Re: ZPD (people/interaction)
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
Sat, 11 Oct 1997 15:08:44 -0500
I agree with Francoise, Leigh, Diane, Kevin and others that it is critical
to see interaction as fully embodied (not just the circulation of signs or
whatever). However, I don't see fully embodied as just peopled, but
peopled-in- a-world, and populated with human artifacts (or traces of human
culture) that carry an embedded agency, perhaps best thought of as
multivalent affordances. One family of such artifacts is our languages and
discourses, collective products that, however dispersed and heteroglossic,
still seem profoundly titled in many ways (including sexist,
heteronormative, etc.). In other words, I think what notions like
mediated activity, mediated agency, functional systems, and zoped point to
is a view that is simultaneously fully embodied and fully historied, a view
of people as particular agents with palpable responsibilites but also as
cultural beings living in material/artifactual worlds.
P.S. Moll and Whitmore's discussion of collective and intersecting zones
of proximal development (in _Contexts of Learning_, 1993, Forman, Minick
and Stone, Eds.) offers an interestingly situated discussion/extension of
the notion of zopeds.
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign