Re: [xmca] conservation

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

David, Mike, Jorge...

I do know Margaret Donaldson's book questioning the child's understanding of the researcher's language in conservation and other Piagetian tasks. And just recently Rod mentioned Valerie Walkerdine's work showing how 'more' and 'less' are understood in terms of everyday family practices.

But I show a brief video when I teach this topic in my undergraduate classes; I think it may even have come with Mike's textbook, as an instructor's resource. I watched it again yesterday. In one segment, the adult places one graham cracker in front of the child and two in front of herself, then asks, do you think that we shared those fairly? The child looks mildly offended and says no, because you have two and I have this. The adult then breaks the child's cracker into two pieces! She asks, now is it fair? The child replies, with a big smile, yes, because we both have two!

I can't convince myself that this is entirely a linguistic phenomenon, though differences in word meaning may certainly play a role. There's something perceptual too. At this time in his work, although Vygotsky had died before any conservation tasks were performed, Piaget was still arguing that the child needs to come to appreciate basic dualisms, such as that between appearance and reality. Vygotsky, of course, argues forcefully against this in Thought and Language. How would he have extended the arguments he made about egocentric speech to lack of conversation? Would he have suggested that changing word meaning transforms the child's perception, so a cracker broken in half no longer is perceived as two?

Martin
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