[Xmca-l] Re: Fun &Games

[Greg Thompson]

Mike,
I think David was just having a little fun with your post.

But seriously (i.e., no fun ;-( ), I'm wondering a bit about what "fun" is?
How do you define it? Are you defining it Justice Potter
Stewart--pornography style? (Okay, now I'm having fun!).

So what is it?

And, more importantly, are we having fun (yet)?

-greg

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 3:47 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Hi David--
>
> I was just beginning to wonder if anyone had any interest in my question
> about play and fun.
>
> I found a lot interesting about your note, but I fear that, perhaps because
> of the specific framework you are using to interpret the question, the
> answer does not seem to help much. I was including preschoolers in my badly
> formed notion of an age range of humans.
>
> I had two 7 year olds over last weekend. They were adamently NOT interested
> in doing any household chores, but they sure had fun shucking corn for
> dinner and even want to wash the car, but drought conditions forbid
> it. My wife and I have fun trying to finish the Times crossword puzzle,
> congratulating outselves when we make it to Wednesday. And I often have fun
> cooking snacks for kids at the afterschool center where I used to have a
> presumably serious minded task at hand. Not play. Not a game. But fun.
>
> It can happen, I surmise, during any part of a stable developmental phase
> or at the beginning, middle, or end, of a crisis (despite the negative
> emotional connotations of the word).
>
> Maybe to vague a wondering to be useful.
> Happy to discuss the topics you raise, but how about a header change?
>
> mike
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 2:24 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Mike:
> >
> > In our presentation over the summer in Kangwondo, we tried to consider
> > various forms of the "next zone of development" as diagnostic rather than
> > pedagogical devices. That is, we tried to take seriously the idea tha the
> > Zoped is not a "zone of proximal development" or a "zone of pedogogical
> > development" but rather a zone of pedalogical development, a way of
> > diagnosing what the child's next zone of development. This seems like an
> > important thing to do; without it, the tendency to reduce the Zoped to a
> > teaching/learning device rather than a developmental diagnostic (as
> > Vygotsky intended it) is hard to resist.
> >
> > When we read Vygotsky's unfinished papers on "Child Development" (Volume
> > Four of the Russian Collected Works and also the 2001 "Lectures on
> > Pedology" published in Izhevsk) we get the impression that the schedule
> of
> > development that Vygotsky had in mind is both too delicate and not
> delicate
> > enough. It's too delicate because, for example, you have the crisis at
> > seventeen which occurs right in the middle of a stable age (puberty)
> after
> > which the child apparently simply goes on with the stable age--we can
> only
> > explain this by the circumstance, peculiar to the USSR of the time, that
> at
> > seventeen youth were required to decide whether they were going to leave
> > school and work or enter a preparatory school for higher education. It's
> > not delicate enough because, for example, the Age of Infancy overlaps
> with
> > the Crisis at One by at least two months (ten months to twelve months)
> > during which time some very important changes are taking place in the
> > child's semantics (according to Halliday, 2002, "The Language of Early
> > Childhood").
> >
> > There's a way out. Vygotsky also says that the critical periods have a
> > three part structure (pre-peak, peak, and post-peak) and the stable
> periods
> > a two part structure (early and late).  In addition, the neoformation
> which
> > defines each age period emerges at the END of the age period and not the
> > beginning. So the next zone of development not only predicts the gross
> > changes of child development which we now simply predict using the
> calendar
> > (Infancy, Crisis at One, Early Childhood, Crisis at Three, Preschool,
> > etc.) but also the next phase within each period. It can do this by
> tracing
> > the child's progress along a main line of development (we called this a
> > "central line of development" when you, me and Andy were working on
> Volume
> > Four, but I notice in the pedalogical lectures that Vygotsky prefers the
> > term "main line of development"). This means the diagnostic next zone of
> > development (that diagnostic Zoped) actually predicts both the next age
> > stage (the "objective" ZPD, to use Chaiklin's terminology) and the next
> > step within each age period (what Chaiklin calls the "subjective" one).
> >
> > Speech is the main line of development only in early childhood. But after
> > early childhood the main lines of development turn out to be various
> forms
> > of verbal thinking (negation at three, play in preschool, "clowning
> > around" at seven,  and conscious awareness and mastery at school age,
> > concept development in puberty). This really makes perfect sense:
> > development is, at least at the beginning of each period,  more about
> > differentiation than about growth. So if we apply this little insight to
> > the problem you name--the problem of having fun, play, and games--we
> obtain
> > a process of differentiation: games are a form of play (but not all play
> is
> > a game), play is a form of having fun (but not all fun is play).
> >
> > In our Kangwando presentation we used a rather course method to
> > differentiate having fun, play, and games: rote, role, and rule. Rote
> play
> > is "having fun", or what Vygotsky calls "quasi-play", that is,
> sensorimotor
> > repetition, something which never goes away from play  but which
> transfers
> > its functions upward to role play. Role play is the creation of an
> > imaginary situation, but it is an imaginary situation in which the rules
> > are imaginary and not explicitly stated and objectively shared. Only rule
> > play--that is, formal games--represents the final form of preschool play:
> > rote play (having fun) and role play (imaginary play) are transitional
> > forms which do not die out but which transfer their functions to higher
> > forms as they arise.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 12:47 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > I have been led to wonder -- what is the relationship between having
> fun
> > > and playing.  How do they differ? Does their relationship, if they are
> > not
> > > reducible one to the other, change over the course of development? Odd
> > how
> > > the category of fun is absent from developmental discourse.
> > > Mike
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > >
> > > It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
> > > object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
> > >
> >
>
>
>
> --
>
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
>



-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson