Let me give an example Barbara Rogoff might mean by "meaning is more than a
construction by individuals." I believe that the meaning of what is XMCA
does not fully belong to individual participants and even their sum. It also
involves relations among participants that often rules emergent processes
(e.g., being respectful to each other in potentially inflamed exchanges). I
think Eva and Francoise, who are studying XMCA, can probably give nice
specific examples of the phenomenon I'm talking about.
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kwang-Su Cho [mailto:ksthink@psylab.yonsei.ac.kr]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 1998 9:08 AM
> To: XMCA
> Subject: Help me to understand...
>
>
> Hello~ XMCA members
>
> While reading the article "Cognition as a Collaborative
> Process" in Handbook of Child Psychology written by Barbara
> Rogoff(1998), a sentence "meaning is more than a construction by
> individuals" seemed ambiguous to me. Rogoff(1988) argued;
>
> For Piaget, the social process provides individuals the
> opportunity to see alternatives and explore the logical
> consequences of their own positions in a meeting of
> individual minds, as opposed to a shared thinking process.
> To understand how individuals learn and develop through
> participation in the sociocultural world, it is necessary
> to grant that
>
> meaning is more than a construction by individuals.
>
> Piaget's use of the isolated individual as the
> unit of analysis, in my view, makes it impossible to develop
> a sociocultural approach to cognition using his theory as
> the basis;sociocultural aspects of cognition are not merely
> the addition of individul changes in thinking resulting
> from social interaction.(Rogoff, 1998, p. 686)
>
> Though trying to figure out the sentence, I'm not sure my
> understaning. I think Developmental process is a individual's
> meaning-making process through participating sociocultrual activities.
> So, in sociocultural approaches, meaning may exist outside a individule,
> therefore, meaning is given as well as constructed.
>
> Help me to make sense the deep meaning of the sentence...
>
> Sincerely,
> Kwang-Su Cho
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> Address: Kwang-Su Cho
> Cognitive Engineering Lab(B110)
> Dept. of Psychology, Yonsei University
> Shinchon-dong, Sedaemun gu,
> Seoul 120-749, Korea
> -------------------------------------------------
>