Yes, this makes sense. I know of a child whose elementary school teacher complained that he would not pay attention -- he was doing tihngs like looking at the ceiling (when I asked he said he was finding patterns in it) -- and she would have been surprised to find years later that he scored 99%ile in math. His middle school teacher, who complained of his constant foot tapping, was surpised to find that he was a drummer... but in all this, is it also not true that these teachers instincts were right -- that this kid was not in the zone because he was not attending to the moment?
-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>
> At 05:36 PM 6/8/2006 -0400, you wrote: Since, by definition, ZPD is a
> construction zone, a time of dynamic changes where everything is "up in the
> air", a longer period of time and more play and non play observations
> should be made on a child in order to be able to make any decisive
> conclusions about that child's position in her/his ZPD.
>
> I haven't contributed much to this discussion--am teaching a summer class
> and trying to get some writing done. I'm wondering, though, about the idea
> that a child has "his/her zpd." If cognition is distributed, it seems that
> the zpd isn't the child's alone, but extended to mediational tools, their
> histories, and the community of practice in which they're used (and more
> I'm sure). In 1990 Luis Moll equated zpd's with social contexts (his intro
> to Vygotsky and Education), and I've always found that to be a useful
> reformulation of Vygotsky's relatively brief account of the zpd: It's not
> an individual capacity, but using Vygotskian logic, the setting (including
> the learner) in which potential may be realized. Peter
>
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