[Xmca-l] Re: A practical request (re: memory development)

Wed Jul 8 21:13:51 PDT 2020

Hi,

I am not much aware and experience with the subject matter under
discussion.... however i share one observation that i have noted in the
journey of my life and i hope you might have also.

The memory power has strong link with our self interest in the subject
matter.
If parent/teacher make the subject matter very interesting for the kids,
and get their interest tempted in the issue..... the kids / students grasps
the same immediately and that too for a long time also.

Regards,

Harshad Dave

On Thu, 9 Jul 2020, 08:45 mike cole, <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> If I were seeking professional information a child I was concerned about
> for the reasons
> relate, Anthony, and I was interested in how a cultural-historical
> psychologist thinks about
> such matters, I would check the work of Tatiana Akhutina whose writings
> can be found on
> Academia.
> mike
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:23 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Anthony--
>>
>> I'm conflicted.
>>
>> I am working on a  "Capstone Design" class preparing sex education
>> materials. It's pretty interesting stuff, because for the first time in the
>> child's life the child is experiencing "perizhivanie" which has CONCEPTUAL
>> content without any EXPERIENTIAL content. To me, this suggests a change in
>> ALL psychological functions: affective perception (obviously), attention
>> (as an immediate result) and memory (which ipso facto cannot play the same
>> role in creating generalized representations that it once did),
>>
>> Now, the materials that the Gyeonggi-do provincial government developed
>> teach AIDS/HIV prevention with something I would basically call a multiple
>> choice/true false test. You give the child a dozen different ways in which
>> people interact (going to the Korean sauna together, sharing chopsticks,
>> kissing, sitting on an unwiped toilet seat, etc.) and the child has to
>> choose the only two which actually do spread AIDS (sharing needles and
>> having unproteced sex). This is an example of what I would call
>> "backwash"--you start out with the test, which is essentially
>> diagnostic and not pedagogical in design. You then work backwards. And
>> because we all like to take the fastest and most direct route to the
>> object, you end up teaching to the test. Which is, almost by definition,
>> bad teaching.
>>
>> I'm afraid I see some of this in Nikolai's lecture. He starts out (as he
>> often does) with a very useful distinction between tools for research and
>> tools for pedagogy (or, in the instance of perizhivanie, between tools for
>> research and tools for thinking about research). But in his natural
>> enthusiasm for research there is a bit of backwash--towards making what are
>> essentially ANALYTICAL stages into PEDAGOGICAL ones.
>>
>> Vygotsky derives his four stages (in T&S and also in Chapter 5 of HDHMF)
>> from Buhler. Buhler tells us that there are three historical stages of
>> human behavior (unconditional instincts, conditional habits, creative
>> intelligence) and he thinks these will be useful in analyzing childhood
>> into periods. Vygotsky agrees, but he points out that free will is none of
>> these (think of sexual consent, and you will see--it is a higher form of
>> behavior that owes very little to instinct, habit, or even creativity and
>> is in some ways inimical to all three). Vygotsky also points out that ALL
>> of these forms (including free will) are present right there in infancy, so
>> using the to analyze childhood will involve analyzing each period that way
>> and not simply assigning behaviors to age periods one to one. All of this
>> suggests to me that natural memory (an instinct), naive memory (a
>> conditional habit), external-sign-memory (creative intelligence) and
>> "vraschivaniye" (free memory) are analytical tools and not pedagogical ones.
>>
>> But what would a pedagogy informed by this mean? I don't know. I think it
>> would first of all have to be age-period-sensitive. A ten year old is after
>> the Crisis at Seven and before the Crisis at Thirteen. The memories in
>> question ARE experiential (they are not  fantasies); they are generalized
>> representations (e.g. chain-like narratives, diffuse complexes like family
>> trees, and above all pseudoconcepts).  Here are some activities I have used.
>>
>> CHAINS:  You play 끝말잇기 a well known word game in Korean. Round One is
>> when each player offers a two-syllable word, repeating the the
>> last syllable of the previous word and then adding a new syllable.  In
>> English it might go something like this:
>> "Monday-->Daytime-->Timely--"Lytic--"Tick-tock"--"toxin"--"inform"....
>> Round Two is when you try to remember as many of the words as you can in
>> the form of a story. "On Monday, during the daytime, I chose a timely
>> moment to read Leontiev's definition of lytic periods in child development
>> and try to apply them to Sarah Cooper's impersonations of Donald Trump on
>> Tick-tock, but the toxic masculinity which informed....etc."
>>
>> DIFFUSE COMPLEXES: In Korea, we do "제사" offerings to four generations in
>> the patrilineal line. Suppose you also want to honor your maternal
>> ancestors. Can you remember anything about them? Their places of birth and
>> death?  What would a family history in the matrilineal line look like?
>> Where would it begin and where would it end?
>>
>> PSEUDOCONCEPTS: This is a version of the "why" game that eight year old
>> children sometimes play. You start out with a simple fact, like "Kids eat
>> food". You ask why. "Because they are hungry". You ask why. etc. You then
>> ask the child to distinguish between different kinds of "because". Another
>> version of this involves asking the child to create an autobiography,
>> starting with the cover and the LAST chapter, then the penulitmate one,
>> then the one before that, etc. and then asking how they are causally
>> related (I usually ask the kids to do this photographs if they are too
>> young....)
>>
>> (Mutatis mutandis...as you can see, it's sex education all the way down!)
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
>> Outlines, Spring 2020
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!R7LPbeFF0mWZDKnZMqUJecJMcZAxKtLbeX2VyBRal1KbdhxEingEa4B_7PasO-k2W3x21A$ 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!VuYDft0oMGAM9qY8EcRo06LVSNymMSpaDqYioRUquNkHbecO40qUVxiIBz7uouo2Dj05uQ$>
>> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *Volume
>> One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!R7LPbeFF0mWZDKnZMqUJecJMcZAxKtLbeX2VyBRal1KbdhxEingEa4B_7PasO-l5mqKrLg$ 
>>
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VuYDft0oMGAM9qY8EcRo06LVSNymMSpaDqYioRUquNkHbecO40qUVxiIBz7uourLKiFoUw$>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 5:53 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Good afternoon ~
>>>
>>> I come to you (as a parent and as a teacher) seeking advice and
>>> information, knowing this listserv is one of the best collective resources
>>> on the subject at hand.  Thank you in advance for your thoughts . . .
>>>
>>> FIRST, here is the question:
>>>
>>>    -
>>>
>>>    If a child (age 10) has an underdeveloped memory -- potentially from
>>>    a disruption in the child’s process of development of the higher
>>>    psychological function of memory --  what are some suggestions for
>>>    A) developing this function in non-academic contexts, in order to B)
>>>    increase the likelihood of transfer into academic contexts?
>>>
>>>
>>> SECOND, here is the theory (and source) behind the question:
>>>
>>>    -
>>>
>>>    Vygotsky’s “Law of 4 Stages” - https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://tiny.cc/q3p7rz__;!!Mih3wA!R7LPbeFF0mWZDKnZMqUJecJMcZAxKtLbeX2VyBRal1KbdhxEingEa4B_7PasO-kQBtGiqA$ 
>>>    <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://tiny.cc/q3p7rz__;!!Mih3wA!XPc6MihE_2JAUm1FVECluRHB-fBm7usjC6m6SkGx3Gzr6clVrtOVLXXkggL7q-oW4gcVJg$>
>>>    (also, cf. "The Problem of the Cultural Development of the Child")
>>>    -
>>>
>>>    In place of watching the (very good) 7-minute video, please refer to
>>>    these two excerpts that richly capture the video’s gist:
>>>    -
>>>
>>>       From Clip 1 (“Vygotsky’s law of 4 stages”):
>>>       -
>>>
>>>          “This is the law that says there are 4 stages of the
>>>          development of every higher psychological function. It gives us a key to
>>>          understanding: if something goes wrong with the child, if the child has a
>>>          difficulty, maybe one of these stages didn’t go correctly.
>>>          -
>>>
>>>             Stage 1 - natural behavior (no use of signs)
>>>             -
>>>
>>>             Stage 2 - naive psychology (naive imitation)
>>>             -
>>>
>>>             Stage 3 - external signs and operations (beyond crude
>>>             imitation but still reliant on external tools)
>>>             -
>>>
>>>             Stage 4 - internal signs and operations (internalized
>>>             tools; decontextualized mediational means)
>>>             -
>>>
>>>       From Clip 2 (“How this law can help teachers and students"):
>>>       -
>>>
>>>          “Put the child in specially created situations -- might be
>>>          play, game, competition, whatever -- and introduce these tools he or she
>>>          probably doesn’t have -- and then, having these internal tools, the child
>>>          comes back to the class equipped with the tools, and now the task will be
>>>          much easier for the child . . . because the tools are not related anymore
>>>          to the concrete task (in which they were developed).  They are universal.”
>>>
>>>
>>> With these assumptions in mind (and choosing to accept them at least for
>>> now), here is the question again:
>>>
>>>    -
>>>
>>>    If a child (age 10) has an underdeveloped memory -- potentially from
>>>    a disruption in the child’s process of development of the higher
>>>    psychological function of memory --  what are some suggestions for
>>>    A) developing this function in non-academic contexts, in order to B)
>>>    increase the likelihood of transfer into academic contexts?
>>>
>>>
>>> Sincere thanks,
>>>
>>> Anthony
>>>
>>>
>
> --
>
> It is unwise to run after people for their own good- Traditional Vai
> Proverb
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> Cultural Praxis Website: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!R7LPbeFF0mWZDKnZMqUJecJMcZAxKtLbeX2VyBRal1KbdhxEingEa4B_7PasO-mhebhcfQ$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!TKR7XIT3zeJIzwF2x4xUdMGsgKy616QkR_CM7-IaU5uu7KiU0O5fbGIrmaEfyepyL0WZRg$>
> Re-generating CHAT Website: re-generatingchat.com
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://re-generatingchat.com__;!!Mih3wA!TKR7XIT3zeJIzwF2x4xUdMGsgKy616QkR_CM7-IaU5uu7KiU0O5fbGIrmaEfyeq_d8zlrg$>
> Archival resources website: lchc.ucsd.edu.
> Narrative history of LCHC:  lchcautobio.ucsd.edu.
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20200709/b603edef/attachment.html 