RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense and made sense

[Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>]

I have always been struck by Vygotsky's reference (in 'The development of higher mental functions') to the collision between the creative meaning making of children and the created meanings available to them in the culture in which they swim:

"The very essence of cultural development is in the collision of mature cultural forms of behaviour with the primitive forms that characterise the child's behaviour." (not sure about the translation here).

For me it is the active making of sense which each new generation contributes which keeps the 'made sense' of culture alive and responsive to changing circumstances. There is also an argument that the made culture feeds back into the process in that oral cultures tend to be much more conservative, keen to maintain and preserve their lore, than literate cultures which can rely on books to 'keep track' of changes and allow us to go back if we find that changes don't work out too well. New technologies which allow massive amounts of information to be stored, including endless versions with all their 'track changes' annotations and commentaries should make us more open to the sparks struck by collisions with children's 'outsider' perspective but I wonder whether they might also tend to exclude these 'naïve' contributions, much as literacy tends to shut out the preliterate and the illiterate.

All the best,

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: 02 February 2010 05:24
To: xmca
Subject: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play

Or rather, Monica Nilsson on the magnificent Gunilla Lindvist on Leontiev on play, writing in one of the papers in the current issue of MCA:
 
"Lindqvist is critical of how Vygotsky's successors came to interpret his theory of play. Vygotsky emphasized teh dialectics expressed through the relation between the adult world and the child's world and also between the will and the emotion. She writes that Leontiev sees no tension between the adult world and the child's world and that play, for him, is about a child's inability to acquire adult roles. When a child can't perform adult actions he instead creates a fictitious situation. This situation, Lindqvist writes, is, for Leontiev, the most significant sign of play. Thus play is the sign of the child's inferiority, and hence play is in fact an infantile activity because, as Lindqvist states, from this perspective, the child will gradually grow into the adult world and play is diected toward the future. Moreover, she claims that the implication is a stress on reproduction (of adult roles) at the expense of creativity. Therefore, she attempts to
 reinterpret Vygotsky's play theory, based on his original thoughts in The Psychology of Art, and his inquires (sic) into creativity and imagination. According to Lindqvist, Vygotsky's idesas give rise to a creative pedagogical approach instead of an instrumental one. This is because Vygotsky shows how children interpret and perform their experiences by creating new meaning and how emotions characterize their interpretations, that is, how emotion and thought unit in the process of knowledge construction." (p. 16).
 
Kozulin remarks (on p. 25 of HIS magnificent book, Psychological Tools, on how Leontiev's emphasis on practical activity instead of semiotic tools led him into a kind of "Piagtian program of exploring the internalization of sensorimotor actions". 
 
But it really took Gunilla Lindqvist to point out the terrible consequences that a neo-Piagetian program like Leontiev's might have for children at precisely the age that Piaget called "sensorimotor". 
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 


      
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