Re: Arievitch discussion

From: Peter Moxhay (moxhap@portlandschools.org)
Date: Mon Jun 28 2004 - 11:37:56 PDT


> Excellent idea to compare both Eugene and Jim Wertsch's
> anti-internalization
> approaches with Arievitch on Galperin, Peter. Could you post, perhaps,
> some
> passages, or point to some passages that could be the focus on joint
> attention?
> mike

Mike,

My current reading includes "Vygotsky and Pedagogy" (2001) by Harry
Daniels. On pp. 39-41
he relies extensively upon Matusov E. (1998) 'When solo activity is not
privileged:
participation and internalization models of development,' Human
Development 41: 326-49.
I don't have the original as yet, but Daniels quotes Eugene as writing,
for example:

"The internalization model of cultural development, emphasizing
transformation of
social functions into individual skills, leads to a chain of mutually
related dualisms
between oppositional abstractions such as the social and the
individual, the
external and the internal, and the environment and the organism.
Attempts to
bridge these dualistic gaps seem problematic because these dual
abstractions
mutually constitute each other and are thus, inseparable from the
beginning..."

and goes on to summarize some results of Eugene's discussion of
internalization and
participation as two different world views in a useful dialectical
unity. For example,
how "social and psychological planes" or "joint and solo activities"
are seen under
the internalization model and under the participation model.

Arievitch emphasizes that the key feature of Gal'perin's analysis is
the idea that
there is a specifically human plane of action that "enables humans to
act with
symbolic substitutes of objects without those objects being physically
present."
And that this plane is what, for better or worse, is labeled by the
somewhat misleading
term "internal plane of action."

Gal'perin's conception indeed sounds original, as summarized by
Arievitch.
  What do people think? Is it squarely within the "internalization"
model? Does it
succeed or fail to bridge some dualism? How can we look at it within the
internalization-participation tension, if at all? Is is possible, as
Arievitch says, to
use Gal'perin to "overcome the dualistic dichotomies without discarding
individual
cognition and the 'internal' plane"? In the light of Eugene's
discussion, is it even
desirable to try to do so?

Peter



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