Ah, the delights of sunday afternoon conversations like this!
I just hope everyone will strive for understanding the other. I tried
to signal this in referring the atricle jim and I wrote in human development
where we argued that the indivdiual-social dimension of lsv/piaget
differences could not be understood without consideration of what we
considered a major difference in the role of culture in the two
cases.
I am REALLY interested in obtaining citations from Piaget's work from
which David took his characterization of the role of the teacher because
it suggests convergences, although Ana did not interpret David that way.
Both LSV and Piaget are, I believe, constructivists. The issues revolve
around the organization of the constructive process and the role of others
(teachers) in it. Coming to Piaget from the cross-cultural literature as
I did, I was always impressed at his distrust of schooling as a source
of development because accomodation so dominated assimilation, blocking
equilibration, but David is suggesting a quite different form of
educative activity (not to be found in many classrooms at 1:30 ratios
I am afraid) where getting a delicate balance of accommodation and
assimilation is the goal of the teacher (my case was taken from
afterschool, one-on-one activity).
I am not clear, Kevin, why you interpreted anything I wrote as sustaining
this idea:
But I get the impression that conversation may not count as "joint
activity" as you use it. It seems that the weight on the word
"embodiment" suggests some physical exertion beyond conversation, for
example.
Sure, conversation is a form of joint activity, mediated by the complex
cultural system of spoken language. But in the example, the child and
college student were not sitting opposite each other, hands folded,
having a conversation. They were actively jointly attending to a complex
set of cultural artifacts in common. My guess, and it is only a guess,
is that if they had been using only spoken language to mediate their
joint activity, the adult would not have been able to arrange for the
child to construct a new understanding.
As BB suggests, there are a lot of similarities in points of view here. There
MAY be some important differences, or the poverty of THIS convesational
medium, with only the written words and a few conventional icons support
our attempts at mutual understanding.
So, to follow a bb suggestion for a new practice, I'll end with some
questinos (sorry I didn't take the time to do this in previous post).
Are a Piagetian and Vygotskian analysis of the interaction I posted
different in any important ways?
Where does Piaget most clearly lay out the role of the teacher within his
constructivist framework?
Do others have other examples we might examine that could help us parse
our differences and the examples themselves?
mike
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