Re: [xmca] Kindergarten Cram: When is play?

["Vera Steiner" <vygotsky@unm.edu>]

Hi,
Jay, thanks for the interesting message about speech, writing and inner 
speech.
I think without considering the functions of these three language processes 
(plus other communicative modes like gesture) one can become hierarchical 
when discussing them.  I agree with you that face-to-face spoken language is 
more communicatively complex than writing.  It has to meet some of its 
interpersonal (bonding,disciplining, explaining, etc) functions/speech acts 
Thus the power of acting where skilled performers use all their physical, 
emotional and intellectual resources to make spoken language memorable.
And I also agree with you that writing's value and thus its standing in 
some kind of hierarchy was and is influenced by the importance of the sacred 
texts.Writing's primary function of bridging time-or semi-permanence--  
requires selectivity in contrast with the ease and abundance of speech. And 
thus the teachers and learners of writing need to exercise some other and 
then self-regulation  in choosing what should be written, which is a very 
different process from
verbal exchanges.But the choice of writing as the primary criterion of
academic knowledge does not, and should not follow, from the differences 
between these two processes. Limited experience with speech as performance 
contributes to the poor job done by  so many post-graduate teachers who have 
not been asked to perform verbally (or only very infrequently) during their 
own training.
As some of you may remember I have found in "inner-speech writing" an 
excellent tool for planning, mostly for sustained writing, but also for 
grocery lists. Both of these telegrammatic words, or short strings of words, 
are characterized by their condensed and contextualized aspects.
I think while Vygotsky's notions are incomplete, they are generative,
Vera


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jay Lemke" <jaylemke@umich.edu>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 09, 2009 12:35 PM
Subject: Re: [xmca] Kindergarten Cram: When is play?



Associational chains, whether they occur to us naturally or are just a
mode of linking meanings that gets out of control as the text-scales
get longer, sure can take us on a Grand Tour!  from no time for play
in early childhood schooling, to the excesses and illusions of
testing, to demanding essay tasks in (Confucian) testing vs.
deskilling ones in NCLB (the routinization of the 5-paragraph
"essay"), to how to think about writing and written language as higher-
order, developmentally late processes in relation to inner and outer
speech, materiality, contextualization, etc.

Whew!

I'm not sure how to organize my reactions, so I won't particularly
try. Here they are. Organize them yourself!

Convergent evolution in examinations. The same surface phenomena can
evolve historically as they can biologically in quite different
lineages for quite different reasons. Confucian examinations and
modern essay testing look a bit alike at some level of abstraction,
but I think that in terms of their historical specificity and
functions, they are really quite different. So I think David is
probably right that the Confucian meritocratic system does not have
much to do with modern school testing, though it may envelope the
latter in a certain cultural web of supportive feelings about
importance, honour, upward mobility, etc.

But what's so great, or hard about writing, anyway? that we should
consider it the most reliable index of knowledge and understanding, or
even of the habitus by which one succeeds in academia or elsewhere in
the wider "Knowledge Society"?

David adduces and modifies a  bit, LSV's original arguments about
written language. I think LSV got a lot of this right, but not all of
it. Written language is really different from spoken, does require a
higher level (i.e. a successor level building on the first) of
"abstract" functioning -- though what "abstract" really means here, as
Mike points out in his questions, and David tries to explicate and
complicate, is problematic. LSV is trying in part to articulate
relationships among 3 modes of language: written, spoken, and 'inner
speech'. The kinds of "abstraction" that distinguish W from S, and S
from IS, however are not quite the same, and we can emphasize their
similarities or their differences. I think this leads to a large space
of possible and actual confusion.

What LSV is most wrong about, IMHO, is in accepting the universally
accepted view of his times that written language is a more highly
developed or more completely expressive (i.e. explicitizing) variety
than spoken. With tape recorders we have learned differently. Spoken
language, in situ, with interlocutors, is vastly more complex and
richer in meaning possibilities and actualities, than written
language. Written language is a specialized form, limited in what it
can say and do by the conventions it requires in order to overcome
everything that is normally missing from the full, natural
communication system of spoken language (which is not just language,
an artificial unit of analysis -- it is the unified system of speech,
gesture, posture, and many aspects of action generally).

 Written language has been overvalued for many reasons, mostly
ideological. Its association with Sacred Texts, first and foremost
(Torah, Gospels, Quran, Vedas, Confucian classics, etc.). Later in the
European tradition with not just the Second Canon (Aristotle, etc.)
but with the Protestant emphasis on individual reading and
interpretation of the Bible (degenerating into fundamentalist
literalism, alas), and descending from that (as David Olson notes) a
close association between written text and hermeneutic reasoning,
which more or less becomes scientific reasoning eventually. Most of
the arguments that mastering written language grounds our higher
reasoning skills go wrong by not seeing that it is really the
juxtaposition of written vs. spoken language that leads to the
insights about language and reasoning that they attribute to written
mastery alone. (And inner speech probably plays some key role in all
that, too, as LSV seems to be struggling to to find a way to piece all
this together.)

So to come back to education and testing, the gold standard of
assessment of how well someone understands something is not how
beautiful an essay they can write about it, but how well they do in an
extended conversational oral examination in some concrete setting with
the relevant situation or stuff at hand.

JAY.

Jay Lemke
Professor
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke




On May 8, 2009, at 11:50 AM, David Kellogg wrote:

> dhk:
>
> Yes. One fact I forgot to cite is that the closer the kids get to  the 
> college entrance exam, the less impressive their performances  get on 
> those international student evaluations that PISA and  Stevenson were so 
> impressed by.
>
> What's true of the kids is truer of their schools. We have the very  best 
> elementary school on earth (in my humble opinion) and every  single 
> elementary school teacher has liftime tenure, and is part of  a career 
> structure that professors in the USA would envy (low  tuition in school, 
> three months paid vacation a year, time off for  further education, etc.) 
> Until the last few years, our elementary  schools were virtually test 
> free.
>
> Middle school teachers are treated much less well, and high school 
> teachers downright shabbily, and of course the testing system, for  all 
> the excitement generated (airplanes grounded, traffic rerouted,  police 
> and even troops mobilized to get the nation's kids to the  testing centres 
> on time) at bottom enforces mediocrity, which is the  baseline of our 
> disgraceful university system.
>
> It's for PRECISELY this reason that I don't believe it has anything  to do 
> with traditional Confucian testing. The Confucian tests were  based on 
> essay writing, and required analysis and synthesis of  ancient texts and 
> their creative interpretation and presentation.  The current exams are 
> multiple choice, "skills-based" and  psychometric tests that Binet and 
> Simon would easily recognize and  of which Thorndike would heartily 
> approve. Items are statistically  independent (so much so that several 
> attempts to factor-analyze the  test have turned up absolutely nothing)
>
> This kind of statistical independence is exactly what Vygotsky  denies in 
> Chapter Six, Section Four, (p. 267 of the Meccaci  translation, pp. 
> 207-208 in Minick):
>
> "The research has shown that the different materials of school  learning 
> enter into reciprocal interactions during the course of the  development 
> of the child. This development appears in a mode which  is more unified 
> than that which we might suppose on the basis of the  experiments of 
> Thorndike according to which development acquires an  atomistic character. 
> The experiments of Thorndike have shown that  the development of any 
> partial knowledge or capacity consists of the  formation of an independent 
> chain of associations, which cannot in  any way aid the appearance of 
> another associative chain. All  development would be independent, isolated 
> and autonomous and would  be realized equally on the basis of associative 
> links."
>
> Instead, in the quotes I talked about last time, Vygotsky argues for 
> "abstraction" that is brought about through the realization of both  LINKS 
> and DIVERGENCES between mathematical thinking (- x - = +) and  written 
> speech ("It's NOT worth nothing"). I think Vygotsky uses the  word 
> “abstract” in two linked but nevertheless distinguishable  senses, one 
> having to do with capacity and the other having to do  with actual 
> performance.
>
> On the one hand, “abstract” refers to DECONTEXUALIZEABLE knowledge,  e.g. 
> written language as opposed to spoken language. This is  abstract because 
> it is IDEAL; when we write, we take away the  SENSUOUS, material form of 
> words, we take away the SENSES we create  because we are talking to a 
> real, immediate person, and we take away  the SENSIBLE purposes of 
> language use because there is no question  to which we are replying, no 
> command which we obey, no request we  must respond to, etc.
>
> On the other, “abstract” refers to RECONTEXTUALIZEABLE knowledge,  e.g. 
> actual writing as opposed to actual speech. This is abstract  because it 
> is VOLITIONAL, it does not depend on response to an  immediate 
> environment. But it DOES depend on choice, selection, and  free will 
> constrained by the writer’s purposes. When we actually  write we choose 
> particular sequences of letters to form words, and  it is possible to 
> think of idiosyncratic spellings like “doe a dear”  which give us access 
> to our volitional memory and focus our  volitional attention.
>
> When we actually write we select sequences of words to form  sentences; at 
> the level of grammar innovation becomes not simply an  option but a 
> virtual necessity, because unlike spelling there is no  ready reserve of 
> preset sentences which will tell us exactly what to  say in every 
> situation. Finally, when we actually write we are free  to create our own 
> EXCHANGES and not simply our own sentences,  creating the need for 
> language use as well as fulfilling it; If at  the level of lexicogrammar, 
> written language tends “znachenie”, at  the level of the text, it tends 
> towads “smysl”.
>
> The distinction seems important to me, because Bakhtin (and even 
> Volosinov) does not really recognize that the latter form of  abstract 
> thinking, which allows the individual to realize free  choice, rests on 
> the former, which makes thinking available in a new  context precisely by 
> tearing it from an old one. It seems to me,  though, that this kind of 
> abstraction is actually what we see in the  old kind of Confucian testing.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca