[Xmca-l] Re: poverty/class

[mike cole]

David--

I want strongly to agree with you and Michael that

we all know that privileged genres privilege the
privileged, but the question is what to do about it

That is, the rich get richer aka the "Mathew effect" - to s/he who has be
given."

I am still considering with the notion that "childism" equals pre-formism.
Just as pushing the bernsteinian codes to extremes is now well understood
to be a mistake, so is the mistake of underestimating the significant
culturally mediated, socially organized, development of the psychological
capacities of young children.

How that defeats the Mathew effect remains the issue.

One thing we can do is to try to avoid encouraging it when fooling
ourselves into thinking that we are defeating it.

See attached
mike


On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 3:47 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Michael and Anna:
>
> Halliday points out that there really isn't any necessary connection
> between, say, preformism and the idea that the child "learns by
> setting up hypothetical rules of grammar and matching them against
> what he hears", nor is there some kind of logical link between
> empiricism and "associationist, stimulus response" models of the
> learning process (2004: 29). We can easiliy imagine preformist models
> that don't depend on the freestanding autonomous child as little
> scientist, and we can also imagine empiricist models that don't
> involve associationist psychology. Similarly, I think that although
> historically there was a very strong and long lasting marriage between
> behaviorism in learning theory and structuralism in language theory in
> language teaching which lasted most of the twentieth century, the fact
> that we now have two very different communicative language teaching
> methods (a British version which jettisons structuralism but keeps
> behaviorism in a social-behaviorist form and an American one which
> jettisons behaviorism but keeps structuralism in a Chomskyan one)
> there isn't any necessary link between the theory of language and the
> theory of learning.
>
> Greg asked me to comment on what I thought the ramifications of
> "childism' were for language research AND for teaching. That seems to
> me to be two different topics, although of course they are related. So
> what I said was that Halliday considered "childism" to be a kind of
> preformism. I think that's right. On the separate topic of teaching, I
> thought that "childism" sometimes demands that children exercise free
> will where no free will is yet possible, and I thought the anecdote
> about Summerhill was a pretty good illustration of that. Actually, the
> link that Ana posted pretty much confirms that view; you can certainly
> see that the gentleman in question is in fact white, British, and a
> native speaker of the English language.
>
> Let me attempt a very brief reply to the point that Michael raises,
> namely that we all know that privileged genres privilege the
> privileged, but the question is what to do about it. First of all, I
> think that doing something about it requires recognizing that "it"
> exists. We don't do that if we consider that saying that Berstein has
> a "deficit" model of language proficiency constitutes a refutation of
> Bernstein. In fact, what Bernstein is saying is preciselyt hat
> privileged genres privilege the privileged, and labeling this a
> "deficit" model seems to me to be a way of implying that by
> recognizing this reality Bernstein is somehow seeking to blame the
> victim. That really doesn't follow at all, particularly if we reject
> preformism; the "deficit" simply does not and cannot lie in the
> learner him or herself. Secondly, I think that what Halliday would say
> is that doing something about it requires us to get outside the
> privileged genre and see it as a genre, not as a latent ability in the
> child and still less as conterminous with or even a necessary
> component of the linguistic environment. This seems empowering to me,
> and not only to the underprivileged learner.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
> -----------------------------------------
cut off by mike cole. check xmca for the rest of the thread minus the
trailing
>>s
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