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

Thu Jul 9 10:27:10 PDT 2020

Hi Anthony, Huw, Harshad, and V. others,

I agree with Huw on understanding over memory.

It would also not be a bad idea to promote a self-understanding of knowledge/understanding, or meta-cognition, to understand how one understands.

It's a great thing to explain to kids that every person learns in different ways and there is no "best" or singular way to learn, and that all learning happens in steps, not like flipping a switch on and off. Rather analogously like the game Tetras (maybe this is why it's a video game that has lasted and remained so popular).

One thing is certain, intellectual bullying is not a good practice in creating a learning space or community.

Kind regards,

Annalisa
________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 9, 2020 2:35 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: A practical request (re: memory development)

  [EXTERNAL]

Harshad, which is your personal name, please (what I would call a Christian name), is it Harshad or Dave?

Anthony,

To help place Harshad's (*) experience (which is frequently reported) within the theoretical and experimental literature of the Russian (and in my opinion, more rigorous) aspects of the literature, design "instruction" so that what is to be remembered (if that is actually a goal, which seems dubious - see next paragraph) is located within the structure of the child's activity. The child's activity is not necessarily the same thing as the activity that the adult intends, this is one reason why I call it active orientation.

Another way to put this is, do not even worry about memory, focus upon understanding instead. Or, if you are concerned about remembering anything (like a phone number) focus upon understanding techniques of recall. Note that by understanding, I do not mean merely knowing. This seemingly simple epistemological distinction between understanding and knowing is an important principle of developmental education which distinguishes it from many conventional schooling practices.

I'm happy to send you references, papers, or correspond offline if you wish.

Best,
Huw

On Thu, 9 Jul 2020 at 05:16, Harshad Dave <hhdave15@gmail.com<mailto:hhdave15@gmail.com>> wrote:
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<mailto: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<mailto: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!SyErpwsLQtkc_ESx0hePHc5t5NMj6uFjZ9s6f-wBsOTAWh6Xcra-B559zqTwdedtZlYXQQ$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!VuYDft0oMGAM9qY8EcRo06LVSNymMSpaDqYioRUquNkHbecO40qUVxiIBz7uouo2Dj05uQ$>
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!SyErpwsLQtkc_ESx0hePHc5t5NMj6uFjZ9s6f-wBsOTAWh6Xcra-B559zqTwdedx5zxQVg$ 
<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<mailto: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!SyErpwsLQtkc_ESx0hePHc5t5NMj6uFjZ9s6f-wBsOTAWh6Xcra-B559zqTwdecb_AQZ1Q$ <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

--

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