RE: [xmca] conservation

["David H Kirshner" <dkirsh@lsu.edu>]

> I can't convince myself that this is entirely a linguistic phenomenon

"Fair" and "not fair," as with "more," "less," and "same," are bound
into a variety of broad cultural practices that could be seen as
absorbing children's responses in these experiments (as in Piaget's
original studies). Gelman (1980) employed the terms "winners" and
"losers" that hearken to cultural practices around games wherein
definitions always are local. Thus in the context of local "game"
practices adopted in her experiments she was able to get results that
contradicted the conservation studies.

David

Gelman, R. (1980). What young children know about numbers. Educational
Psychologist, 15(1), 54-68.



-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of Martin Packer
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 8:52 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] conservation

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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