[Xmca-l] Re: Crises and stages/ages

[mike cole]

Thanks for all the extra material, David.

As usual, an overabundance of interlocking issues to grapple with..... sort
of like development itself. With respect to your Point A a discussion and
empirical example that might be considered a possible exception to your
generalization concerning critical accounts of the zoped can be found on
pp. 137ff of Newman, Griffin, & Cole, *The Construction Zone. *
mike


On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 2:57 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> What we're translating here in Korea is the second half of the manuscript
> published by Galina Serpionovna Korotaeva in the Department of German
> Philology at the Udmurt University in Izhevsk in 2001. It's available in
> Russian on the Vygotsky Internet Archive as the second part of  Лекции по
> Педоклоии
> <
> https://www.marxists.org/russkij/vygotsky/pedologia/lektsii-po-pedologii.pdf
> >,
> 1935. We published the first part of this book in Korean in January:
>
> http://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ISBN=8994445803
>
> The second part (on Crises and Stable Periods) should be ready in January
> 2016.
>
> The Korotaeva manuscript hasn't been translated into any language, but
> there are parts of it in Volume Five of the English Collected Works Volume
> Five, and the passage that I quoted can be found, more or less, on p. 191.
>
> Unfortunately, that's not true for much of the manuscript.
>
> Кризис 3 и 7 дет
>
> (The Crisis at Three and the Crisis at Seven)
>
> Негативная фаза переходного возраста
>
> (Negative Phases of the Transitional Age)
>
>  Школьный возраст .
>
> (School Age)
>
>  Мышление школьника
>
> (Thinking in the School Child)
> As you can see, this isn't in the Collected Works at all, so as Mike says
> it's well worth revisiting the discussion.
>
> But I can think of three non-textological reasons for revisiting this
> material.
>
> a) Almost ALL of the interpretations of the zone of proximal development
> used in the West are non-critical--that is, they see "development" as a
> kind of improved way of adapting to the environment. But even a cursory
> reading of this manuscript makes it clear that is not what Vygotsky means
> when he speaks of development (even if we didn't know this already from the
> emphasis on the development of free will in HDHMF).
>
> b) Andy's interpretation of the text in Volume Five overemphasizes the
> social situation of development, and for this reason does not provide an
> adequate explanation of the CAUSES of the crisis (which in my view are not
> caused by the environment directly. Even my own critique of Andy's
> interpretation at the time underemphasized the intrinsic side of
> neoformations; it falls into the kinds of developmental schemata that
> Vygotsky calls "eclectic" here (I used a basket of verbal, mental, and
> material processes without bothering to find some intrinsic link between
> them).
>
> c) There are also issues which Vygotsky himself does not appear to resolve,
> for example, the nature of CRITICAL neoformations. These cannot be entirely
> negative--that is, "neo-disformations", because they do not entirely
> disappear in the subsequent age. But what are they?
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
> PS, for those who are not sticking to the one screen rule: I think that
> when Vygotsky criticizes "bourgeois psychologists", he is simply using his
> usual tactic of naming a distant target in order to avoid naming names
> close to home (this is why he is so very eloquent on the subject of Watson
> and Thorndike and has so little to say against Pavlov and Bekhterev).
>
> On the one hand, Mike is right when he says that Western psychologists, and
> in particular pedologists, were all talking about the crises. In fact a lot
> of this chapter  consists of polemics against their periodizations of the
> crisis: Binet's, Stratz's, Stern's, Buhler's and Busemann's.
>
> Here's an abstract of the Busemann paper that Vygotsky critiques:
>
> Die Erregungsphasen der Jugend. / The excitation phases of youth.
>
> Busemann, A.
>
> Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung, Vol 33, 1927, 115-137.
>
> Abstract
>
> The author takes as his text the thesis of Siegert (Die Periodizität in der
> Entwicklung der Kindesnatur, 1891) that children develop not according to a
> smooth upward curve of physical and mental progress, but rather by an
> irregular course of "favorable and unfavorable phases," so that the
> impression of periodicity is given. In a careful review of recent European
> work, including a few of the older studies in English, the author finds
> striking evidence of critical phases in the development of children. Among
> the experimental studies reported are Busemann's own contributions in the
> field of early speech development and of moral judgments. The article
> serves as an historical background and field of enlargement to them. The
> critical phases or periods of excitation the writer places roughly at ages
> 3, 6, 9, 12 or 13, 16 or 17, and perhaps at 19 or 20. The Binet tests do
> not show the variations in response at the critical ages as do some other
> intelligence tests, probably, the author believes, because they are
> constructed in such a way as to take account of these variations in rate of
> psychological development. Country children reach the successive excitation
> crises somewhat later than city children. A theory of physiological and
> psychological phase and counterphase is advanced in explanation of the
> developmental rhythm: the progress of development proceeds until in the
> emotional-subjective sphere a supernormal phase occurs. The passing of a
> certain high point in this sphere then releases or stimulates a
> compensatory development in the intentional-objective sphere. The apparent
> correlation between the appearance of the excitation phases and rapidity in
> anatomical growth lends evidence in favor of a structural basis for the
> observed behavior phenomena. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all
> rights reserved).
>
>
> On the other, there were a lot of SOVIET pedologists who did not believe in
> the crisis (including Vygotsky's friend Blonsky, and, as we've seen,
> Leontiev). Actually, they are still at it. Look at this:
>
>  “...(G)iving more freedom to adolescents in making their own choices over
> minor issues could substantially reduce the frequency of their conflicts
> with parents. Even when dealing with more serious issues, a parent saying
> ‘I’m older than you and your elder, so do what i say’ does not seem to be
> an effective strategy (Larson & Richards, 1994, p. 140). Rather than that,
> to both reach an acceptable solution and avoid excessive conflicts with
> adolescents, parents should reason with them on disputable issues, which is
> now possible because of their children’s new formal-logical abilities
> (Larson & Richards, 1994). On the basis of the discussion above, it would
> be reasonable to suggest that conflicts between adolescents and their
> parents are heavily determined by parent-adolescent styles of interaction;
> that is, they are anything but inevitable.” (pp. 226-227)
>
>
>
> Karpov, Y.V. (2005). The Neo-Vygotskyan Approach to Child Development.
> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
>
> dk
>
> On 21 March 2015 at 04:41, David H Kirshner <dkirsh@lsu.edu> wrote:
>
> > Andy, you're slurring your spelling.
> > David
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
> > xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
> > Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 9:50 PM
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Crises and stages/ages
> >
> > Oops! "Peter Principle" not "Peer Principle"
> >
> >
> >
>



-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
that creates history. Ernst Boesch.