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

[ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org]

David:

I believe your assumption that crisis can be avoided is false. Development 
be it at the micro or societal level requires crisis for movement. 
Irreversible time provides for a three year old that has already 
incorporated numerous neopeptide connections and that the mentalization 
they bring to the table is unavoidable.  Crisis moves this forward.  In 
the Fonagy article he is most interested in those individuals who lack 
solid attachments and believes therapies for that individual need to focus 
on their ability to "mentalize".  Obviously the intervention is as gentle 
as possible but it still needs to incorpate stress. 

Stress is good and without it humans would not have achieved the 
technologic advances available today.  Different country's cultures 
exhibit this stress in different guises.  I believe your example is 
beautifully illustrative of this difference.

eric




David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
02/04/2010 08:36 PM
Please respond to "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"

 
        To:     Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
        cc: 
        Subject:        Re: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making 
sense and made sense


A couple of days ago I had dinner with my former grad student, his wife, 
and their six year old daughter. Yeonhui is still in kindergarten, but her 
library is about half the size of her Dad's and when I asked her if she'd 
read them all, she said yes. I looked to see if I had read any of them. 
They were mostly cartoon books done in the Japanese "anime" style that 
school kids here love. But there was the Iliad, and of the Odyssey, lots 
of Korean history, and a series of "Why?" books covering the science 
curriculum, from how the Northern Lights work to why a fuel cell produces 
water. 
 
It wasn't just that she'd learned to read at home; that's not unusual in 
Korean children, thanks to the great learnability of the alphabet and the 
consistent fit with spoken language. It only takes between three hours 
(for an adult) and three days (for a child) to learn the alphabet. Then, 
if you know the spoken language, every printed text seems to open up like 
a blossom and speak in response to your gaze. Only in Korean is it really 
true that "When you know the notes to sing, you sing most anything!" 
 
Yeonhui had also mastered the "honorific" forms of speech which Korean 
kids have to use with their teachers and with adult strangers. During 
dinner, while her father and I spoke in English, she did not become bored 
or demand attention; she listened for a while and then found objects 
around the room to amuse herself with, tuning out the TV screen in the 
restaurant in almost exactly the same way as she tuned out our meaningless 
chatter in English.
 
Of course, it's tempting to see all of these phenomena as related. After 
all, Vygotsky predicts, in the chapter on learning and development in Mind 
in Society, that preschool education when it is properly organized may be 
able to guide children's thinking in conceptual directions much earlier 
than we now think possible. But of course what has really happened in 
South Korea is a prolepsis of a different kind; the tasks, the tools, and 
even the discourse of the school environment are introduced (in a 
non-threatening but nevertheless quite insistent way) into the home 
environment.
 
Last Saturday we had thesis proposals, and one of the grads made a very 
interesting proposal for studying the transition between elementary school 
English (which tends to be play-centred) and middle school English (which 
is much more test-based). Like many attempts to study this transition, the 
underlying assumption was the Leontievian one, that under ideal conditions 
this transition could be made crisis free (by streamlining the 
vocabularies, grammatical syllabi, etc, and introducing the new format of 
testing with famliar phrases.). 
 
It seems to me that the STRUCTURES of discourse in primary school and in 
middle school are always going to be (and probably should be) different in 
kind, just as the structures of home discourse and school discourse 
are. If we want to make the child's structural transition trauma-free (or, 
more realistically, crisis-ridden but minimally traumatic) then it seems 
to me that there are two choices.
 
Either we proleptically introduce the new material in the familiar 
psychological forms (as Yeonhui's parents have introduced her to reading 
and writing), by introducing a lot of our middle school vocabulary in the 
form of role plays and games right in middle school. Or (what I think of 
as the Baby Einstein solution, though it is really found throughout 
on-line learning programmes) we retroleptically stunt the child's progress 
by dumbing down the new, innovative forms of middle school discourse 
(especially the testing genres) to the old content and thereby rendering 
all restructuring otiose and unnecessary. Two choices, but only one worth 
choosing.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Thu, 2/4/10, Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca> wrote:


From: Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca>
Subject: Re: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between 
making sense and made sense
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, February 4, 2010, 9:53 AM


Hello Eric, Rod and others
Eric I also want to bring this article, Rod's article, and other 
perspectives on the parenting relationship into dialogue with CHAT 
perspectives.  Attachment theory points to early bonding as a central 
foundation for further developmental elaborations.  How do others view the 
relation of these early experiences to higher mediated mental 
functioning.  Also, do our institutional structures facilitate or 
frustrate these relational patterns.  In elementary schools these 
developmental questions have a huge impact on pedagogical discourse but it 
is often assumed children arrive at school having "integrated" the 
tensions of these developmental functions when in fact these parent-infant 
dyad's (and triads) are continuing to be in tension with school norms and 
roles (which often have a monological conduit metaphor of pedagogy).  It 
is the "fit" and "tension" between the different sociocultural practices 
between intimate home structures and the more
 "detached" focus on "authoritative" communication patterns of "received" 
pedagogy that I think lead to experiences of futility for many students.  
Rod's article mentions in passing the issue of VULNERABILITY in various 
institutional structures such as schools.  Attachment theory has a lot to 
say about these patterns of vulnerability.
What do others think about early parent-infant relational patterns and 
pedagogy
Larry

----- Original Message -----
From: ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org
Date: Thursday, February 4, 2010 7:46 am
Subject: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between 
making sense and made sense
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

> Hello all:
> 
> This fonagy article should be brought into the discussion 
> pertaining to 
> the parent infant relationship.  It was briefly touched 
> upon a short time 
> ago but not really discussed in depth.
> 
> http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/Mail/xmcamail.2009_12.dir/pdfu8DjDXTWQv.pdf
> 
> eric
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
> Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
> 02/03/2010 04:31 AM
> Please respond to "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
> 
>  
>         
> To:     "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" 
> <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>        cc: 
>         
> Subject:        RE: [xmca] 
> Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense 
> and made sense
> 
> 
> David, 
> 
> I don't think I am all that optimistic about the ways in which 
> technology 
> is still transforming the relationship between 'individuals' and 
> their 
> cultural ecology. I am interested in the ways in which 
> communication at a 
> distance depends on a sophisticated internalisation of 'primary' 
> aspects 
> of communication - I have never met you but I have a set of 
> assumptions 
> about how you are likely to respond to things I type. What makes 
> me less 
> optimistic is the feeling that 'remote' communication might be 
> eating into 
> the time which people have available for the more intimate, face 
> to face 
> and body to body forms of communication (I mean picking up on 
> cues about 
> feelings which are expressed in vocal tension, gesture, gaze 
> direction 
> etc.). If we see communication more and more in terms of a 
> trading in 
> symbols rather than a sharing of sense (co-creation of common 
> meanings 
> with all the tangles of emotional and corporeal connotations) 
> then I see a 
> risk of social dis-integration. On the other hand, I can see 
> myself as an 
> old chimpanzee grumbling that the newfangled use of speech means 
> that 
> people don't do as much fur grooming and nit-picking as they 
> used to - and 
> I can see in my own children that the massive increase in symbol-
> trading 
> has not turned them into social isolates, they still manage to 
> get on fine 
> with friends when they do meet up and they seem to enjoy meeting 
> up every 
> bit as much as I do.
> 
> I came across a lovely analogy on the 'Edge' website recently - 
> http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_2.html ; George Dyson writes 
> about the difference between Aleut kayak building 
> (gather pieces of driftwood, bone etc, tie it all together to 
> make a frame 
> and then stretch skins over it to make a boat) and Tlingit 
> dugout canoes 
> (take a tree trunk and remove as much as you can until a boat is 
> left). 
> Dyson argues that we used to take an Aleutian approach to 
> information, 
> assembling arguments from scarce and hard won pieces of 
> information but 
> that we may now need to focus more on digging arguments out of 
> the mass of 
> information available to us. We have to chop out the spam, the 
> reality TV 
> etc. to make something useful, elegant and pleasing from the 
> mass of stuff 
> at our disposal.
> 
> Stories for children is a whole other thing! Written, published, 
> sold and 
> bought by adults, even though the stories may be already well 
> within the 
> common domain, they tell us more about adults' anxieties about 
> childhood 
> than about what children are interested in. All the arguments 
> about 'age 
> appropriate material' seem to miss the crucial fact that when an 
> adult 
> shares a book with a child the book is a tool to support, frame 
> and 
> pattern interaction, not a chest of meanings to be delivered 
> from the page 
> to the child's mind! The scary bits of fairy tales (child-
> killing, eating 
> of people, cutting stomachs open etc.) provide opportunities for 
> a child 
> to experience horrific situations while safely cuddled up with 
> an adult 
> who can offer reassurance and safety - if any possibility of 
> upset is 
> edited out (I remember versions of 'Little Red Riding Hood' in 
> which she 
> jumps onto a wardrobe rather than being eaten by the wolf) 
> children will 
> not have the opportunity to enjoy the experience of 
> contemplating danger 
> from a safe vantage point.
> 
> I have just been teaching a group using Merlin Donald and Steven 
> Mithen's 
> arguments about the importance of mimesis as a kind of 'missing 
> link' 
> between prelinguistic and later ways of making sense of the 
> world and I 
> think Donald's sections on 'mythic culture' have a lot to say 
> about how 
> information has a very different status for oral cultures (if 
> the stories 
> are not retold, the accumulated knowledge of the group is lost) 
> and for 
> literate ones. For children the structure and patterning of 
> stories seem 
> to be at least as important as the details of their content - 
> surprise is 
> fun but knowing what to expect is comforting.
> 
> Apologies for a rambling response.
> 
> Rod
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-
> bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On 
> Behalf Of David Kellogg
> Sent: 02 February 2010 22:37
> To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision 
> between 
> making sense and made sense
> 
> Rod (not "Rees", Mike!):
>  
> Thanks for your note. One of my grads is using your work in her 
> work--she's interested in the extraordinary difference we've 
> discovered 
> between the creativity of language (in this case, the 
> GRAMMATICAL 
> creativity of SECOND language) in primary intersubjectivity 
> (which as we 
> all know is the leading edge of first language development) and 
> secondary 
> intersubjectivity (which appears, in some important ways, to 
> lead in 
> second language development). She's trying to operationalize 
> alot of what 
> you said about creativity in your recent article (which you 
> kindly posted 
> for us here) by using Tomasello's neat distinction between fixed 
> expressions, item-based "combinations", and what she calls 
> abstract 
> creative constructions. 
>  
> I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as you are about the ability of 
> new 
> technological means to make a big difference in the way we 
> think. Perhaps 
> this is true of technological means of production, both because 
> the actual 
> increase in production impacts people's lives in the short run 
> and, in the 
> long run, the DECREASE in SURPLUS value produced leads 
> inexorably to a 
> fall in the rate of profit. Both of these are material 
> constraints on the 
> way we think.
>  
>  
> It seems to me that the issue you raise, when you talk about how 
> the 
> ability to store track changes, is not a difference in 
> production, but 
> rather a way in which the very distinction between text and 
> discourse 
> (which I have made such hay out of) is starting to disappear, 
> and with it 
> the distinction between sense and meaning (which Vygotsky, in 
> his day, 
> also made hay with). If the visible trace of a discourse is 
> infinitely 
> malleable, unfinalizeable, then it is no longer the trace of a 
> discourse; 
> it's the discourse itself. There is ONLY outside text, and no 
> actual text.
>  
> You suggest that this might lead to making literature more 
> porous to 
> children's responses; we might actually get a child literature 
> instead of 
> a children's lit, that is, something that is written as well as 
> read by 
> kids the way that, say, Russian literature is written by 
> Russians but read 
> by the whole world. 
>  
> But you also admit, and it seems to me that this more 
> likely, that this 
> child literature might get lost in the flood of adult drivel, 
> exactly the 
> way that child motives, child aims, child goals for play are 
> completely 
> ignored in Leontiev (or, to take a more immediate example, the 
> way that 
> e-mail has been strangled by spam, television throttled by 
> 'reality TV', 
> the cinema devestated by the 'blockbuster', etc.)  
>  
> To me, that's just why Lindqvist's critique of Leontiev is so 
> important. 
> Here is a man around whom the entire world changed, touched, or 
> at least 
> brushed, by the greatest genius in child psychology of the 
> twentieth 
> century, a man who then looked both ways and produced a "theory" 
> of play 
> that is essentially no different from what Piaget comes up with 
> in "Play, 
> Imitation, and Dreams": play is essentiallly assimilative and 
> only labor 
> has accomodational potential. For Piaget, that is almost 
> synonymous with 
> creative potential. But then why create, if the result is the 
> same old 
> drivel?
>  
> I have on my desk a version of "Goldilocks" by James Marshall, 
> which, I am 
> reliably informed by the cover, won the Caldecott medal, was  a 
> 'pick of 
> the lists' for American Bookseller, and an ALA notable book. We 
> are told 
> that it is an offbeat and inventive retelling of the story tht 
> will 
> "enchant readers young and old" (a nice tip, that; they are 
> going to aim 
> at two audiences, the paying and the non-paying. I wonder who 
> will get 
> priority?)
>  
> Now, the original story of the Three Bears, by Robert Southey, 
> is not 
> about Goldilocks at all; it's really about three bears  (all 
> male; it's 
> not a family) who resist the intruder, a rude, mannerless old 
> crone, who 
> is collared by the local bailiff for vagrancy. Like most tales 
> of its time 
> (1838) it's a pretty vicious anti-working class diatribe (the 
> Lake Poets, 
> including Southey, were what we would call neo-Cons today). But 
> the 
> Marshall version is not at all "off beat" and it's nowhere near 
> as 
> inventive or appealing as the original, of which it is 
> apparently unaware. 
> The funniest it gets is when baby bear tastes the porridge and 
> says "I'm 
> dying" at which Mama Bear suggests "That's quite enough. Let's 
> go for a 
> walk." 
>  
> Part of the problem is precisely this unawareness, this loss of 
> track 
> changes. Of course, we all know that it is perfectly possible to 
> understand the original of something through the parody. Many of 
> us have 
> read Don Quixote without reading Amadis de Gaul, and more of us 
> know 
> Goldilocks as a heroine than as a villain. 
>  
> But parody is always a very BACKWARD looking understanding; in 
> many ways 
> like the replacement of sense with meaning of which you speak 
> (meaning 
> SUBSUMES sense, but in so doing a lot of the vigor and 
> liveliness and 
> directness of sense is lost). And when the original is entirely 
> lost sight 
> of, the child has sacrificed sense and gained no meaning in 
> return; we 
> have somehow managed to produce disenchantment without having 
> any 
> enchantment in the first place.
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
> 
> --- On Tue, 2/2/10, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-
> Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision 
> between 
> making sense and made sense
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 3:36 AM
> 
> 
> 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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