[Xmca-l] Re: A practical request (re: memory development)

[David Kellogg]

Anthony--

I'm conflicted.

I am working on a  "Capstone Design" class preparing sex education
materials. It's pretty interesting stuff, because for the first time in the
child's life the child is experiencing "perizhivanie" which has CONCEPTUAL
content without any EXPERIENTIAL content. To me, this suggests a change in
ALL psychological functions: affective perception (obviously), attention
(as an immediate result) and memory (which ipso facto cannot play the same
role in creating generalized representations that it once did),

Now, the materials that the Gyeonggi-do provincial government developed
teach AIDS/HIV prevention with something I would basically call a multiple
choice/true false test. You give the child a dozen different ways in which
people interact (going to the Korean sauna together, sharing chopsticks,
kissing, sitting on an unwiped toilet seat, etc.) and the child has to
choose the only two which actually do spread AIDS (sharing needles and
having unproteced sex). This is an example of what I would call
"backwash"--you start out with the test, which is essentially
diagnostic and not pedagogical in design. You then work backwards. And
because we all like to take the fastest and most direct route to the
object, you end up teaching to the test. Which is, almost by definition,
bad teaching.

I'm afraid I see some of this in Nikolai's lecture. He starts out (as he
often does) with a very useful distinction between tools for research and
tools for pedagogy (or, in the instance of perizhivanie, between tools for
research and tools for thinking about research). But in his natural
enthusiasm for research there is a bit of backwash--towards making what are
essentially ANALYTICAL stages into PEDAGOGICAL ones.

Vygotsky derives his four stages (in T&S and also in Chapter 5 of HDHMF)
from Buhler. Buhler tells us that there are three historical stages of
human behavior (unconditional instincts, conditional habits, creative
intelligence) and he thinks these will be useful in analyzing childhood
into periods. Vygotsky agrees, but he points out that free will is none of
these (think of sexual consent, and you will see--it is a higher form of
behavior that owes very little to instinct, habit, or even creativity and
is in some ways inimical to all three). Vygotsky also points out that ALL
of these forms (including free will) are present right there in infancy, so
using the to analyze childhood will involve analyzing each period that way
and not simply assigning behaviors to age periods one to one. All of this
suggests to me that natural memory (an instinct), naive memory (a
conditional habit), external-sign-memory (creative intelligence) and
"vraschivaniye" (free memory) are analytical tools and not pedagogical ones.

But what would a pedagogy informed by this mean? I don't know. I think it
would first of all have to be age-period-sensitive. A ten year old is after
the Crisis at Seven and before the Crisis at Thirteen. The memories in
question ARE experiential (they are not  fantasies); they are generalized
representations (e.g. chain-like narratives, diffuse complexes like family
trees, and above all pseudoconcepts).  Here are some activities I have used.

CHAINS:  You play 끝말잇기 a well known word game in Korean. Round One is when
each player offers a two-syllable word, repeating the the last syllable of
the previous word and then adding a new syllable.  In English it might go
something like this:
"Monday-->Daytime-->Timely--"Lytic--"Tick-tock"--"toxin"--"inform"....
Round Two is when you try to remember as many of the words as you can in
the form of a story. "On Monday, during the daytime, I chose a timely
moment to read Leontiev's definition of lytic periods in child development
and try to apply them to Sarah Cooper's impersonations of Donald Trump on
Tick-tock, but the toxic masculinity which informed....etc."

DIFFUSE COMPLEXES: In Korea, we do "제사" offerings to four generations in
the patrilineal line. Suppose you also want to honor your maternal
ancestors. Can you remember anything about them? Their places of birth and
death?  What would a family history in the matrilineal line look like?
Where would it begin and where would it end?

PSEUDOCONCEPTS: This is a version of the "why" game that eight year old
children sometimes play. You start out with a simple fact, like "Kids eat
food". You ask why. "Because they are hungry". You ask why. etc. You then
ask the child to distinguish between different kinds of "because". Another
version of this involves asking the child to create an autobiography,
starting with the cover and the LAST chapter, then the penulitmate one,
then the one before that, etc. and then asking how they are causally
related (I usually ask the kids to do this photographs if they are too
young....)

(Mutatis mutandis...as you can see, it's sex education all the way down!)

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!VuYDft0oMGAM9qY8EcRo06LVSNymMSpaDqYioRUquNkHbecO40qUVxiIBz7uouo2Dj05uQ$ 
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
Works* *Volume
One: Foundations of Pedology*"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VuYDft0oMGAM9qY8EcRo06LVSNymMSpaDqYioRUquNkHbecO40qUVxiIBz7uourLKiFoUw$ 


On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 5:53 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Good afternoon ~
>
> I come to you (as a parent and as a teacher) seeking advice and
> information, knowing this listserv is one of the best collective resources
> on the subject at hand.  Thank you in advance for your thoughts . . .
>
> FIRST, here is the question:
>
>    -
>
>    If a child (age 10) has an underdeveloped memory -- potentially from a
>    disruption in the child’s process of development of the higher
>    psychological function of memory --  what are some suggestions for A)
>    developing this function in non-academic contexts, in order to B) increase
>    the likelihood of transfer into academic contexts?
>
>
> SECOND, here is the theory (and source) behind the question:
>
>    -
>
>    Vygotsky’s “Law of 4 Stages” - https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://tiny.cc/q3p7rz__;!!Mih3wA!VuYDft0oMGAM9qY8EcRo06LVSNymMSpaDqYioRUquNkHbecO40qUVxiIBz7uourC1dRFOQ$ 
>    <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://tiny.cc/q3p7rz__;!!Mih3wA!XPc6MihE_2JAUm1FVECluRHB-fBm7usjC6m6SkGx3Gzr6clVrtOVLXXkggL7q-oW4gcVJg$>
>    (also, cf. "The Problem of the Cultural Development of the Child")
>    -
>
>    In place of watching the (very good) 7-minute video, please refer to
>    these two excerpts that richly capture the video’s gist:
>    -
>
>       From Clip 1 (“Vygotsky’s law of 4 stages”):
>       -
>
>          “This is the law that says there are 4 stages of the development
>          of every higher psychological function. It gives us a key to understanding:
>          if something goes wrong with the child, if the child has a difficulty,
>          maybe one of these stages didn’t go correctly.
>          -
>
>             Stage 1 - natural behavior (no use of signs)
>             -
>
>             Stage 2 - naive psychology (naive imitation)
>             -
>
>             Stage 3 - external signs and operations (beyond crude
>             imitation but still reliant on external tools)
>             -
>
>             Stage 4 - internal signs and operations (internalized tools;
>             decontextualized mediational means)
>             -
>
>       From Clip 2 (“How this law can help teachers and students"):
>       -
>
>          “Put the child in specially created situations -- might be play,
>          game, competition, whatever -- and introduce these tools he or she probably
>          doesn’t have -- and then, having these internal tools, the child comes back
>          to the class equipped with the tools, and now the task will be much easier
>          for the child . . . because the tools are not related anymore to the
>          concrete task (in which they were developed).  They are universal.”
>
>
> With these assumptions in mind (and choosing to accept them at least for
> now), here is the question again:
>
>    -
>
>    If a child (age 10) has an underdeveloped memory -- potentially from a
>    disruption in the child’s process of development of the higher
>    psychological function of memory --  what are some suggestions for A)
>    developing this function in non-academic contexts, in order to B) increase
>    the likelihood of transfer into academic contexts?
>
>
> Sincere thanks,
>
> Anthony
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20200709/e2bec074/attachment.html