Re: [xmca] Another Claim That LSV Did Not Originate the ZPD

I'm following up SOME of the copious links that Peter posted (for the which many thanks, Peter!) So far I'm about halfway through the book of Meumann's that Vygotsky must have read. The first is half is about "observational learning" and the second is "associative learning".
   
  Nothing so far remotely resembles:
   
  a) A clear distinction between learning and development
  b) A clear leadership role in the link for learning (rather than development)
  c) A transitional mechanism between the two consisting of other mediation and/or self-mediation which culminates in internalization
   
  I don't see how we can really speak of a ZPD without even one of these, much less without any of them.
   
  I guess I really AM one of those troglodytes Dot talks about who thinks that LSV was the sole originator of the ZPD. Worse, I am one of those unevolved anthropoids that Mike gently ridicules who actually thinks it matters.
   
  I think that LSV was the sole originator, because I think that what Mike says about having an idea in the right place at the right time is partly a statement about ideological synergy: it is not ideas per se but COMBINATIONS of ideas that are history-shaking (and in this respect new ideas are very much like other scientific concepts; it is the web in which they appear that determines their accessability and their social value). So it does seem to me possible to say that LSV synthesized the three ideas above and even to prove it against all comers.
   
  I think it matters because we've just endured almost half a century of Western efforts to remove Marxism from the ZPD (starting with the removal of all references to Marx and Engels from the 1962 Thought and Language).
   
  Thanks at least in part to the efforts of people like Mike and Vera John-Steiner (and the other editors of Mind in Society), we've managed to show that you cannot really perform this widely desired excision without excising LSV himself.
   
  I think that it is for this very reason (and not simply the usual rambunctious "Who's King of the Castle" routine that academics like to indulge in) that people are now proposing a ZPD without LSV.
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education

       
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Received on Tue Jan 22 19:02 PST 2008