[Xmca-l] Thank you to Peter

[robsub@ariadne.org.uk]

I just want to say thank you to Peter for introducing me to 
"Deconflating the ZPD and instructional scaffolding". 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320579162_Deconflating_the_ZPD_and_instructional_scaffolding_Retranslating_and_reconceiving_the_zone_of_proximal_development_as_the_zone_of_next_development

I have felt for a long time that there was something not quite right 
about the way people conceive of both the ZPD (or, as I shall now call 
it, the ZND) and instructional scaffolding, but lacked the expertise to 
analyse why. Now Peter comes and, with great authority, tells me that I 
was thinking along the right lines. The irony of now being officially A 
Retired Person is that I have the leisure to study these things in the 
detail I needed when I was working and did not have the time.....

Just a couple of random thoughts around my reading of the article.

I have always felt that "scaffolding" was a misnomer, a bad choice of 
metaphor by those who originally coined it. The point of scaffolding, 
the stuff you put on buildings, is that it is inflexible. It is massive, 
rigid, and designed never to fall over with a worker on it. Although I 
have never quite been in tune with the idea of instructional 
scaffolding, it has always seemed to me that its point must be 
flexibility - taking bits away from it must be at least as important as 
putting them there in the first place. So, whenever I think about 
instructional scaffolding, I first have to get past the jarring 
metaphor. Perhaps I am too sensitive to words.

I wonder also if the popularity of the "assisted-learning-today, 
independent-performance-tomorrow" model is not just popularity with 
teachers of teaching. Its short term focus and superficial specificity 
make it appear to be very measurable, which makes it popular with policy 
makers, especially in today's audit culture.

The introduction of Moll and the idea of context being crucial was also 
very illuminating. Something else for me to examine, dammit. But also 
something that becomes obvious once it is pointed out because CHAT and 
the activity triangle are all about context.

This quote from p73 gives me pause for thought too. "Assuming that 
instructional scaffolding will work because it is written into a lesson 
plan overlooks the possibility that teacher and learner will approach 
each other in ways that produce conflict over product and process, with 
the student inevitably losing. Scaffolding, then, needs to be viewed as 
an intensely relational process, one requiring mutual understanding and 
negotiation of goals and practices." Teachers know that (I would say) 
but policy makers, at least in this country, don't. They love lesson 
plans and teachers are coerced into achieving the aims in the lesson 
plan regardless of where the lesson is actually going. The disjunction 
between what we know to be good teaching on the one hand, and, on the 
other, the requirements of neoliberal audit culture, becomes ever more 
stark.

I hope I am making sense.