xmca@weber.ucsd.edu Louise writes:
>From a Vygotskian perspective, the
>card game provides a leading activity for engaging in strategic planning
>and
>mathematical operations.
in my third grade classroom the strategic planning has taken a
remarkable (to me) turn of events.
the girls in my third grade class (eight and nine years old) -
except for the one who plays soccer with the boys out on the field -
have been struggling with social alliances - so that there were two
conflicting factions. one girl came up the the idea to have a club that
combines both faction, and the mediating tool for cooperation are the
pokeman cards - every girl contributes her cards to a single holding
site - in this case a clear pink plastic box with a handle and locking
mechanism - rather like a small lunch box. all the girls now constitute
a single club - meetings are held in a clump of three pine trees that
grown close together and share multiple branches - the climb up into the
branches and share the cards, talk about the cards, etc. (i only have
second hard reports here about clubhouse activities). additional items
have been added - the plastic pokeman characters - but i haven't yet
been able to do a "natural" accounting of the objects. one girl, who had
initially been a social pariah is the carekeeper of the plastic box.
so far the boys use the cards for what they were _designed_ for -
one boys did suffer the loss of his cards having left them out and they
disappeared. the other boys decided to replenish his collection by
jointly providing new cards.
i wouldn't label any of this as socialist or capitalist - i'm reminded
of Karen Gallas' work on how elementary students appropriated gender
identities - the practice is never whole cloth, but rather multiple
approximations with lots of individual personal re-constructions going on.
i see the students as appropriating the pokeman cards to mediate their
own immediate social goals - the entire activity is only part of a much
larger activity of becoming a less legitimate peripheral member of the
society at large.
phillip
phillip
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