[Xmca-l] Re: A practical request (re: memory development)
mike cole
mcole@ucsd.edu
Wed Jul 8 20:12:42 PDT 2020
If I were seeking professional information a child I was concerned about
for the reasons
relate, Anthony, and I was interested in how a cultural-historical
psychologist thinks about
such matters, I would check the work of Tatiana Akhutina whose writings can
be found on
Academia.
mike
On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:23 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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!TKR7XIT3zeJIzwF2x4xUdMGsgKy616QkR_CM7-IaU5uu7KiU0O5fbGIrmaEfyeqWsYeYuA$
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!VuYDft0oMGAM9qY8EcRo06LVSNymMSpaDqYioRUquNkHbecO40qUVxiIBz7uouo2Dj05uQ$>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *Volume
> One: Foundations of Pedology*"
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!TKR7XIT3zeJIzwF2x4xUdMGsgKy616QkR_CM7-IaU5uu7KiU0O5fbGIrmaEfyepLw8EHOQ$
>
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VuYDft0oMGAM9qY8EcRo06LVSNymMSpaDqYioRUquNkHbecO40qUVxiIBz7uourLKiFoUw$>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 5:53 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Good afternoon ~
>>
>> I come to you (as a parent and as a teacher) seeking advice and
>> information, knowing this listserv is one of the best collective resources
>> on the subject at hand. Thank you in advance for your thoughts . . .
>>
>> FIRST, here is the question:
>>
>> -
>>
>> If a child (age 10) has an underdeveloped memory -- potentially from
>> a disruption in the child’s process of development of the higher
>> psychological function of memory -- what are some suggestions for A)
>> developing this function in non-academic contexts, in order to B) increase
>> the likelihood of transfer into academic contexts?
>>
>>
>> SECOND, here is the theory (and source) behind the question:
>>
>> -
>>
>> Vygotsky’s “Law of 4 Stages” - https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://tiny.cc/q3p7rz__;!!Mih3wA!TKR7XIT3zeJIzwF2x4xUdMGsgKy616QkR_CM7-IaU5uu7KiU0O5fbGIrmaEfyervDcg9Jw$
>> <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
>>
>>
--
It is unwise to run after people for their own good- Traditional Vai Proverb
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Archival resources website: lchc.ucsd.edu.
Narrative history of LCHC: lchcautobio.ucsd.edu.
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