Dear Paula:
Thanks for your EXTREMELY detailed reply, and above all for your paper. We are trying to produce a Korean translation of Thinking and Speech, and your work is invaluable for our understanding of Chapter Five.
As part of this project, I'm reading the Mecacci translation into Italian that Rene van der Veer recommends, and I can tell you that it really DOES make a big difference, particularly in terms of connecting Chapter Five and Chapter Six.
One regular contributor to this list (who we both admire) has complained (off list, at some length, and in a characteristically modest but incisive way) that the links between Chapter Five and Chapter Six are tenuous and need to be strengthened.
In some ways this is hardly surprising: more than five years separate the two chapters, and in a career as short and as developmentally convulsive as Vygotsky's what would be surprising is if his categories of analysis did not change between Sakharov's 1939 work and the early spring of 1934 when he lay dying and dictated Chapter Six to Kolbanovsky.
On p. 234 of Mecacci's translation, the dying Vygotsky seems to forget where he is and tries to start the whole book over again from the very beginning, almost word for word. (Compare p. 188 of the Minick translation with p. 43 and you will see what I mean.)
At moments like this, I am torn: on the one hand, I desperately NEED that kind of redundancy; I am far too slow of foot to follow LSV at his normal pace (what Bruner calls, for once understating the matter, "his thumping stride").
On the other hand, I know that time is exactly what we do not have; for every redundancy, there is going to be loose threads we must take up and weave on our own, perhaps even a hole somewhere in the fabric of the argument.
I think the gap between Chapters Five and Six is just one of the most obvious of these pieces of the tapestry that needs patching. I also think that LSV himself knew this, and he lets us know it:
"The system which emerges with the scientific concept is fundamental to the entire history of the development of the child's real concpts. It is a chapter of that history that is inaccessbile to research based on the analysis of artificially or experimentally formed concepts." (Minick Trans. pp. 223-224)
Shortly after this passage, he explicitly discusses why he thinks that syncretic concepts, complexes, preconcepts and true concepts do NOT correspond to the logical structure of concepts as learnt by the child in school.
This is quite consistent with what he said in Chapter Five (on p. 161 of Minick and elsewhere) about the difference between the concept as defined and the concept as developed under experimental conditions: the psychological categories revealed by Sakharov are based on the concept of inclusiveness rather than logical hierarchy (that is why LSV harps so much on the "rose" "flower" "plant" example).
At the very least, I think we need to accept what LSV says on p. 143 of Minick's translation: "the child is not in fact free to develop the meanings he receives from adult speech", and so the Sakharov experiment does merely show us something hypothetical; what the child would do about concepts IF the child were free to discover for himself the meanings of adult speech (and also IF the child had an almost unlimited attention span!)
And that brings me to your first comment, about the extent to which the Sakharov experiment can be said to be eco-specific. Rene van der Veer and Valsiner (in Understanding Vygotsky) points out that the experiments were VERY time consuming. This alone makes it strange situation, I'm afraid.
We can add an adult to make sure the child stays on task, of course. But it will be a strange adult and it will make the situation even stranger.
Nor does it make the time significantly longer. The materials used in Chapter Six cover a span of two years (and even then LSV feels obliged to "extend" it hypothetically into a parallelogram of development which covers the whole of elementary school. How can we compare an experiment, no matter how long, to six years of school experience?
I've been reading some studies on "microgenesis" in a book edited by Valsiner. One of these is on something that's been rather big in the news these days: suicide (Korea has the highest suicide rate in the OECD at present, and a famous pop star just killed himself, producing a disgusting epidemic of copycat suicides).
The authors CORRECTLY realize that microgenetic decisions are often subject to perfectly trivial circumstances. I think this ALONE would explain why the suicide rate is so high here in Korea, where the land is mountainous and people live in high-rises because there isn't much territory to build on, and low in Australia (for example) where social conditions are otherwise quite comparable. Hongkong is similar to here, in both housing and suicide rates. Rural China, where insecticide is widely available and emergency medical care is not, is also similar, but for totally different reasons.
Now, with widespread gun availability, America turns out to be more like Korea, Hongkong and rural China than like Australia: the underlying decision structure of a gun is comparable to a tall building or a bottle of insecticide when the nearest medical care is several days away.
The experiment in question, though, attempts to explore this decision structure by looking at the extent to which people are willing to shoot at a computerized duck icon and comparing their willingness (tapped through think aloud protocols) with their willingness to shoot at a (picture of a) bronze statue or a (picture of a) live duck! I doubt very much if the choices are generalizeable or even comparable to the problem of interest,and in fact I rather doubt if the choices are even comparable to each other. (Why would anyone pretend to shoot or for that matter have any qualms about shooting at a photo of a bronze statue of a duck in a psychological experiment?)
So to what extent is the underlying structure of the Sakharov experiments generalizeable to the problem of interest (in my case, the teaching of foreign language concepts to school age children)? That's what I want to know.
LSV certainly DOES think that there is an underlying ability of abstraction that underpins every higher psychological function. That's why he's such a believer in "formal discipline' in schooling (study of grammar, even Latin grammar, etc.).
He contrasts this with the lower psychological functions. The reason why Thorndike really struck out when he tried to find a common link between the ability to estimate angles and the ability to estimate line segments is that perception is a lower psychological function; it's quite situation specific. But in Chapter Six LSV reminds SEVERAL TIMES that the main neoformation in the school age child is "conscious awareness and mastery" (pp. 206, 208, 212, and elswhere in Minick).
I think that's why Vygotsky is willing to accept that Sakharov's experiment reveals processes that do not go away but play an important role in REAL concept development; he believes that the categories of syncretism, complexive thinking and preconcepts are all there even in the child's school based thinking because underlying each is a mental act of generalization which is not based on perception and memory but rather on conscious awareness and mastery.
I believe this. I agree with it. But that belief is a matter of faith, and I would not want to foist this faith on Bronfenbrenner. Not least because I reserve the right to be VERY skeptical with Bronfenbrenner when, for example, people show me test scores and insist that they correspond to the actual processes of language development or even to their actual deployment in language use. This is even true of dynamic assessment.
I think that Mike's comments on Luria's comments on Sakharov were just that: Mike on Luria on Sakharov. Mike's reading is possible, although if we accept it than we have to say that Luria rejects Chapter Eight of Mind in Society, because LSV clearly uses some of the "pictogram" material there.
You and I agree one hundred percent: the matter of geographical variation (between Geneva and Hamburg, between Moscow and Capetown) is the whole key. If it is possible to organize social conditions such that whole groups of children make significant cognitive advances, then we want to know how to do it.
The fact that we find enormous spatial and temporal variations in the effectiveness of primary education (for example, between South Korea and just about everybody else) is the promise (and I would say the proof) of the existence of zones of proximal development that Mike has been looking for in vain for all these years.
As LSV says, the key neoformation of school age (for whatever reason) is conscious awareness and mastery. A key index of conscious awareness and mastery is literacy, that is, the ability to use language without actually using the concrete sensuous sonic forms of language. Here in South Korea, we do that better than anybody else on the planet.
(I'm always slightly amazed at the lack of interest by scholars in other countries in how exactly this is done. When I thundered at a potential Ph.D. supervisor that our country is an elementary education superpower, he merely smiled and directed me to a pile of American studies on teaching Spanish to university students!)
In some ways, I think that Chapter Seven contains some of the answers I'm looking for:
a) the compatibility of complexive thinking and even syncretism with conceptual thinking is not absolute, but it is real: we can see it in poetic language, and also in metaphor, upon which scientific thinking is highly dependent (Halliday 2006).
b) conceptual thinking is not particularly widespread in modern man. Concepts are based on language, but things are not at all the other way around: language is by no means a matter of creating counters for concepts.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
PS: I wonder...did Columbus and Franklin (Northwest Passage) have the concept of a great circle route or were they just complexifying?
dk
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Thu Sep 11 21:25 PDT 2008
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Wed Oct 01 2008 - 00:30:05 PDT