Dear David
Thank you very much for your email about these apparently strange
situations and your insightful and expansive drawing-in of threads. Dot
Robbins is about to start so I will write when I get back to SA. I agree
time is of the most important esence.
Take care and will be in touch early next week.
Paula T
ps will also send you the dvd next week. I get back to SA on Wednesday
after a 31-hour journey
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
>
>
>
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Received on Fri Sep 12 10:25 PDT 2008
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