>Going back to an earlier point in this conversation on Dewey, Mead
>and Vygotsky: Glassman was quoted as as casting Vygotsky as
>"top-down/determinate". I think that, in comparison with Dewey's
>"inquiry" approach,there are some grounds for this characterization.
>Whereas Dewey emphasized inquiry, with teaching starting from
>students' questions arising from their experiences, Vygotsky does
>seem to be more concerned with students' appropriation of the
>culturally sanctioned definitions of concepts. The following quote
>comes from the chapter on "scientific concepts" in Thinking and
>Speech, and the teacher's role in helping students to master
>scientific concepts. The passage comments on the processes through
>which a student becomes able to correctly answer a question with
>respect to a question in the area of social science.
>What is it that [the child] does when he answers this question taken
>from the social sciences? We think that the operation that the
>school child carries out in solving this problem can be explained in
>the following way. First, the operation has a history. It was not
>constructed during the experiment. The experiment can be seen as a
>final stage in a long process that can only be understood in
>connection with those that precede it. The teacher, working with the
>school child on a given question, explains, informs,inquires,
>corrects, and forces the child himself to explain. All this work on
>concepts, the entire process of their formation is worked out by the
>child in collaboration with the adult in instruction. Now, when the
>child solves a problem, what does it requires of him? It requires
>the ability to imitate and solve the problem with the help of
>teacher even though we do not have an actual situation of
>collaboration at this moment. The situation lies in the past. Here,
>the child must make independent use of the results of that earlier
>collaboration. The fundamental difference between the problem which
>involves everyday concepts and that which involves scientific
>concepts is that the child solves the latter with the teacher's
>help. (1987, pp.215-216).
"Collaboration" here seems to be a rather one-sided affair, with
little opportunity for the student to engage in and draw from
relevant first-hand experience of practical activities in negotiating
the meaning of new concepts. Nevertheless, I had always assumed that
the transmissionary tone of this quote was due to Vygotsky's lack of
personal experience in teaching children in the early school years
(6-10 years) rather than to a strong commitment to a "top-down"
pedagogy.
Whatever Vygotsky may have envisaged, a variety of contemporary
Vygotsky-inspired approaches to the learning and teaching of
scientific concepts (e.g. Brown & Campione, Palincsar et al., Rogoff
et al., Scardamalia & Bereiter) combine "hands-on" investigation with
encounters with discipline-based definitions in a fruitful dialogue.
It seems, therefore, that the Dewey's and Vygotsky's approaches are
complementary rather than mutually exclusive alternatives.
Gordon
-- Gordon Wells Dept of Education, http://education.ucsc.edu/faculty/gwells UC Santa Cruz.
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