[xmca] The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky

I'm presently reading Daniels, Cole, and Wertsch's (Eds, 2007) Cambridge
Companion to Vygotsky and in the first few chapters have come across some
ideas germane to recent xmca discussions. First, for those who enjoy looking
at intellectual antecedents and influence on LSV's thinking, the
contributors look at LSV in relation to Hegel, Meade, and many others, so
you might want to take a look.

Second, with regard to the discussion on the poverty of lecture-hall college
classes, Bakhurst quotes LSV as follows:

The student educates himself. . . . For present-day education, it is not so
important to teach a certain quantity of knowledge as it is to inculcate the
ability to acquire such knowledge and to make use of it. . . . Where he [the
teacher] acts like a simple pump, filling up students with knowledge, there
he can be replaced with no trouble at all by a textbook, by a dictionary, by
a map, by a nature walk. . . . Where he is simply setting forth
ready-prepared bits and pieces of knowledge, there he has ceased to be a
teacher. Vygotsky, 1926/1997, p. 339) [Educational Psychology, R. Silverman
Trans., Boca Raton, FL: St. Lucie Press.

Add podcast after nature walk and you've got the sort of teaching described
in today's universities in the USA and other locations, as described by
several contributors to this discussion. Eighty-two years later and after a
century of Dewey, and we're still back where we started.

Peter

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Received on Thu May 29 11:04 PDT 2008