[Xmca-l] Emotion as "Sputnik"

[David Kellogg]

How could we experimentally test Vygotsky’s theory that emotion plays a key
“sputnik” role in concept formation? It seems as if no laboratory test is
really possible and no mass test in schools would be ethical.



Alas, the mere fact that something is unthinkable does little to prevent it
from happening these days.  In the last year, there have been, for example,
mass experiments on human subjects in the US, Sweden and the UK which have
led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, something we have not
really seen on this scale since Nazi experiments and the American “trial”
of the “Little Boy” bomb design on Hiroshima. Just as Vygotsky made sense
of what became Nazi psychology (Spranger, Kretschmer, Kroh, and Potzl), we
will have to, whether we accept the ethics of the experiment or not, make
sense of the data.



Consider three modes of teaching reading to the same class of Korean eighth
graders: recorded lectures which are made available on line and
supplemented with homework, video-conferencing classes which allow T-S
interaction but minimal S-S interaction, and finally face-to-face classes.
These three formats do not differ in their conceptual content, but they
differ very widely in their emotional content. How do they differ in their
educational impact, and how does this educational impact vary with age and
with social class?



The result should be visible in language. To interpret them, however, we
will need not only Vygotsky but also Bernstein and Halliday.

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!RGZkVXlzeukChniKOY-9EXEs2riIUxU9QR_yemJDCktCr7UgmMuAxOzB5SQsTHOvTjo4aA$ 
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!RGZkVXlzeukChniKOY-9EXEs2riIUxU9QR_yemJDCktCr7UgmMuAxOzB5SQsTHMYSau_Qg$ 
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