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

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Very reasonable speculations, Rees. You have access to the writings in
question?
mike

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 3:36 AM, Rod Parker-Rees <
R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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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