I had half promised to say something about the middle childhood school
maths section of your paper -- but I'm afraid that I'm not much more
updated than you are, having more or less closed my ear in that direction
after finishing my dissertation in 96. There would, I suspect, be
references to add as concerns actual classroom application of the stuff you
mention -- by the way, shouldn't Maggie Lampert be mentioned somewhere in
that context. And you're not taking up the aspects of gender and of power,
which you could do by means of Valerie Walkerdine. But... you know that
already, don't you?
My main reaction to the chapter was how you are navigating within a
worldview of cognitive abilities and processes -- which presumably is from
where your readers come to the book(?) -- and try to nudge the ship into
more sociocultural waters. The social practice of intelligence and
scholastic aptitude testing looms large and heavy... I do hope your text
can teach some readers how not to run aground on those rocks.
But, then I do wonder how much you need the talk about abilities et al. in
order to make yourself heard? What, for example, is the "display" of
metacognition in the quote below? Among the practices of schooling is the
practice of talking ABOUT cognitive activities... and with schooling
children adopt some of this practice, right? Thinking, knowing, learning
become possible topics of talk, and there's an appropriatable repertory of
ways of talking about them... well, you ALMOST say so, but in a vocabulary
that isn't quite consistent.
Hope this topic survives the current gremlin upheavals.
Eva
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http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Cole/chp13.html
Metacognitive skills
Schooling appears to influence the ability to reflect on and talk about
one's own thought processes (Luria, 1976; Rogoff, 1981; Tulviste, 1991).
When children have been asked to explain how they arrived at the answer to
a problem or what they did to make themselves remember something, those who
have not attended school are likely to say something like "I did what my
sense told me" or to offer no explanation at all. Schoolchildren seem
better able to describe the mental activities and logic that underpin their
cognitive activities. In other words, they display metacognition.