You caught me just in time. I was about to send more on the provenience - or rather the general lack of provenience - of works comparing Vygotsky and Mead.
Glassman's references, "Vygotsky wants to use the educational process to teach new members of the social community how to "use" important, socially developed tools in an effective manner (a top-down/determinate approach)" are the huge output of Vygotsky-inspired Educational theory on Mediation and Proximal learning. The basic principle of most of these works is that the role of the educator is that of provender of socially developed tools, and that the means(note the pragmatic bias) for inculcating these for greatest effect is to identify that moment or period which proximates the intellectual stage at which the student is capable of incorporating these tools into his mental tool case. No wonder Patty Farrah regards Vygotsky as a pragmatist!
Cheyne and Tarulli 1996 Historical-Cultural Zones of Proximal Development: Dialogue, Difference, and the "Third Voice". http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/chp.html contrastVygotsky's educational theory with that of Bakhtin and determine that for Vygotsky the relation between teacher and student is very much one of top-down:
In discussing internalization Vygotsky invokes the master-slave or supervisor-subordinate relationship (e.g. 1981, p. 160). The social relationship that stands as a model for Vygotsky is markedly asymmetrical, hierarchical, and organized around the developmental goal of instrumental control. Moreover, the master-slave, supervisor-subordinate relationship is itself a social transformation of the worker-tool relation and hence it is easy for Vygotsky to recover, through reciprocal transformation, the tool-like instrumentality of inner speech from such social relationships. Social relationships are based on the same labour-production instrumentality as action-tool relations. All of this is organized around the issue of control which, through ontogenesis, becomes transformed from that of an external agent over a subordinate to one of an internal agent over self and ultimately to a principle over an instance. "A major step in the evolution of labor is that the work of the supervisor and that of the slave are united in one person" (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 160). For Vygotsky, the leading edge of cultural-historical development is the progressive evolution and internalization of control and mastery of action and production. He focuses on the technical, principled, hierarchical, and paradigmatic in the ontogenetic (and ontological) assimilation of the person into the cultural. The guiding interests here are clearly technical and epistemic. As we have noted, Vygotsky was particularly focusing on the development of scientific-technical thought. Vygotsky's metaphor also highlights another significant ingredient of such dialogue - power. Like Bourdieu (1984), Vygotsky, at least in his view of the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development), clearly portrays a knowledge differential as power differential. That differential brings into focus the role of the other in the ZPD.
It should be noted that Cheyne and Teroulli qualify these hard words on Vygotskyan authoritarianism by, first, indicating that the "master-slave" relation is more or less specific to the development of scientific-technical thought and, second, by limiting the assymetric relations of power between student and teacher to the ZPD. In no part of their article do Cheyne and Teroulli refer to Vygotsky's research and writings on the role of play in education, and they appear to pass over Vygotsky's observations that children develop the capacity for conceptualization long before they acquire the ability to express concepts in speech.
The fortunes of Vygotsky's research and theory in American educational thought remind me somewhat of the fate of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle. While Upton was writing to expose the suffering of the exploited workers of Chicago's stockyards, the issue that made his book famous for his mostly middle class readers was the low level of supervision over food processing. So too with Vygotsky. The role of the educator as mediator and the theory of ZPD learning with their authoritarian overtones were quickly accepted and developed by the educational community while the role of play and the "free adoption of those patterns of behavior which will vouchsafe the consonance of all of behavior." got lost somewhere in the shuffle.
Even so there have been some experiments with the role of free play as educational method. This article by Matuga, naturally an art teacher, is a virtual jewel, "New Pictures of an Art Room: Observing Peer Interaction and Artistic Development" http://psych.hanover.edu/vygotsky/matuga.html I used it once as a major reference in a paper on art education in one of my prior incarnations as art instructor.
You may not be exactly alone, but it appears that here too you're in the minority
----- Original Message -----
From: Andy Blunden
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2003 12:37 PM
Subject: Re: George Herbert Mead
Victor, if you have the patience, I would just like to try to express myself a little more cautiously to see if I am so much on my own.
Glassman: "Vygotsky wants to use the educational process to teach new members of the social community how to "use" important, socially developed tools in an effective manner (a top-down/determinate approach)" http://www.aera.net/pubs/er/pdf/vol30_04/AERA300402.pdf p 4
Vygotsky: "The closest we can get to a definition of this new principle, which is to become the foundation of moral education, is to view it from general approaches to education, as consisting in the social coordination of one's own behavior with the behavior of the group, and here obedience must be replaced throughout by free social coordination. The rule that originates from everyone, from the group, and which is directed likewise to the entire group and sustained by the actual effective mechanism of the self-discipline and routine of daily life in the school has to itself replace that "pedagogical singsong" which prevails between teacher and student in the authoritarian system. It is not obedience to someone or obedience to something, but the free adoption of those patterns of behavior which will vouchsafe the consonance of all of behavior. This mechanism is not something alien to the child, something that grips him, on the contrary, it lies within the child's very nature, and play is the natural mechanism which develops and connects these skills together. Nowhere is the child's behavior so regulated by rules as in play, and nowhere does it assume such a free and morally instructive form as in play. Nowhere in play do we find any patterns whatsoever that an adult might have prescribed and which the child only enact.
"... self-governance in the school and the self-discipline of the children themselves are the best tools for moral education in the school" [Ch 12. Ethical Behaviour. in Education Psychology, 1926]
This chapter includes criticisms of both "free education" and authoritarian education, and has the proviso (in reference to the "transitional" state of Soviet society):
Every attempt at constructing educational ideals in a society with social contradictions is a utopian dream, since, as we have seen, the social environment is the only educational factor that can establish new reactions in the child, and so long as it harbors unresolved contradictions, these contradictions will create cracks in the most well thought-out and most inspired educational system.
Now I have to say that when I read this, despite the criticism of "free education", I was immediately reminded of the more radical "progressive schools" in the West. But I don't think "top-down/determinate" is an apt description of Vygotsky's view of (in this case) moral education.
Am I on my own?
Andy
At 11:00 AM 18/10/2003 +0200, you wrote:
It appears to me that your review of Vygotsky as a dialectician is unique (at least in the English language) with the possible exception of two articles in English written by Koczanowicz, Leszek.leszek@ii.uni.wroc.pl whose written considerably on Vygotsky and Mead but nearly all in Polish. The two articles of his in English (which I've not read) are:
Analyses of Human Action. Relation between Mind and Action in Behaviourism, G.H. Mead's Social Pragmatism and L.S. Vygotsky's Psychological Concepts. Wroceaw 1990 and "G.H. Mead and L.S. Vygotsky on Meaning and the Self", Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 8 (1994): 262-276
Koczanowicz teaches at Opole University and SUNY Buffalo. In the short description of his early work on Mead and Vygotsky (from a very short biography introducing a lecture of his for the The Pittsburgh Area Realtime Scientifiction Enthusiasts Club).
"Professor Leszek Koczanowicz is a philosopher and psychologist at Opole University, Poland, where he has been teaching courses in history of psychology and social philosophy. Currently Dr. Koczanowicz is a visiting professor at SUNY at Buffalo. His doctoral dissertation (1987) compared L.V. Vygotsky's historical cultural approach to the mental life with G.H. Mead's social behaviorism. His later work has been devoted to the concepts of the self in American Pragmatism. His current research deals with social philosophy and psychology. Dr. Koczanowicz studied and taught at University of Wroclaw, Poland, UC at Berkeley, SUNY at Stony Brook, SUNY at Buffalo, Institut f_r die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna (Austria), and Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Holland).
That's about all that's currently available on (the net) Leszek's writings on Mead and Vygotsky.
The rest of the material on relations between Mead, Dewey and Vygotsky appear to be all oriented towards educational issues and most emphasize the historical relation between Vygotsky and Dewey (after all LSV does refer to Dewey's work) rather than compare them. And then you have Patty Farrah's article, Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism The Three Major Epistemological Traditions and their Influence on Instructional Design ITC 575 November 28, 2001 www.whps.org/schools/norfeldt/libraryweb/ MediaResources/TermPaper.PDF where Vygotsky is touted as a Russian Symbolic Interactionist and pragmatist!
Victor
----- Original Message -----
From: Andy Blunden
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2003 3:30 AM
Subject: Re: George Herbert Mead
I have read the very useful PDF article you recommended, Victor, but I find it somewhat unsatisfactory. (1) The writer, Michael Glassman, seems to have a slightly different Vygotsky than the one I know, and (2) the article is of course very much focused on pedagogy, whereas my specific interest was social psychology.
The article by Vygotsky on Ethical Education in the 1926 "Educational Psychology" I found an exhilerating read, partly because of how much Vygotsky saw it as essential to foster critique and self-management on the part of the students, and how far away it was from Stalinist ideas of schools as institutions for the socialisation of kids into the status quo and inculcation of existing values (except that for Vygotsky revolution clearly was such a value!). The article seems to contrast Dewey and Vygotsky by portraying Vygotsky as an advocate of what I would see as a Stalinist view of education. Vygotsky simply says that a school cannot raise itself above the society of which it is a part.
Secondly, I was particularly impressed by Vygotsky's observation that development always requires an element of invention on the part of the child, since imitation is impossible for her, and this element seems to be missing in the writer's otherwise valid description of how Vygotsky sees the role of a teacher as a mentor and setter-of-problems, rather than simply as facilitator.
The article is about pedagogy and is probably addressed to teachers, so it is natural that it should focus on the role and intentions of the teacher. However, it seems to me that Vygotsky is not just a teacher of teachers. There seems to be a school of interpretation of Vygotsky which emphasises the two-sided negotiation involved in learning and development. But surely this is just the product of "teachers eye view" when reading Vygotsky.
For example, the experimental methods (as described in the famous article by Sakharov) are clearly expressions of how a scientist should intervene *in pursuit of the goals of science*, but this should not be read as descriptive of learning and development itself. Most people do not have a cognitive psychologist around when they are learning.
Do people have a view on these matters? Victor led me to the Glassman article, but I fear I may have the same kind of problems with a Valsiner article. The reason for my interest is critique of Axel Honneth, a "student" of Habermas's who has substituted for Habermas's use of Piaget for empirical backing, the use of George Herbert Mead. A step forward I think, but I need help in focusing on the critique of Pragmatism, since I think the necessary empirical backing must come from the Vygotsky School.
Andy
At 11:13 AM 17/10/2003 +0200, you wrote:
Valsiner, Jaan and Rene Van de Veer. "On the social nature of human
cognition: An analysis of the shared intellectual roots of George Herbert
Mead and Lev Vygotsky. In Lev Vygotsky: Critical Assessments: Vygotsky's
theory Vol 1 edited by Peter Lloyd. New York: Routledge (1999):145-164.
Also check out the online pdf article ]Dewey and Vygotsky: Society,
Experience, and Inquiry in Educational Practice at
www.aera.net/pubs/er/pdf/vol30_04/AERA300402.pdf - 16 Oct 2003. True, this
refers to Dewey rather than Mead, but Dewey and GH are very similar in
theory. This article suggests that Mead, through Dewey had considerable
influences on Soviet theory of education and social psychology.
"Dewey and Vygotsky in Historical Context There are historically based
explanations for both the strong similarities
In 1928 Dewey visited the Soviet Union (although the schools were closed for
vacation for most of the time he was there). Prawat (2001) recounts how
Dewey visited Second Moscow University during this trip at the time Vygotsky
was a rising young star there. Dewey certainly met with Blonsky, Vygotsky's
compatriot, and Prawatt (2001) builds a fairly strong circumstantial case
that Dewey actually met with Vygotsky. This only adds to the probability
that Dewey influenced Vygotsky's early work.
Enough for now
Victor
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2003 3:15 AM
Subject: George Herbert Mead
> Do any of you xmca-ers have a critique of George Herbert mead from the
> Vygotsky perspective at your finger tips? or a "compare and contrast"?
>
> Andy
>
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