RE: Please escuse my ignorance

Eugene Matusov (ematusov who-is-at cats.ucsc.edu)
Fri, 13 Oct 1995 12:02:41 -0700

Hello everybody--

A brief response to Don Cunningham.

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From: Don Cunningham[SMTP:cunningh who-is-at copper.ucs.indiana.edu]
Sent: Friday, October 13, 1995 9:38 AM
To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: Please escuse my ignorance

>Francoise, Delpit was criticizing people who can only validate
>something if it's explained through words. I had a similar
>situation in my department here--a student who taught in a
>business environment developed a very impressive set of
>instructional materials and a professor would not accept
>it unless she accompanied it with a 20 page paper explaining
>how she'd developed them--the materials themselves were
>insufficient. He needed written evidence of her thought
>processes before he'd accept it.
>
>Peter Smagorinsky smagor who-is-at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu
>

Peter,

Can someone be reflexive about their learning, their actions
without language?

djc
Don Cunningham
School of Education
------------
Painters, dancers, car drivers, and other folks who do not
directly work with words reflect and learn while they are acting
which is often fully or partially without involving language.
Separation of action and reflection is itself an phenomenon rather
than the norm. But even when they are separated, the reflection
has not be necessary to be verbal. Piaget gave a nice example of
very young pre-verbal child modeling a match box (how match box
can be open) with her mouth actions. I interpret this case as a non-
verbal reflection separated from the action (am I correct?).

Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz