Re: [xmca] early Vygotsky studies at Chicago

[Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>]

Francine,
My dad (Edward Thompson) was at Chicago's Committee on Human Development in
the 60's (PhD '68) and I recently asked him about whether he recalled
reading Vygotsky, and here is his response:

"As I recall Kohlberg included Vygotsky in one of his classes or somebody
did. I remember reading his [Vygotsky's] work during my time in HD and I
think it was prominently featured although I can’t remember exactly where.
I might even have taken a seminar in which he was featured."

Maybe not the most helpful (for good or for ill, my dad did not stay in
academia!). I sent him your message Francine and will see if that jogs any
memories.

Best,
greg
p.s. I often referred to my advisor, Bert Cohler, as being much like Yoda
(in the original Star Wars, not the light saber toting, flipping, jumping
Yoda of the more recent pre-quels!)



On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 1:01 PM, larry smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> Message from Francine Smolucha:
> Here is a good question - how is that Kohlberg undertook a study of Piaget
> vs. Vygotskyon the social origins of private speech in the 1960's while at
> the U. of Chicago?Kohlberg's doctorate was from the U. of Chicago (1958?)
> with his dissertation on thestages of moral development (based on Piaget's
> book on Moral Judgement). Who wereKohlberg's doctoral advisors at U. C. in
> the 1950's?
> Jacob Getzels was on the faculty there and he had several students who
> went on to becomeVygotskian researchers - Vera John-Steiner, Laura Berk,
> and Francine Smolucha.Getzels, was kind of like Yoda, he didn't give
> directions but rather asked a question.In 1975, I took Getzels' course
> titled Higher Though Processes which included Vygotsky's theory.But, I
> first read Thought and Speech in 1973 in a special topics course on Memory
> and Cognitiontaught by a visiting professor from Cambridge University,
> named Marslen Wilson.
> Marslen Wilson spoke highly of Vygotsky's work and I was intrigued by
> passages in T & S(title mistranslated as the 1962 Thought and Language). I
> found it difficult to follow the 1962 translation of T & S (not knowing
> then that half the paragraphs were randomly omitted.)
> In 1984, as I practiced for the graduate reading exam in Russian, I
> started to translate the Russiantext of T&S and compare it to the only
> English translation available, the 1962 Hanfmann & VakarThought and
> Language MIT Press. What a surprise to find that the only version of T & S
> available had halfthe paragraphs omitted randomly within the text. Finding
> myself correcting the 1962 MIT publication(while still trying to pass my
> Russian exam at the honors level), I decided to look for something really
> interesting to translate and found the Russian text of Vygotsky's 1930
> Imagination and Creativity in Childhood. My husband and I had already
> published our own pioneering research on Creativity as aMaturation of
> Symbolic Play and on creativity as the collaboration of consciously
> directed imagination and analytic thinking. Now, I was translating papers
> by Vygotsky with citations to Theordore Ribotthat made a similar argument.
> In 1986 two complete translations of Thought and Speech were published
> (Kozulin's and Minick's).
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-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Scholar
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
http://ucsd.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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