He, he! Victor, you totally intrigue me! I have a lot of work to do. I
don't know "the answer" yet, but I am a hell of a lot clearer about the
issues. That's a help. But you do seem to be lending support to my
'suspicion' that some of Vygotsky may have got lost in the "translation"
somewhere.
Andy
At 04:12 PM 18/10/2003 +0200, you wrote:
>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
> <http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/ZPD.html>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>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
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