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Re: [xmca] conservation



I rarely have a chance to keep up with discussions here, but I've been thinking about this topic for a while and am happy to see it come up.

I've understood conservation very much in terms of Vygotsky's writing on the development of higher mental functions and academic concepts. There is ample evidence that there's a lot more going on in tests of conservation than children's understandings of conservation, but it seems equally evident to me that young children do not understand the conservation tasks they way older children and adults do. While the language of the questioner is important, the children's limited understanding and use of language is a symptom and measure of their understandings, because language and thinking are developing with one another. Language is what creates the possibility of objectively viewing the task. I'm not sure about the documentation, but I've seen that children whose language is more developed also more readily become certain about the "truth" in these activities. Too often it seems to me that people reduce the question to only language without maintaining the connections between language and thought.

Does that make sense?

Best,
Lara 




On Feb 26, 2010, at 12:13 PM, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org wrote:

> Hello all:
> 
> back when we briefly touched on different boat building techniques and 
> technologies resulting in similar boats mike had attached an article 
> entitled, "Cultural Amplifiers Reconsidered" by Cole and Griffin that 
> addresses the issue of a person's thinking as the internalization of the 
> "means, modes, and contents of the communications activities that exist in 
> the culture into which one is born (pg. 356)".  Perhaps mike could be so 
> kind as to attach that article again.
> 
> I believe it extremely relevant to the idea of how any study of human 
> development is interpreted whether it be the concept of conservation or 
> conversation.
> 
> 
> eric
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "David H Kirshner" <dkirsh@lsu.edu>
> Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
> 02/26/2010 10:07 AM
> Please respond to "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
> 
> 
>        To:     "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>        cc: 
>        Subject:        RE: [xmca] conservation
> 
> 
>> I can't convince myself that this is entirely a linguistic phenomenon
> 
> "Fair" and "not fair," as with "more," "less," and "same," are bound
> into a variety of broad cultural practices that could be seen as
> absorbing children's responses in these experiments (as in Piaget's
> original studies). Gelman (1980) employed the terms "winners" and
> "losers" that hearken to cultural practices around games wherein
> definitions always are local. Thus in the context of local "game"
> practices adopted in her experiments she was able to get results that
> contradicted the conservation studies.
> 
> David
> 
> Gelman, R. (1980). What young children know about numbers. Educational
> Psychologist, 15(1), 54-68.
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
> On Behalf Of Martin Packer
> Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 8:52 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] conservation
> 
> David, Mike, Jorge...
> 
> I do know Margaret Donaldson's book questioning the child's
> understanding of the researcher's language in conservation and other
> Piagetian tasks. And just recently Rod mentioned Valerie Walkerdine's
> work showing how 'more' and 'less' are understood in terms of everyday
> family practices.
> 
> But I show a brief video when I teach this topic in my undergraduate
> classes; I think it may even have come with Mike's textbook, as an
> instructor's resource. I watched it again yesterday. In one segment, the
> adult places one graham cracker in front of the child and two in front
> of herself, then asks, do you think that we shared those fairly? The
> child looks mildly offended and says no, because you have two and I have
> this. The adult then breaks the child's cracker into two pieces! She
> asks, now is it fair? The child replies, with a big smile, yes, because
> we both have two!
> 
> I can't convince myself that this is entirely a linguistic phenomenon,
> though differences in word meaning may certainly play a role. There's
> something perceptual too. At this time in his work, although Vygotsky
> had died before any conservation tasks were performed, Piaget was still
> arguing that the child needs to come to appreciate basic dualisms, such
> as that between appearance and reality. Vygotsky, of course, argues
> forcefully against this in Thought and Language. How would he have
> extended the arguments he made about egocentric speech to lack of
> conversation? Would he have suggested that changing word meaning
> transforms the child's perception, so a cracker broken in half no longer
> is perceived as two?
> 
> Martin
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