RE: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit

[Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>]

Many thanks!

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of dkirsh@lsu.edu
Sent: 22 February 2010 13:53
To: XMCA
Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit

Valerie Walkerdine, Mastery of Reason, ch 2.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:27:02
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>; lchcmike@gmail.com<lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit

I wish I could remember where I read about a study which illustrated the cultural construction of 'meaning' through an account of children's use of the word 'more'. Researchers were rather puzzled by the fact that young children often pointed to a smaller quantity of objects when asked to point to the one which was 'more' - after a while they realised that for these children 'more' was particularly associated with mealtimes (can I have some more?) and in this context 'more' was usually less (second portions being smaller than first portions). I think this shows how concepts are inextricably bound up in the language practices of speakers so that the distinction between children 'knowing' about conservation of volume and knowing how to use the word 'more' is delightfully complicated. Some people are willing to argue about whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable as if there is an objective truth out there which could rule on the matter.

The question about frustration v. humiliation reminds me of an interesting paper from 'Early Years' (Licht, Simoni and Perrig-Chiello 2008 - 28,3 235-49) entitled 'Conflict between peers in infancy and toddler age: what do they fight about' in which the authors argue that many conflicts between under 2 year olds which have traditionally been understood as conflicts about ownership can better be understood in terms of frustration at interruption of an activity (e.g. when one child takes away something another child was examining or playing with). Vasu Reddy has also argued (with Colwyn Trevarthen) that very young infants display forms of 'pride' and 'shame' in their social interactions and perhaps these emotions can be understood in terms of satisfaction when experiences correspond with mental models, theories or plans and frustration when they don't - though these 'personal' responses will also be shaped by cultural patterns of behaviour which children will experience both directly, in responses to their actions, and indirectly, observing other people's reactions to other people's actions.

I too am a bit ambivalent about the playworlds approach - at first it felt to me like an intrusion into a space which children should be allowed to own but I can see how it could serve as a form of boundary space between this more (but not entirely) child-owned space and the more public space of social interactions with unfamiliar others. There seems to be a form of trajectory by which children 'develop' from a foetus which can only function with the support of a womb to infants who can only function with the support of familiar others, to children who can only function in a supportive, familiar community (a village), to adults who can function in progressively wider, more public communities, dealing with people with whom they have progressively less shared history. The 'higher' levels of development may not be accessible to all (not all adults feel comfortable giving a presentation to a room full of strangers) but the 'lower' levels remain highly important!

Also, it may be no bad thing to give young children clear signals about the 'oddness' of the cultural context of being at school - always a playworld but not always acknowledged as such!

All the best,

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: 22 February 2010 00:52
To: lchcmike@gmail.com; Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit

First of all, I have a rather stupid question. In the "conservation" studies that Piaget does, when we ask children whether there is more liquid in the taller glass or the shorter glass, how do we know what the question actually means to the children?

Isn't it possible that it might mean "the level is higher"? When I myself check the the mark on the side of a well I usually just think the level is higher. If you asked me in an unguarded moment, I might say, lazily, that somehow there is more or less water in the well (rather than talk about the water table).

I might think that a higher tide mark means that somehow there is "more tide", and if my wife checks the oil or the transmission fluid in the car using a dipstick, I doubt if she considers whether the transmission fluid is conserved (perhaps it is hiding somewhere in the engine)?

So I often wonder, when we think about issues of face, and menace, and even risk, whether these concepts really mean what we mean when we use them. When children worry about "losing face", isn't it the FRUSTRATION component which is dominant and the HUMILIATION component that is secondary? When they consider "risk", is it the consequences of failure that primarily weigh upon them (as they do with us) or is it instead other the initial outlay of bother and effort that is their prime concern?

Of course, at the adult end of development, kids are like us. One of us, Kim Yongho, created some "avatars" out of children's photographs, and found that the third and fourth graders were very happy to have these used in class, but fifth and sixth graders really hated it. Their humiliation is like our humiliation and the consequences of ridicule fall heavily on their consciousnesses. But that's not what we've got in this article; far from it.

In some ways, Gunilla Lindqvist's whole concept of "playworlds" is the very opposite of what we see in the data. Instead of having a tightly circumscribed activity, with a clear beginning and end, in which the principles of an imaginary situation (guileless, shared deceit) and of abstract rules (gratuitious difficulty) hold sway, a kind of carefully bounded "carnival" space where things are turned upside down without in any way impinging on normal relations, Lindqvist actually takes the kids out of doors and has stuff hidden for them to find, and even members of staff dressed as characters hiding in the woods.

When I first read this, I was pretty shocked, because it seemed to me that it's precisely the DELINEATION of gratuitous difficulty from the normal everyday sort that makes it play, and the DIFFERENTIATION of guileless deceit from the manipulative sort that makes it a fictioin as opposed to a lie. It seemed to me that the whole idea of "playworlds" erases this boundary.

Now I am not so sure. It seems to me that in Vygotsky a "social situation" (whether it's the "social situation of development" or the "environment" [среды]) is really a RELATION rather than a physical environment of some kind. After all, children don't seem to link play acting to any particuar physical site; it's a way of being rather than a place to be.

Or rather it's a bunch of different ways of being. Gratuitous difficulty has to reconstruct guileless deceit before it can fully supplant and take over its functions, including its developmental functions.

So school-age children who, in their guileless deceit, successfully play cops and robbers or cowboys and indians or (as my wife did as a girl, Americans vs. communists), are more developed than preschoolers who stick to "socialist realism" ("house", "school", "hospital", or, as one of my students who grew up over a butcher shop used to, "meat market" games). Requiring toys and props and friends to do this represents a lower developmental moment than being able to do it  with nothing but a piece of paper and a pencil.

But in the same way, gratuitous difficulty represents a higher developmental moment than guileless deceit, and soccer, which requires physical mediation, represents a lower developmental moment than chess (which can actually, at a very high level, be played with nothing but a piece of paper).

Not better. But in a developmental sense higher, in the sense that the child who can do the higher can do the lower with great ease, but the child who can do the lower may not be able to do the higher at all.

And also in the sense that if I really think about the well and the tide and the dipstick in the transmission fluid I can see conservation at work, but it would take billions of physically mediated measurements to prove it (and any mismeasurement, at least according to Karl Popper, would force me to start again from zero!)

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Sun, 2/21/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:


From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, February 21, 2010, 10:40 AM


I would add, Rod, in this case, part of what is unusual owing to the nature of the play world this scene is linked to is that the teacher is also a risk taking co-player, in this sense/con-text a peer in the "safe space" of the play where he takes risks that at times made the researcher's practically drop their teeth!! All very difficult to get into a single article.
mike

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Rod Parker-Rees < R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:

> I wonder how gratuitous the gratuitous difficulties introduced in play
> really are - if we see play as being (among other things) a way of
> organising, calibrating and revising our 'mental models' or theories
> about how the world works, these added difficulties can be seen as a
> strategy for testing the range of applicability of the model or of
> monitoring how it works in new situations. Bruner wrote about how
> adults 'up the ante' in their interactions with developing children,
> adjusting their level of support as children are able to take over
> more of a shared task and this aspect of play may be a way by which
> children can up their own ante. It is now easier to recognise that the
> relationship between child and adult is not 'one-way' - that even
> babies play a part in educating their parents, training them to
> develop mutually acceptable ways of interacting and one of the
> advantages of introducing 'guileless deceit' into play is that it
> affords opportunities for 'dressing up' in social practices associated
> with negotiation of interests. If maternal love serves to modify
> aspects of mothers' social monitoring (the 'love is blind' argument
> made by Fonagy, Gergely and Target  on p. 298 of their article 'The
> parent-infant dyad and the construction of the subjective self') this
> may provide a 'safe space' in which infants can play their way into
> social processes and indeed babies do appear to take on much more
> active, co-creating roles when playing with more familiar partners.
> Even playing at deceit may be considerably more risky when one's
> partner is less well known - familiarity provides a degree of security which allows social risk taking to be thrilling rather than frightening.
>
> In the context of the playworlds paper, these children (and their
> teacher) are having to work out a space between friendship and the
> more formal, managed relationships between children and teacher to
> identify how much scope there really is for children to shape the
> future course of their activity. The question for me is how children
> can be helped to make the step from negotiation of play planning among
> peers to this more sophisticated way of 'playing the game', which
> involves awareness of the teacher's interests and constraints so that
> these can be negotiated. It seems to me that a factor which would
> support this transition would be the degree to which the children know
> the teacher, not only as a teacher (role-holder) but also as a person
> - what he likes and dislikes, how he reacts to teasing and challenging, how willing he is to respond to children's suggestions etc.
> Playing social games is supported by familiar 'more competent others'
> and develops skills which allow us to engage in interactions with less
> familiar, less congenial 'adversaries'.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
> On Behalf Of David Kellogg
> Sent: 20 February 2010 21:55
> To: xmca
> Subject: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit
>
> Very well, let me try to take the play discussion in a rather new
> direction. So far we've mostly discussed how play manages to highlight
> the different e-motions of very young children and mostly speculated
> about how this might be developmental.
>
> In some ways it seems to me that the article is rather poorly suited
> to this view. First of all, the actual data is not play per se but
> only preparation for play. One can easily imagine this play taking
> place without this preparation and therefore it doesn't seem a necessary component.
>
> Secondly, even if we accept the preplay discussion as a necessary
> stage of this form of play, it's not clear to me how e-motion is a
> necessary part of the resolution of the discussion. One can easily
> imagine the discussion being resolved without reference to friendship or best friends, etc.
>
> But take the following dialogue, from our third grade textbook:
>
> Minsu: I like apples.
> Julie: I don't like apples.
> (Minsu's mother turns the plate so Julie can see some fresh Keobong
> grapes)
> Julie: Grapes! I like grapes.
> Minsu: I don't like ...
>
> When we ask the kids to continue the dialogue (either as "volleyball"
> or "pingpong" they will go like this for hours. They will not stick to
> the concept of 'fruit' either (we don't teach the word fruit, because
> it presents a very difficult plural in English). They will extend the
> use of the verb to virtually any field of experience, at hand or not.
>
> In fact, the verb "like" turns out to be BY FAR the preferred verb in
> third grade; the verb which is most likely to be used when we put the
> kids in teams or groups and ask them to improvise on ANY dialogue.
> This is strange, because it's not at all frequent in the material we teach.
>
> So I want to suggest two ways in which play per se requires emotion
> and in particular requires not only emotion but the mastery of
> emotion. The first we can call the principle of Gratuitious
> Difficulty, that is, the introduction of extraneous problems and
> unnecessary rules whose only apparent purpose is to complicate the
> game, rather like the introduction of obstacles between the hero and the goal in a story.
>
> The second we can call the principle of  Guileless or Guiltless
> Deceit, that is, the introduction of a conceit, or an imaginary
> situation which is shared but also contested in some way. I want to
> suggest that these two principles are common to all forms of play, but
> not the preplay activity which the article is concerned with.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
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