Re: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense and made sense

[Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca>]

Hi Rod
I just finished reading your article "Liking to be liked: imitation, familiarity, and pedagogy in the first years of life" and I want to support the spirit and trajectory of  its message as summarized in the last paragraph of the article.
"Conversing" starts with babies imitating movements and recognizing when their own movements are being imitated and has a powerful affiliative effect that binds people together socially and gratifies them emotionally. You reference Kinsbourne who suggests "this EMOTION function of 'entrained' or coordinated interaction developed BEFORE the emergence of language; we danced together and sang together well before we started to talk to each other" (P.14)
Rod, 
you are challenging the prevalent notion of pedagogy as the SYSTEMATIZING approach to the assembly and profiling of individual intellectual abilities and offering an alternative model of pedagogy that is RECIPROCAL and delights in the company of other people which should be at the heart of intentional pedagogy. 
This dualistic framing of pedagogy reminds me of Wertsch explanation of Bakhtin's dialogical theory of communication.(in Voices of the Mind)  Your concept of systematizing seems similar to the TRANSMISSION model of communication which uses the metaphor of the CONDUIT as the sender packaging thoughts and transmitting this information to the receiver who decodes the message.  This process emphasizes an "authoritative" and "certain" voice in the transmission of the "received" culture. Wertsch points out this type of communication can be either accepted or rejected but novelty and interpretation is not invited.  In contrast to this monological style of communication Bakhtin's alternative dialogical approach delights in the company of other people and GENERATES new and novel meanings.
Rod what your research points to is the sense of "intersubjectivity" (as an affective psychological process) that is experienced when the focus is not on systematizing information but rather delighting in the company of others.
Your descriptions of how "expert" early childhood researchers often take on an authoritative certainty which dismisses this  intimate parental-child delight in each others company is also a process which often happens in school systems. The schools models of pedagogy puts authoritative systematic instruction and transmission of knowledge (monological) at the heart of their institutional practices and Discourses and leaves little space for dialogical conversations and the generation of novelty and new meanings.
Rod what is your position on "attachment" theory as many of your themes seem to point to insights that attachment theorists are exploring but your bibliography does not reference this approach.  I know attachment theory often focuses on the individual's emergence and I was wondering if that is the reason.  However, as in many other areas of the human studies, some attachment theorists are attempting to see the person as fundamentally situated in sociocultural relations from the very beginning.  Your paper is exploring many of the same questions as attachment theory and this theory is having a revival in some discourses. 
I also am trying to understand the dynamic relation of the early developmental functions as outlined in your paper with the higher mental functions (the use of representational tools as mediating means. Wertsch p. 20)  My sense is the tools and mediation transform our relationship to these earlier ways of organizing experience BUT these earlier patterns continue to exist and are in dialectical tension with the higher mental functions. Therefore the relational patterns that are formed in the infant years continue to be reflected in later mediated patterns and structures. When I work in schools as a counsellor I often am in a position where I am called on to support a student (or adult) who must first "come to rest" from emotional turmoil before they are able to enter into a mediated teacher/learner engagement.
Larry

----- Original Message -----
From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010 9:28 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense and made sense
To: lchcmike@gmail.com, Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

> It's this one, Mike!
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
> 
> --- On Tue, 2/2/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision 
> between making sense and made sense
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 8:53 PM
> 
> 
> I not only reesENTLY mis represented Rod's name, David, i missed the
> article you are talking about?
> 
> Was it sent to xmca?
> 
> Rod, do you have a web page or some place we can access your work??
> mud
> 
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:36 PM, David Kellogg 
> <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:
> > Rod (not "Rees", Mike!):
> >
> > Thanks for your note. One of my grads is using your work in 
> her work--she's
> > interested in the extraordinary difference we've discovered 
> between the
> > creativity of language (in this case, the GRAMMATICAL 
> creativity of SECOND
> > language) in primary intersubjectivity (which as we all know 
> is the leading
> > edge of first language development) and secondary 
> intersubjectivity (which
> > appears, in some important ways, to lead in second language 
> development).> She's trying to operationalize alot of what you 
> said about creativity in
> > your recent article (which you kindly posted for us here) by using
> > Tomasello's neat distinction between fixed expressions, item-based
> > "combinations", and what she calls abstract creative constructions.
> >
> > I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as you are about the ability 
> of new
> > technological means to make a big difference in the way we 
> think. Perhaps
> > this is true of technological means of production, both 
> because the actual
> > increase in production impacts people's lives in the short run 
> and, in the
> > long run, the DECREASE in SURPLUS value produced leads 
> inexorably to a fall
> > in the rate of profit. Both of these are material constraints 
> on the way we
> > think.
> >
> >
> > It seems to me that the issue you raise, when you talk about 
> how the
> > ability to store track changes, is not a difference in 
> production, but
> > rather a way in which the very distinction between text and 
> discourse (which
> > I have made such hay out of) is starting to disappear, and 
> with it the
> > distinction between sense and meaning (which Vygotsky, in his 
> day, also made
> > hay with). If the visible trace of a discourse is infinitely 
> malleable,> unfinalizeable, then it is no longer the trace of a 
> discourse; it's the
> > discourse itself. There is ONLY outside text, and no actual text.
> >
> > You suggest that this might lead to making literature more 
> porous to
> > children's responses; we might actually get a child literature 
> instead of a
> > children's lit, that is, something that is written as well as 
> read by kids
> > the way that, say, Russian literature is written by Russians 
> but read by the
> > whole world.
> >
> > But you also admit, and it seems to me that this more likely, 
> that this
> > child literature might get lost in the flood of adult drivel, 
> exactly the
> > way that child motives, child aims, child goals for play are 
> completely> ignored in Leontiev (or, to take a more immediate 
> example, the way that
> > e-mail has been strangled by spam, television throttled by 
> 'reality TV', the
> > cinema devestated by the 'blockbuster', etc.)
> >
> > To me, that's just why Lindqvist's critique of Leontiev is so 
> important.> Here is a man around whom the entire world changed, 
> touched, or at least
> > brushed, by the greatest genius in child psychology of the twentieth
> > century, a man who then looked both ways and produced a 
> "theory" of play
> > that is essentially no different from what Piaget comes up 
> with in "Play,
> > Imitation, and Dreams": play is essentiallly assimilative and 
> only labor has
> > accomodational potential. For Piaget, that is almost 
> synonymous with
> > creative potential. But then why create, if the result is the 
> same old
> > drivel?
> >
> > I have on my desk a version of "Goldilocks" by James Marshall, 
> which, I am
> > reliably informed by the cover, won the Caldecott medal, was  
> a 'pick of the
> > lists' for American Bookseller, and an ALA notable book. We 
> are told that it
> > is an offbeat and inventive retelling of the story tht will 
> "enchant readers
> > young and old" (a nice tip, that; they are going to aim at two 
> audiences,> the paying and the non-paying. I wonder who will get 
> priority?)>
> > Now, the original story of the Three Bears, by Robert Southey, 
> is not about
> > Goldilocks at all; it's really about three bears  (all male; 
> it's not a
> > family) who resist the intruder, a rude, mannerless old crone, 
> who is
> > collared by the local bailiff for vagrancy. Like most tales of 
> its time
> > (1838) it's a pretty vicious anti-working class diatribe (the 
> Lake Poets,
> > including Southey, were what we would call neo-Cons today). 
> But the Marshall
> > version is not at all "off beat" and it's nowhere near as 
> inventive or
> > appealing as the original, of which it is apparently unaware. 
> The funniest
> > it gets is when baby bear tastes the porridge and says "I'm 
> dying" at which
> > Mama Bear suggests "That's quite enough. Let's go for a walk."
> >
> > Part of the problem is precisely this unawareness, this loss 
> of track
> > changes. Of course, we all know that it is perfectly possible 
> to understand
> > the original of something through the parody. Many of us have 
> read Don
> > Quixote without reading Amadis de Gaul, and more of us know 
> Goldilocks as a
> > heroine than as a villain.
> >
> > But parody is always a very BACKWARD looking understanding; in 
> many ways
> > like the replacement of sense with meaning of which you speak 
> (meaning> SUBSUMES sense, but in so doing a lot of the vigor and 
> liveliness and
> > directness of sense is lost). And when the original is 
> entirely lost sight
> > of, the child has sacrificed sense and gained no meaning in 
> return; we have
> > somehow managed to produce disenchantment without having any 
> enchantment in
> > the first place.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> > --- On Tue, 2/2/10, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-
> Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> >
> > From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
> > Subject: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision 
> between> making sense and made sense
> > To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 3:36 AM
> >
> >
> > I have always been struck by Vygotsky's reference (in 'The 
> development of
> > higher mental functions') to the collision between the 
> creative meaning
> > making of children and the created meanings available to them 
> in the culture
> > in which they swim:
> >
> > "The very essence of cultural development is in the collision 
> of mature
> > cultural forms of behaviour with the primitive forms that 
> characterise the
> > child's behaviour." (not sure about the translation here).
> >
> > For me it is the active making of sense which each new generation
> > contributes which keeps the 'made sense' of culture alive and 
> responsive to
> > changing circumstances. There is also an argument that the 
> made culture
> > feeds back into the process in that oral cultures tend to be 
> much more
> > conservative, keen to maintain and preserve their lore, than 
> literate> cultures which can rely on books to 'keep track' of 
> changes and allow us to
> > go back if we find that changes don't work out too well. New 
> technologies> which allow massive amounts of information to be 
> stored, including endless
> > versions with all their 'track changes' annotations and 
> commentaries should
> > make us more open to the sparks struck by collisions with children's
> > 'outsider' perspective but I wonder whether they might also 
> tend to exclude
> > these 'naïve' contributions, much as literacy tends to shut 
> out the
> > preliterate and the illiterate.
> >
> > All the best,
> >
> > Rod
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-
> bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> > Behalf Of David Kellogg
> > Sent: 02 February 2010 05:24
> > To: xmca
> > Subject: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play
> >
> > 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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>       
e generation of novelty
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