[xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Or rather, Monica Nilsson on the magnificent Gunilla Lindvist on Leontiev on play, writing in one of the papers in the current issue of MCA:
 
"Lindqvist is critical of how Vygotsky's successors came to interpret his theory of play. Vygotsky emphasized teh dialectics expressed through the relation between the adult world and the child's world and also between the will and the emotion. She writes that Leontiev sees no tension between the adult world and the child's world and that play, for him, is about a child's inability to acquire adult roles. When a child can't perform adult actions he instead creates a fictitious situation. This situation, Lindqvist writes, is, for Leontiev, the most significant sign of play. Thus play is the sign of the child's inferiority, and hence play is in fact an infantile activity because, as Lindqvist states, from this perspective, the child will gradually grow into the adult world and play is diected toward the future. Moreover, she claims that the implication is a stress on reproduction (of adult roles) at the expense of creativity. Therefore, she attempts to
 reinterpret Vygotsky's play theory, based on his original thoughts in The Psychology of Art, and his inquires (sic) into creativity and imagination. According to Lindqvist, Vygotsky's idesas give rise to a creative pedagogical approach instead of an instrumental one. This is because Vygotsky shows how children interpret and perform their experiences by creating new meaning and how emotions characterize their interpretations, that is, how emotion and thought unit in the process of knowledge construction." (p. 16).
 
Kozulin remarks (on p. 25 of HIS magnificent book, Psychological Tools, on how Leontiev's emphasis on practical activity instead of semiotic tools led him into a kind of "Piagtian program of exploring the internalization of sensorimotor actions". 
 
But it really took Gunilla Lindqvist to point out the terrible consequences that a neo-Piagetian program like Leontiev's might have for children at precisely the age that Piaget called "sensorimotor". 
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 



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