[Xmca-l] Re: Thank you to Peter

[mike cole]

Makes good sense to me, Rob.

I do not have the same problem with proximal that Peter does, but
emphasizing the
temporal ordering seems certainly right.

With respect to scaffolding: The russian term is строительные леса  -
literally,
"construction forests" -- think of the "scaffolding" around public
buildings that block the sidewalks and are a "forest" of pipes and boards.
Beats a gallows by a verst or two!

BUT, beware that Vygotsky and Luria, among others, used this very term at
times. There is interesting work by Arthur Bakkar and Anna Shvarts on this
very topic that I am hoping to get represented in MCA. Arthur has written
on this topic with empirical
work in classrooms and makes a case for a broad use of the term that
converges very closely with. If there is interest here, let me know, and i
can post one of his papers.

mike
(the guy who believes that the proper English concept is a zoped)  :-)

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 3:56 AM, robsub@ariadne.org.uk <
robsub@ariadne.org.uk> wrote:

> I just want to say thank you to Peter for introducing me to "Deconflating
> the ZPD and instructional scaffolding". https://www.researchgate.net/p
> ublication/320579162_Deconflating_the_ZPD_and_instructional_
> scaffolding_Retranslating_and_reconceiving_the_zone_of_proxi
> mal_development_as_the_zone_of_next_development
>
> I have felt for a long time that there was something not quite right about
> the way people conceive of both the ZPD (or, as I shall now call it, the
> ZND) and instructional scaffolding, but lacked the expertise to analyse
> why. Now Peter comes and, with great authority, tells me that I was
> thinking along the right lines. The irony of now being officially A Retired
> Person is that I have the leisure to study these things in the detail I
> needed when I was working and did not have the time.....
>
> Just a couple of random thoughts around my reading of the article.
>
> I have always felt that "scaffolding" was a misnomer, a bad choice of
> metaphor by those who originally coined it. The point of scaffolding, the
> stuff you put on buildings, is that it is inflexible. It is massive, rigid,
> and designed never to fall over with a worker on it. Although I have never
> quite been in tune with the idea of instructional scaffolding, it has
> always seemed to me that its point must be flexibility - taking bits away
> from it must be at least as important as putting them there in the first
> place. So, whenever I think about instructional scaffolding, I first have
> to get past the jarring metaphor. Perhaps I am too sensitive to words.
>
> I wonder also if the popularity of the "assisted-learning-today,
> independent-performance-tomorrow" model is not just popularity with
> teachers of teaching. Its short term focus and superficial specificity make
> it appear to be very measurable, which makes it popular with policy makers,
> especially in today's audit culture.
>
> The introduction of Moll and the idea of context being crucial was also
> very illuminating. Something else for me to examine, dammit. But also
> something that becomes obvious once it is pointed out because CHAT and the
> activity triangle are all about context.
>
> This quote from p73 gives me pause for thought too. "Assuming that
> instructional scaffolding will work because it is written into a lesson
> plan overlooks the possibility that teacher and learner will approach each
> other in ways that produce conflict over product and process, with the
> student inevitably losing. Scaffolding, then, needs to be viewed as an
> intensely relational process, one requiring mutual understanding and
> negotiation of goals and practices." Teachers know that (I would say) but
> policy makers, at least in this country, don't. They love lesson plans and
> teachers are coerced into achieving the aims in the lesson plan regardless
> of where the lesson is actually going. The disjunction between what we know
> to be good teaching on the one hand, and, on the other, the requirements of
> neoliberal audit culture, becomes ever more stark.
>
> I hope I am making sense.
>