Re: play, performance, and development--a second try

via eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se (lholzman@sescva.esc.edu)
Wed, 22 May 1996 11:31:33 +0200

>202020

As the results of Lois' second try (for my part) was the above number and
nothing else, I'll forward the result of converting the originally sent
file. The conversion was an interesting process... the first try froze my
Mac, the second try contained the text in an invisible state -- it came out
only after I saved the file as text-only.

best wishes
Eva

********************** forwarded message ************************************
> The recent conversations about play, games, developmentalism,
>affect--and politics--have been fascinating. My take on these issues,
>growing from my practical-critical everyday work, overlaps and yet
>diverges from most of the views presented so far. At least that is how I
>read them (and read "myself"). I offer it as a move in the language game
>we are playing and in specific response to Ana's request for my thoughts
>on the developmental potential of play and Peter's question about Fred
>Newman's Performance of a Lifetime.
> It seems to me that the revolutionariness of CHAT and Vygotsky lies
>in being willing to give up--or at least acknowledge how strong the
>commitment is to--the cognitive bias of modernism. As I read postings on
>the discussion list, journal articles and books, I keep coming to the
>same point--a seemingly unexamined acceptance of what seems to me to be a
>pretty traditional view of knowledge and of schooling.
> What's so great about knowledge? Might it be that
>knowledge--whether transmission OR construction--is highly overrated? I
>happen to believe that developmentalism (Stone's politics notwithstanding)
>has done quite a bit of damage in our troubled culture. Having
>constructed human development as evolutionary (and not revolutionary), as
>a phenomenon in need of explanation, and as a precondition for learning,
>psychology has contributed mightily to the slowdown of development.
> I have been rereading some of the situated learning and
>neoVygotskian literature as I write chapters of a forthcoming book,
>Schooling for Development: Some Postmodern Possibilities. I am once again
>struck by the center stage knowing and understanding occupy in these
>discussions and by the identification of learning with mediation and
>appropriation. I do not know why folks think that human
>social/joint/relational activity requires systemization and explanation,
>nor why it isn't enough for the tool-and-result of activity to be more
>activity.
> The kind of play that is performed at the Barbara Taylor School and
>at the various other developmental environments practicing our
>cultural-performatory, distinctly unscientific, approach has no goal or
>purpose other than to create the environment/create development
>continuously. The characteristic of "free play" that excites me is its
>performatory nature rather than its value in acculturating. What makes it
>so potentially developmental is the suspension of truth-referentiality.
>We don't stop little kids from playing house or doctor; we don't say
>you're not Michael Jackson or Barney; we don't tell them their drawings
>have no perspective--truth and correspondence with "reality" are not
>relevant. But schools are a different story--they're organized around
>truth and reality, getting it right, accounting, justifying, explaining,
>interpreting. Our collective struggle at the Barbara Taylor School is to
>keep Truth out of it, to help kids learn without destroying their
>development, that is, without stifling the human capacity to perform. Our
>activity is to perform the school each day--to create it and ourselves
>through performing our lives. We believe (and we are endebted to
>Vygotsky's numerous discussions of the language-learning environment/the
>language-learning child) that it is through performing ourselves that we
>develop. Vygotsky's learning-leading-development is a continuous
>performance of "being a head taller than you are," of performing beyond
>yourself. The reading games at our school often look like kids of
>different ages "reading together" regardless of whether, societally
>speaking, they know how to read. Our days are filled with creating
>speaking environments--where kids can babble math, physics, biology, art,
>history--just as babies are supported to babble, to make meaning, to do
>what they don't know how to do, to creatively imitate (a relational
>activity). If someone wants to learn something or thinks someone else
>should learn something (like the new student who last week was upset that
>a girl his age couldn't spell), then the question on the table is "what
>should we do?" In this case, the girl said she wanted to learn how to
>spell, the boy who raised it said he learned by watching game shows, and
>maybe that would work for her too, so the group decided to produce a game
>show. Will she learn how to spell? I don't know. What I hope and expect
>is that she and others, through their creative activity, will "learn" that
>spelling is a particular kind of human performance, and that it is through
>performing as a speller that she eventually will "become" one. The
>work/play is to collectively organize the environment; that is, to play at
>being learners (really at being methodologists). So we're not
>particularly interested in knowledge--imparting it or having the kids
>construct it. We have found that it is in constructing the
>school/constructing their relational lives that they learn how to
>be/perform as learners. Our experience over these years is that organizing
>the school as A PLAY is remarkably successful and incredibly
>difficult--both of which keep us at it.
> Performance is a way to (in Wittgenstein's and Newman's and my
>language) move about around an emotion--which has become a form of
>alienation--and create a new form of life. The 11 year old kid who has
>temper tantrums whenever the plans change (diagnosed as ADD) is supported
>to participate in creating an environment with the other students and
>staff in which he can perform his tantrum rather than merely having a
>tantrum. Our therapeutic work, both in therapy settings and in the
>school, is non-diagnostic and non-interpretive. For those who are
>interested, Newman's and my Unscientific Psychology (Praeger) will be out
>by the end of the year; Newman's Performance of a Lifetime is available
>from Castillo International, 500 Greenwich St, NY NY 10013, and the draft
>of my Schooling for Development is nearly complete.
>Lois Holzman
>lholzman who-is-at sescva.esc.edu
>