[Xmca-l] Re: Content and pedagogy - cleavage and non-cleavage

[Ulvi İçil]

Thank you David.

It is probably for those reasons you mentioned that Russian piano pedagogy
insisted on the music as a main purpose and piano as an instrument  from
the very beginning.



7 Nis 2015 04:37 tarihinde "David Kellogg" <dkellogg60@gmail.com> yazdı:

> Ulvi--and also Henry:
>
> Vygotsky begins Chapter Seven of (the manuscript known as) "The History of
> the Development of the Higher Mental Functions" with some analogies that I
> think are a bit more precise than my dancing dress analogy, but they are
> quite negative ones. He compares the teaching of writing to the teaching of
> lip-reading to the Deaf on the one hand, and the teaching of piano-playing
> to children on the other. I think both analogies are highly instructive,
> but I don't really understand either completely. Just the sort of thing for
> an xmca discussion, no?
>
> Concerning lipreading, he says that articulation (he means recognizing and
> producing vowels and consonants) has displaced instruction in meaning. The
> way he puts it in Russian is this:
>
> "За техникой произношения глухонемой ученик не замечал самой устной речи.
> Получалась картавая речь." That is, *(B)eyond the techniques of
> pronunciation, the deaf-mute pupil did not notice oral speech itself. What
> was obtained was a murmuring (lisping? burring?) speech."
>
> This is translated as "dead speech" in Mind in Society (p. 105), and as
> "guttural speech" in Minick (Collected Works in English, Vol. 4, p. 130). I
> am not sure, but it seems to me that what Vygotsky is trying to convey is
> what we hear when children read the LETTERS but not the actual WORDINGS
> when we ask them to read them aloud. They blur and burr, they murmur and
> mince, because the meanings of oral speech are  not there behind the
> articulatory gestures. In a curious way, it is the opposite of the
> situation which Vygotsky and other researchers of his time called
> "autonomous speech", the babbling and cooing of the pre-grammatical infant:
> here we have speech for others, but  not for the speaker him or herself.
>
> Concerning piano playing, he says: "Обучение письму до сих пор еще не
> основывается у нас на естественно развивающихся потребностях ребенка и на
> его самодеятельности, а дается ему извне, из рук учителя и напоминает
> выработку какого-нибудь технического навыка, например навыка игры на рояле.
> При такой постановке дела ученик развивает беглость пальцев и научается,
> читая ноты, ударять по клавишам, но его совершенно не вводят в стихию
> музыки."
> That is, "The teaching-and-learning of writing is still not based, for us,
> upon the naturally developing desires of the child and on his activity
> itself, but is given to him from the outside, from the hands of the
> teacher, and it resembles the workings of any other habitual technique,
> such as the habit of playing on the piano. With such a state of affairs,t
> he pupil develops dexterity in the fingers, and learns how to read notes,
> how to hit the keyboard, but completely does not enter into the essence of
> the music."
>
> It seems to me that in both of these analogies, the emphasis is on
> precisely the kind of modularity that alphabetic writing and musical
> notation, as developed in the West, actually encourages. As Vygotsky says,
> the invention of an alphabet and the invention of musical notation means
> that writing becomes second order symbolism--symbols for sounds, and not
> for meanings. That turns it into a technical module, or as Vygotsky puts
> it, "something self sufficient in comparison with which living written
> language (or music) recedes into the background)". Of course, such
> technical modules are very testable; they correspond fairly precisely to
> the narrow and shallow kinds of skills that we see in successful business
> models, including (but not at all limited to) the successful business
> models we see in teaching. But they lack the infinite depth and breadth of
> a true language system.
>
> What's the alternative? Incredibly, Vygotsky suggests an even more narrow
> and shallow module--the child's own "natural" meaning making systems, e.g.
> the numerical figures (model tractors) used instead of base ten numbers, or
> the system of objects and marks and so on used in his experiments on
> writing in pre-literate children.
>
> What would this look like outside the laboratory? Here's an example from
> Korea.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5XPB3XwzGI
>
>
> During the first fifteen seconds of the video, the child is trying
> unsuccessfully to do a little chant that preliterate children in Korea do,
> where one line of speech is matched to one figure in a drawing (e.g. "I had
> breakfast-ddeng!" results in a circle with a line drawn through it, to
> indicate that the bowl of rice was eaten).
>
> I had breakfast--deng! (bowl of rice with a line drawn through it)
> I had lunch--deng! (bowl of rice with a line drawn through it)
> I opened the window and saw the rain (beneath the two ricebowls a box
> indicates the window and the lines in the box indicate rain)
>
> Now, at this point the child cannot remember the rest of the rhyme. He
> should continue like this:
>
> I saw three worms crawling by (three wavy lines above the two ricebowls).
> I turned out the light (draws a "lightbulb" shape around the whole of the
> drawing)
> Oh, no--horrors! It's a human SKULL!
>
> (See the attached picture for a correct example.)
>
> As you can see in the video, the child gives up and precedes right to the
> skull (which is a neat demonstration of Vygotsky's comments on the Stern
> picture test--even very small children will look at the whole before they
> attempt to master and memorize the parts.
>
> This is only one of many "draw-stories" produced by children at play,
> without the supervision of literate adults; it corresponds to a culture of
> draw-stories seen all around the world, including Inuit children (so-called
> "knife stories"), African children, and Aboriginal ones in Australia. Mark
> Twain and Laura Ingalls Wilder noted this tradition, and so did Lewis
> Carroll ("The Black Cat"). But it's a very limited one: it draws movement
> and action, but not thinking and speaking, and above all (as we can see in
> this example) the "meaning" is something that really emerges as an
> afterthought, and so often even very young children will work backwards,
> from meaning to parts. And in fact it's the very drawbacks of these natural
> systems that makes it possible and even necessary for the child to learn
> the cultural means of meaning making.
>
> The problem is that in the West, that cultural means of meaning making
> includes an alphabet, which is by its very nature a system that require
> analysis into ELEMENTS (without meaning) rather than UNITS. That is why I
> think maybe the poem I recited for my little neighbor, wildly inappropriate
> and horribly misarticulated, had the right idea--in Arabic, you see, it has
> very strong rhythm and rhyme:
>
> Ayathunnuni anni lu'abatun fi yadehee? "(Does he think I am a toy in his
> hands?)
> Anna la ufikiru al'a reja'a alehee...  (I never thought of returning)
> Yom al rad, wa ka'ayun sha'yun lum yakun (Yesterday he returned, as if
> nothing had happened)
> Wa ber'aa al utfal fe anehee.. (And that smile of a child was on his lips)
>
> (Apologies to Arabic speakers; I'm doing this from a thirty-five year old
> memory. But this is the only part I remembered in the elevator)
>
> Hatta al fustan allati insituha... (And even the dress that I had forgotten
> farihat bihi raqusat alla qaddamehee (Was happy to see him and danced to
> the doorway)
>
> As Adorno says, music is form, but dance is content.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
> ? I think it means this--in order
>
>
> there is a reversal of roles
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 8:33 PM, Ulvi İçil <ulvi.icil@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Dear all,
> >
> > Perhaps, others, but from within the history of Russian teaching,
> > especially Russian colleagues, can give an answer to this:
> >
> > Shulman, in the attached article, p6, writes about a cleavage btw content
> > and pedagogy in teaching in US history and this is long ago, in 1986.
> >
> > Well, I write my master thesis on the piano teaching of a piano teacher
> > from former Soviet Union, and I observe that, she studied a lot piano
> > teaching beyond formal education, has a serious scholarship in piano
> > teaching and executes really a very effective teaching. She took a child
> > from 60/100 grade to almost 90/100 and this is valid for other children
> > too.
> >
> > Now the question and my hypothesis is:
> >
> > Russia, from 19th century onwards, has inherited best parts of the
> Western
> > pedagogy (French, German) and developed its own in many disciplines so
> that
> > such a cleavage which perhaps occurred in the West after a certain point
> > did nto occur in Russia, thanks also to October Revolution and building
> of
> > socialism and as a result, Russians have developed a quite improved way
> of
> > teaching the content, which resulted in a developed pedagogical knowledge
> > content (an amalgam of pedagogy and content) in many areas. In other
> words,
> > Russia, then Soviet Union could miss, refrain from such a cleavage in
> > pedagogy in general.
> >
> > Hence, an effective teaching in many areas, like piano teaching.
> >
> > What was lying behind that?
> >
> > I think uneven development and the idea of surpassing the West.
> >
> > And this was not peculiar to a few disciplines, it was valid in a wide
> > social development range.
> >
> > Anyone to support or negate my hypothesis about non cleavage of content
> and
> > pedagogy in Russian pedagogy tradition?
> >
> > Please note that content is what, pedagogy is how, and pedagogical
> content
> > knowledge is a transformed version of content knowledge which is made
> > teachable.
> >
> > Ulvi
> >
>