Vera was the arete
>>>> that the Old Greeks talked about.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> I feel she made a good-faith effort to be accepting of others even if she
>>>> disagreed with them. She was willing to seek the grey tones in a black and
>>>> white contest. Everyone had a viewpoint and that viewpoint was for its very
>>>> existence a valid one, because it was thought by someone, arising from a
>>>> personal, perhaps intimate, experience – and this demands respect, but was
>>>> not immune to being challenged, which sometimes she could do in five words
>>>> or less.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> She did not see disagreement as an assault to her being, as some of us can
>>>> sometimes feel in heated debate, frustrating disagreements, even chafing
>>>> exasperation. She was patient, nuanced, poised. Such rapport during a
>>>> debate of ideas is the academic standard for which we all must reach, given
>>>> the world we live in today. It is imperative. I feel that way because in
>>>> this process of reaching (to listen, to search, to learn), we each stretch
>>>> a little: it's a good kind of yoga that makes each of us a better
>>>> contributor to the rest, for the rest, by the rest.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> I do not believe I am wrong to say that Vera fought for a better world
>>>> through her efforts to understand how to be a better teacher and how to
>>>> truly serve the developing minds of children who might not have that many
>>>> opportunities available to them. She encouraged that temperament in her
>>>> students, and perhaps her colleagues as well. It was how to serve in order
>>>> to achieve the best outcomes for everyone, which was a sign of her wisdom.
>>>> It is not a struggle singular to Vera, and I believe every one of you has a
>>>> dog in that race, to serve today's children and tomorrow's graduate
>>>> students, and even one another.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Vera was also a bona fide feminist. A velvet glove with a strong grip on
>>>> the realities of gendered relationship. She was not afraid to support other
>>>> women and celebrate their accomplishments no matter the size. She was not
>>>> afraid to debate men, but I feel safe to say she chose her battles when it
>>>> mattered, but she was aware we still have a long way to go, baby. She was
>>>> aggrieved over the election and was fearful about our future. I wish we
>>>> could have shared better news with her than hurricane Harvey, if you get my
>>>> meaning.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> I also want to say something about Vera's strength if only because it was
>>>> annealed through resilience. I feel she saw resilience as necessary for
>>>> survival, and that she saw collaboration as resilience expressed between
>>>> two or more people. I think this is why she valued collaboration; it is
>>>> vital to know the dynamics of collaboration in order to survive all
>>>> challenges that life eventually presents to us. "A sterling collaborator
>>>> be," might be on her family crest.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Additionally, Vera studied those whom we call geniuses, Vygotsky being one
>>>> of them. She told me and a classmate once during office hours that she
>>>> would continue to find new insights in his work after each re-reading, so
>>>> even after her own familiarity, we all have that to look forward to in
>>>> reading and re-reading his work. If this was the case for her, then it will
>>>> be for us.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> It occurred to me some years ago how brilliant it is to study the
>>>> development of genius. "Notebooks of the Mind" is one residual of such
>>>> work. She was onto something there. She was looking at what occasions a
>>>> person or a partnership to reach unique levels of creative accomplishment;
>>>> not what is pathological about the mind in society, but what were its
>>>> virtues? What is a mind that has developed to a pinnacle, significantly
>>>> altering a paradigm of study, creative discourse, or any human endeavor?
>>>> How does one become distinguished in creative work? What was the recipe for
>>>> that? Can it be replicated?
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Imagine if we could all be geniuses, what would the world be like? Would
>>>> there be enough room for so many of us?
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> I think she would say, "Yes," in that delicate Hungarian accent of hers.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> I suppose any doubt she might have concerning a world populated with
>>>> geniuses, precipitated from the problematic baggage that the word "genius"
>>>> carries. Consider the fallacy of Rodin's thinker, his head on his fist
>>>> where ideas spring eternal from no place in particular while enthralled in
>>>> monastic solitude. It is not real, nor is it human. Instead, Vera preferred
>>>> to call such folks "experienced thinkers." It is so apt a phrase, and so
>>>> elegant. Please consider appropriating that phrase in your vocabularies, in
>>>> memory of Vera if you want. Certainly Vera was an elegant thinker; her
>>>> speech embodied remarkable reflections that revealed the ripples of her
>>>> introspection.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> An image of koi comes to my mind's eye, as they swim in a clear pond
>>>> socially, quietly, peacefully.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Thank you for allowing me to share my heartfelt gratitude for this unique
>>>> human being in this very long post. I want to say I will miss her, but I
>>>> feel she is with me still.
>>>> 
>>>> I hope you feel that way too.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Kindest regards,
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Annalisa
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> --
>>> Robert Lake  Ed.D.
>>> Associate Professor
>>> Social Foundations of Education
>>> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
>>> Georgia Southern University
>>> P. O. Box 8144, Statesboro, GA  30460
>>> Co-editor of *Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies,* vol.39,
>>> 2017
>>> Special issue: Maxine Greene and the Pedagogy of Social Imagination: An
>>> Intellectual Genealogy.
>>> 
>>> http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gred20/39/1
>>> Webpage: https://georgiasouthern.academia.edu/RobertLake*Democracy must be
>>> born anew in every generation, and education is its midwife.* John
>>> Dewey-*Democracy
>>> and Education*,1916, p. 139
>>> 
>>> 
>