[Xmca-l] Re: The Diagnostic Zoped

[Larry Purss]

David,
What is the relevance you see in showing the disparity between a
scaffolding zoped, a leading activity zoped, and a diagnostic zoped?
I have just read Andy's article on the "nature" of concepts  as always
expressing disparity  This disparity is in their nature as concepts. Or in
a metaphor you offered describing Vygotsky as like a crow using "words [as
eggs] that are pilfered and filled with new "sense".
Does this disparity in the various meanings of zoped "deepen" our
understanding of the concept "zoped?  or are the scaffolding and leading
activity versions of zoped "mis-taken" or "mis-guided" or inauthentic
versions?

Larry

On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 4:16 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been comparing the 2001 Korotaeva manuscript of Vygotsky's final
> pedological lectures with the version published in Volume Four of the
> Russian Collected Works (Volume Five of the English). This kind of
> textological comparison is fairly grueling work, and yields few dramatic
> moments. But the section which is called "The Problem of Age and the
> Dynamics of Development" (pp. 199-205) is an exception.
>
> First of all, the TITLE'S different! The CW has "dynamics", which makes no
> sense, because the previous section was about dynamics. The Korotaeva
> manuscript makes it clear that this is about diagnostics. Secondly, there
> are two paras in the CW that don't appear in Korotaeva, and thirteen
> paragraphs (!!) in Korotaeva that do not appear in the CW. Thirdly, the
> word "pedology", which occurs 32 times in Korotaeva, does not appear once
> in the CW.
>
> I've always thought of the Soviet and the Western distortions of the Zoped
> as being symmetrical: the Soviets pretended that it was all development and
> no learning, dissolving it into the notion of leading activity, while the
> Americans pretended that it was all learning and no development, dissolving
> it into the notion of scaffolding.
>
> But the Korotaeva manuscript really makes it clear that the Soviets and the
> Americans really misconceived the Zoped in exactly the same way: both
> ignored the pedological nature of the Zoped--that it wasn't a description
> of dynamics at all but rather a diagnostic tool to be linked to very
> precise ideas about how and above all when neoformations arise, through
> lines of development, from the social situation. The Zoped wasn't a fever,
> or even a temperature; it was a thermometer.
>
> David Kellogg
>