High Phil-- Email is has a very narrow bandwidth, and between peg, me, and
Esteban, my offhand memories of VVD's visit to UCSD were naturally a bit
foggy.... although no Thai beer!
Its interesting to hear that AT is alive and well in Siberia and I keep hearing
about interesting inroads in other parts of Russia, where, as Peg's
intervening note indicates, it was a rare site indeed to see non-authoritarian
education in Soviet Russian classrooms. In fact, our Russian colleagues were
interested in the Fifth Dimension as a kind of innoculation against command
and control education. How much all of this has to do with the general
loosening of centralize control in the post-Soviet era (a trend that is
itself in danger) and how much to do with the charisma of people like VVD
and Boris Elkonin and others I do not know.
In the context of parallel discussions about contradictions, it seems to me
that one lesson in struggles to obtain educational activity in schools is
that between continuity and discontinuity, transmission and creativity, in
processes of intergenerational enculturation.
mike
PS-- As coincidence would have it, it looks like LCHC will be engaged with
a school system near Vladivostok which specializes in English-only instruction
in a project where kids here and there create various digital projects and
disuss them together in a virtual web space. Perhaps some of the folks you met
are involved.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Nov 09 2004 - 11:43:06 PST