Re: Word culture
vera p john-steiner (vygotsky who-is-at unm.edu)
Sat, 14 Oct 1995 10:35:27 -0600 (MDT)
Francoise, Ellice, Jay,
Some more on word culture.While reading your messages I am also thinking
about the writing I am doing right now on complementarity in perspectives
and disciplinary training in collaboration (right now between Einstein
and his mathematician friend Grossmann, and between Feynman and Dyson.)
Einstein wrote a lot about patterns and concepts, a relationship which
had, for him, little verbal content. In my Thought and Language class, a
Navajo graduate student has been pushing me hard to break my verbal mode
of teaching, the other members of the class participate, they help me in
broadening the processes of semiotic mediation with the use of
films, diagrams, demonstrations from the
highly iconic ASL metaphors, etc. These current activities highlight for me
the way in which we are mired through class, culture and individual predis-
positions and experiences into a set of dominant semiotic codes.And that
we /I need to be pushed to go beyond a habitual use of them .
Vera
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Vera P. John-Steiner Department of Linguistics
Humanities Bldg. 526
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
(505) 277-6353 or 277-4324
Internet: vygotsky who-is-at triton.unm.edu
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