LSV and Defectology
Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Fri, 6 Feb 1998 15:12:30 -0800 (PST)
Dear XMCA'ers,
Having reported out one of our seminar discussions, let me open up
another interesting issue that came up this week to see whether any of you
might have further thoughts on this.
Since a number of people in the seminar have interests in special
education, we looked at some chapters of LSV's Fundamentals of Defectology
(available in volume 2 of Collected Works, Plenum, 1993), material that I
had not looked at carefully before. It is really remarkable material,
sounding very modern in many respects, forecasting and in some specific
ways leading developments of the last couple of decades in special ed.
Mike Gerber, who draws on Vygotsky in his own special ed work, was kind
enough to sit in on the seminar and fill us in on some of the connections.
However, I want to raise a slightly different issue here--the way
in which the work on defectology may have directed Vygotsky's thinking on
some paths that would later mature into those ideas we now most associate
with him. Most of the documents published in the English language version
of Fundamentals of Defectology date from very early in LSV's career in
psychology--1924, 1925. Both Kozulin and van der Veer & Valsiner go over
this material a bit in their intellectual biographies of LSV. But I saw
some very specific foreshadowings of the later work that places that work
in interesting contexts.
1. His noting of the way people with handicaps used cultural tools
to compensate for their biological limitations seemed to give him the
opportunity to puzzle through the relationship of neurobiology and culture
in the formation of mind. One element of his analysis seemed very fruitful
was the separation of the channel of sensory information and the meanings
and knowledge that we attributed to it, the sense we made of it--with the
blind for example, without the visual channel of sensation, there were
still other channels out of which they could construct knowledge of the
things that others see. The handicapped compensated not by changes in
sensory capacity but in cognitive processing of the senses they have
available, processing that was deeply influenced by the attempt to
coordinate with others who treat certain things as given.
2. He recognized that the actual biological deficiency was only
an element in forming the total being of the person with a handicap and
that the formation and that even more important was the way the handicap
was treated socially by others and the kind of social and cultural
arrangements that the individual worked out as a consequence along with
how the handicapped individual learned to cope with the world created by
and for the non-handicapped. This again foregrounds the issue of social
and cultural learning.
3. Through working with the deaf he noted how language was a
primary vehicle of social bonding and social interaction, and that access
to this vehicle of interaction was directly linked to cognitive growth.
4. The forms of training that the handicapped had to undergo in a
futile attempt to directly compensate for their limitations (forcing
phonetic learning on the deaf by a punitive mechanical method) brought to
his attention the importance of meaningful activity in learning--that is
meaningful activity for and on the part of the learner.
5. The difficulties of learning disaabled in moving beyond
concrete operations, but the psoobilities of some of them to do so with
support seemed to provide a means for conceiving of the Zone of Proximal
Develpopment, supported learning, and qualitative zoped testing in order
to determine the ability of LD children to enter into this supported
learning.
6. The processes by which the disabled were able to draw in others
to aid in their activities and education again pointed toward the role of
social and cuiltural mediation, cooperative zoped learning, and the role
of speech in regulating behavior.
7. The use of support tools by the handicapped in order to engage
in social interactions others engage in seamlessly may have helped clarify
the distinction between social interaction and cultural tools.
8. The puzzle of what LSV means by his great emphasis on the word
as the fundamental meaning unit in Thought and Language is readily solved
when you see him in struggle with what he calls the German phonetic metod,
which teaches sound outside meaningful communicative activity. So word to
him clearly means meaningful utterance and is not to be considered as
something like minimum semantic unit as opposed to sentence, or any other
such linguistic distinction.
to those of you familiar with the defectology texts does this all
make sense to you? Do you have any further thoughts along this line?
Chuck Bazerman