Mile Cole asks:
What about the Vygotsky quote caught your attention/memory David?
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Thanks for asking, Mike.
I've appended the quote, below. In it, Vygotsky articulates what I refer to
as an "enculturationist pedagogy" in which the agenda is to enhance
students' cultural forms of participation. I conceive forms of
participation broadly to include tendencies to relate to others, oneself,
problems, and artifacts in culturally specific ways. In such a pedagogy,
one focuses on supporting the development of the classroom microculture so
that it comes to resemble the target culture with respect to the targetted
forms of participation. Thus individual students "learn" by becoming
enculturated into the evolving classroom microculture, not directly from
the teacher.
I distinguish this enculturationist agenda from a
psychological-constructivist agenda in which the goal is to help students
develop stronger, more viable conceptual structures. This kind of pedagogy
involves making conjectures about students' current understanding and
developing tasks designed to stress the students' current conceptual in
ways that are intended to produce cognitive perturbations leading to
conceptual restructuring. The problem I'm attending to is that the
contemporary discourse of pedagogical reform tends to be integrative,
trying to marry together what I see as quite distinct pedagogical
orientations. The result is that the pedagogical guidance we offer to
teachers has a tendency to be more labored and equivocal than I think it
needs to be. I treasure quotes like this one from Vygotsky because it
speaks clearly, and presses a strong pedagogical agenda.
David Kirshner
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from Vygotsky's Educational Psychology:
From the psychological point of view, the teacher is the director of the
social environment in the classroom, the governor and guide of the
interaction between the educational process and the student. [?] Though the
teacher is powerless to produce immediate effects in the student, he is
all-powerful when it comes to producing direct effects in him through the
social environment. The social environment is the true lever of the
educational process, and the teacher's overall role reduces to adjusting
this lever. [?] Thus, it is that the teacher educates the student by
varying the environment (Vygotsky, 1926/1999, p.49).
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