It is partly in this light that I see Eugene's insistence on the
communicative, dyadic, interactive aspect of zoped--in that the impulse to
relationship with others is one of the strongest forces for our reachiong
outward, and conditions all our other forms of activity (consider Judy and
Eugene's interest in transference issues in learning). While I am not
sure whether I would put the same insistence on communications marking the
boundary of zoped learning situations from others, I certainly thinki it
is worth considering the force of human relationships in learning.
Chuck
On Fri, 10 Oct 1997 p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu wrote:
>
>
> Chuck Bazerman wrote:
>
> >I have been following the ZPD strain with great interest, seeing the many
> >illuminating uses made of this concept, originally framed quite narrowly
> >by LSV within the issue of testing individual propensity (possibly
> >transient and situational, and not necessarily a stable capacity)
> >for learning--with all the social, institutional, power correlates that go
> >along with that framing.
>
> And in a related thread David Russell wrote:
>
> >I keep wondering if and how a ZPD is a different (more focused) unit of
> >analysis than an activity system (in or more sense the term is used in
> >CHAT)? If all activity systems (with their participants) are changing, as
> >Engestrom says, how and why might one draw a line between ZPD and Activity
> >System? (Culture?)
>
> I too wonder how ZPD relates to a unit of analysis like activity or
> functional systems. Could it be that many of our questions about negative
> zopeds, the roles of artifacts in forming zopeds, and so on are grounded in
> the original formulation of this notion around questions of how to measure
> individual performance and how to optimize instructional effect by working
> in the child's zone? When I think about its articulation as the difference
> in performance between the child acting independently (the level of actual
> development) and the child acting with some kind of help, it seems to be
> hard to make zoped include on-going development of the more experienced
> peer or adult, two-way influences, the role of artifacts (i.e., as already
> helpers), questions of the impact of destructive and dysfunctional
> interactions, questions of large-scale events (e.g., how would the zoped
> deal with events like Woodstock, or the Promise Keepers Rally in Washington
> D.C., or an urban riot)?
>
> I guess my sense is that the questions people have raised in this thread
> (and the descriptions of individual and social change) are outpacing and
> struggling against a concept formed in a much narrower and more strategic
> fashion (many educational testers today could be challenged by the
> implications of zoped as Vygotsky formulated it and questions of
> teachability are still important to teachers).
>
> Paul Prior
> p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>
>
>