>Play emerges
>at around the age of three as part of the merging of thinking and
>speech, as well as, I think, the emergnece of two phase functions.
>The idea of two phase functions is important I think because the child
>no longer has to depend on motive to rudimentary action to meet his
>or her needs. The child has the planning ability to meet needs
>throug imaginary play (I'm not very good when it comes to play, so
>I may be messing this up a bit).
>
I am not so well acquainted with Leontiev's terminology. What are "two phase
functions"?
I also didn't quite understand "the child no longer has to depend on motive
to rudimentary action to meet his or her needs".
Then you say:
>What I think is true is that when the child plays he or she is meeting
>needs in the immediate situation.
This is very tricky fir me. What is it that you define as an "immediate
situation"?
You continue your description with:
>The child takes a stick and calls it
>a horse in that immediate situation. The rule of the stick being a horse
>exists for the child _in that particular situation_.
In what particular situation?
Vygotsky explicitely talks about severing a tie between perception and
meaning i.e. severing a tie between thought and object.
"Play provides a transitional stage in this direction [severing thought from
object] whenever an object (for example, a stick) becomes a pivot for
severing the meaning of horse form a real horse. The child cannot as yet
detach thought from object. The child's weakness is that in order to imagine
a horse, he needs to define his action by means if using
"the-horse-in-the-stick" as the pivot. But at the same time, ***the basic
structure determining the child's relation to reality is radically changed
at this crucial point, because the structure of his perception changes.***
(Mind in Society, pp. 97-98, stress mine)
This, to me, means that we have to know exactly what are we defining as a
"particular situation". A child creates a perception of relaity which is
detached from the objective reality (or objects at hand). In play, a child
actually disregards objects as themselves and uses them as "pivots"
(Vygotsky's term) or props (dramatistic terminology). The child creates (by
the use of props) a world which is not the same as the "objective, given,
present world/situation".
You further continue:
>There is no
>larger conceptual base for the rule.
(?)
>Thus the motive, the two phase
>action, and the rule all exist in that single place and time.
Could you elaborate on "single place and time"?
> There
>is an immediate flow from motive to action. When the imaginary play
>situation is over, the rule itself is over.
Another question I have is, how you define the "rule"? I think that the
developmental aspect of play lays in the fact that "rules" of behavior
discovered in play may be and indeed are being transfered to non-play
situations and used there too!!
Inge Bretherton (in "Symbolic Play", 1984, Academic Press, pp 3-41) compares
play with conditional thinking, i.e. "what if..." thinking. In play,
children create conditional wolrds and discover "rules" under these
conditions. They can then transfer these rules to the reality when reality
meets the conditions postulated in a play world. The relationship between
play and reality, she claims is similar to the "Fantasy Rule". The first
rule of propositional calculus, according to D. Hofstadter (Goedel, Escher,
Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid, 1980, Vintage Books) is the Fantasy Rule.
I'll quote his somewhat esoteric example to make a point. Please bear with me:
"To use the fantasy rule, the first thing you do is to write down any
well-formed string 'x' you like, and then "fantasize" by asking, "What if
this string 'x' were an axiom, or a theorem?" And then, you let the system
itself give an answer. That is you go ahead and make a derivation with 'x'
as the opening line; let us suppose 'y' is the last line. (Of course, the
derivation must strictly follow the rules of the system.) Everything from
'x' to 'y' (inclusive) is the 'fantasy'; 'x' is the 'premise' of the
fantasy, and 'y' is its 'outcome'. The next step is to 'jump out of the
fantasy', having learned form it that
If 'x' were a theorem, 'y' would be a theorem."
(D. Hofstadter, Goedel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid, 1980, Vintage
Books, p. 183, single quotes designate italics in the original).
In other words, what Hofstater claims in a context of a highly abstract
activity (Propositional Calculus) is the following: RULES are made FIRST in
FANTASY - then the reality is checked out. The derivation from 'x' to 'y' is
all done within the fantasy obeying strictly the rules of the system. To
translate this into the play situation: The fictive worlds created in play
are "systems" governed by certain "rules". We/children discover these rules
by creating the systems, or as L. Holtzman said: we are building a ship as
we are crossing the ocean. If this process is sucessfull, in other words if
the play "makes sense", then we have discovered some rules (in fantasy)
which could be transferred to reality when the reality seems to have the
same meaning/sense as the fantasy world. In other words, play is a tool for
understanding reality (not just objects in it, but more importantly
relations in it). This is why Vygotsky claimed that play is an activity in
the zone of proximal development (zpd).
I hope this makes sense.
Ana
_________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Ana Marjanovic-Shane
151 W. Tulpehocken St. Office of Mental Health and Mental
Retardation
Philadelphia, PA 19144 1101 Market St. 7th Floor
(215) 843-2909 [voice] Philadelphia, PA 19107
(215) 843-2288 [fax] (215) 685-4767 [v]
(215) 685-5581 [fax]
E-mail: pshane who-is-at andromeda.rutgers.edu
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