[Xmca-l] Re: So Why Play?

[Lplarry]

Helena & David

Right this moment PBS is showing the show (inside the mind of Leonardo da Vinci).
To watch the opening introduction  Leonardo is drawing a hexical single thread 

Please go and access this site
Fascinating in the spirit that David is here outlining 
Larry
Sent from my Windows 10 phone

From: Helena Worthen
Sent: September 9, 2017 8:22 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: So Why Play?

This sequence of recollections and interpretations of ISCAR activity is incredibly rich. I am very sorry to have missed it. However, we are back in Viet Nam teaching, with some new assignments that are very interesting (to us). As usual, the discussion on XMCA forms the thinking/background to looking at challenges here as they come along. 

H

Helena Worthen
helenaworthen@gmail.com
Berkeley, CA 9470 Phone VN 0168 4628562
Blog US/ Viet Nam: skype: helena.worthen1
helenaworthen.wordpress.com





> On Sep 10, 2017, at 9:55 AM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> One of the most interesting "moments" (that is, instances) of the
> conference in Quebec happened the day before the conference, at the CHACDOC
> session of the preconference institute. Mariane Hedegaard presented the
> case for the ZPD as an age specific proximal zone of development, using the
> rather algebraic slogan "children as explorers" (which, since "exploration"
> can describe different things, can be applied infancy and to adolescence).
> Barbara Rogoff and her students, in contrast, contributed a session on
> "Learning by Observing and Pitching In" (LOPI), which instead stressed play
> as a form of legitimate peripheral participation.
> 
> In good ISCAR fashion, both strands strove to make the other's case
> plausible and to include it as a working part of their own strand, and the
> result was--at least to my mind--a completely workable synthesis. But then
> I work with the idea that verbal art and verbal science, which I take to be
> the future of these two respective visions of play, are linked by their
> verbality.
> 
> Last Saturday, we worked on Chapter Three of Vygotsky's "Pedology of the
> Adolescent". You can be as sententious as you want about translating words
> exactly when you are working with poetry, but when you are translating many
> books (this is our ninth volume) what you really need is
> consistency--focusing on the relationships between words like "play" and
> "development" and not losing their development through random variations.
> 
> So Vygotsky first discusses whether age periods are characterizable by a
> single activity: embryonic life by vegetative activity, infancy by animal
> activity, early childhood by walking/talking, preschool by play, school age
> by study, adolescence by fantasy, etc. He notes that if we consider "pure
> play" as something opposed to study or to labor, then it is absolutely
> wrong to consider preschool as an age of play, but if we take play to be a
> complex activity which includes the grandcestors of study and of labor as
> well, it has a certain truth.
> 
> And then he lays bare what I think must be one of the hidden sources of the
> Zoped, and also what I think must be the real answer to the compatibility
> of CHACDOC and LOP in Quebec. Groos is presenting play as a form of
> legitimate peripheral participation (rather than as exploration), but Groos
> does remark that it has the effect of "raising" rudimentary and undeveloped
> instincts (e.g. the hunting instinct in kittens) to the level where they
> can compete with complete and developed ones (e.g. fear of injury).
> 
> Vygotsky has just presented the idea that play is a kind of естественным
> дополнением, естественной школой или самовоспитанием, that is, "a natural
> annex", "a natural school", or a "natural auto-didactics". So play does for
> the human child what it does for the kitten, only in the human child what
> needs to be raised is not instincts, but habits. And that is what makes it
> possible for peripheral participation to become mastery and conscious
> awareness and for the simple act of looking for something to open out onto
> the sea of exploration.
> 
> David Kellogg