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Re: [xmca] Is the Transition from "Roaming" to "Scanning" Developmental?
David,
you mention that the next step in development is written language as the process of the "disembodiment of meaning". I wonder what types of institutional structures create the contexts that will facilitate the emergence of this new "disembodied" relation to meaning.
How secure does Andrew feel in the " traditional institutional structure" of school.
As a counsellor working in school settings I've observed over and over with many "anxious" students who are roaming the classroom to stay connected [much like Andrew] that there is not the affective climate [for a particular student] to refocus on learning to write.
My introducing the notion of a "lifeworld" is pointing to a suggestion that learning to write [and developing a disembodied relation to meaning] requires a developmental situation that is relational and supports Andrew to stay connected to the other students and teacher. Until these relational patterns of connection are established [or he develops a more encapsulated individuated identity that can navigate rationalized institutional systems] learning to write may not be a priority for Andrew.
David I don't want to assume that learning to write cannot be done in a relational lifeworld conext [not an either/or tension] but that depends on the types of school "traditions" that we historically develop.
Nietzsche, in talking about traditions and institutional structures said
"The overthrow of beliefs is not immediately followed by the overthrow of institutions; rather the new beliefs live for a long time in the now desolated and eerie house of their predecessors, which they themselves preserve, because of the housing shortage."
I believe we could create institutional structures that are both nurturing and develop writing but it requires examining the rationalized systems and the presuppositions that keep the traditional beliefs of the purpose of school alive.
Larry
----- Original Message -----
From: Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, May 15, 2010 4:03 am
Subject: Re: [xmca] Is the Transition from "Roaming" to "Scanning" Developmental?
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> D
>
> It may be a forced "development", insofar as Andrew would never
> be able to
> roam the class physically, that much is clear. We don't for
> example know if
> his language changed from home to school.How much of the other
> children'slanguage was he constructing? Insofar as this was
> qualitative research,
> David is correct in his analysis of the flaw.
>
> My sister learned Icelandic by watching Icelandic subtitles of
> mainly German
> films when her second child was newborn.
>
> Carol
>
> On 15 May 2010 08:55, David Kellogg
> <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > The Seoul subway has installed televisions on most cars for
> public service
> > announcements, but they are silent and subtitled. The
> subtitles go by pretty
> > fast, and the announcers are usually young and extremely
> attractive (in a
> > blooming, refreshing, corn-fed, healthy but quite unsexy way
> that reminds me
> > of my own students).
> >
> > So I often find myself concentrating on the features of the
> speaker, and
> > trying to lip-read rather than struggling with the text. After
> only a few
> > journeys, I began to discover certain things about Korean
> sentence structure
> > that I had pretty much ignored in both my speaking and my reading.
> >
> > One is that every Korean utterance tends to end with an
> INTERPERSONAL> element. Grammatically, this marked by the
> presence or absence of an
> > honorific at the end of the verb (and thus the end of the
> sentence). But
> > visuallly, it is usually marked by a smile (informal) or a
> slight bow
> > (formal). Where particles in middle of the sentence contain
> epistemic or
> > deontic elements, you see pretty much the same thing.
> >
> > Now, the way I discovered this was to IMAGINE the intonation
> without any of
> > the grammar or vocabulary while trying to "lipread" and
> checking my
> > hypotheses against the subtitles. In other words, intonation
> and facial
> > expression represents a kind of "internalization" of the external
> > grammatical markers.
> >
> > This internalization is less complete in women and young
> people and more
> > complete in men and elderly people; that is, women and young
> people tend to
> > rely more on intonation and facial expression to convey the
> interpersonal> element of their speech and the less telegenic
> men and older people tend to
> > rely on grammar and vocabulary.
> >
> > Marilyn Fleer and Marianne Hedegaard, in their article, appear
> to assume
> > that Andrew's replacement of "roaming" behavior by "scanning"
> behavior is a
> > similar instance of development. Bodily displacement has been
> "internalized"> by the displacement of eye contact.
> >
> > The problem I have with this extremely intriguing idea is that
> it appears
> > to me to be, like my own discovery of the connection between facial
> > expression and grammatical honorifics, a step sideways rather
> than forwards;
> > I can't see how it will lead to WRITTEN LANGUAGE, which seems
> to me to be
> > the real next step in the disembodiment of meaning, both for
> me and for
> > Andrew.
> >
> > I guess this is related to what I see as the chief THEORETICAL
> flaw in the
> > article, which is the interpretation of "social situation of
> development" in
> > a rather objectivist "community of practice" sense rather than
> a semiotic
> > one. I note that there is no actual verbal data from Andrew at
> all, and only
> > one page of verbal data from his mother.
> >
> > It seems to me that life is full of nonadaptive sidesteps, and
> classroom> life is especially so. For hundreds of years, it was
> assumed that
> > translation was a step forward in foreign language learning;
> the mapping of
> > foreign sounds onto native word meanings represented the
> acquisition of
> > vocabulary. This is undoubtedly true in many cases, and it may
> be truer as
> > we move upwards, towards more universal concepts. But in every
> language> there are certain core structures (e.g. tenses and
> articles and so on) which
> > are untranslatable, and the attempt to translate them only
> leads to trouble.
> >
> > Now, the current dogma is that it's better to GESTURE than to
> TRANSLATE. I
> > am unconvinced. The mind is an economical thing; and it seems
> to me to
> > likely that I will remember the gesture and the pragmatic
> circumstance and
> > not the word or the semantic meaning, just as I understand and
> remember the
> > English and forget the Korean when I translate.
> >
> > It seems to me that the transition from translation to
> gesture, like the
> > transition from roaming to scanning and the transition from
> relying on
> > intonation to relying on facial expression, may be yet another step
> > sideways.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> >
> >
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> >
>
>
>
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