Re: [xmca] Re: Roaming, Scanning and the Objectivity of the SSD/Where is Development

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

I agree, Jay, that the mother is clearly worried about Andrew owing to
the school's diagnosis that something is wrong with him (I am unclear on the
ADD/ADHD issue). But while we see well documented the constant movement of
people in the home, so far as i recall, the only evidence we have of the
school's impact on the home is in conversation between mother and
researchers. Is there an example of changed relationship to
Andrew? Seems plausible, but it would be nice to see. It must be there in
the taping, but the analysis is extraordinarily time consuming, let alone
getting it all into one article!

Hopefully Marianne and Marilyn can join the conversation to fill us in.

mike
PS- I had this thought after reading the article. I wonder if Barker and
Wright's *One Boy's Day* with its microscopic record of observations of a
kid from arising in the morning to going to sleep at night might provide
evidence similar to that in this project. No longitudinal data, but lots and
lots of settings where different SSD's that integrate into A SDD might be
visible.
On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 3:18 PM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:

>
> I was one of the participants in the LCHC discussion of Hedegaard & Fleer.
> I am perhaps not quite so worried about just what has been established about
> revolutionary development in the paper's reported data as Mike is, though I
> recognize his concerns.
>
> H&F emphasize that we need to understand the SSD in terms of the
> _relationship_ between child and his/her environments, and I assume that it
> is changes in these relationships that is involved in development. They also
> seem to frame the environments in terms of institutional values and
> practices, and so the relationship presumably is in some important part
> constituted by the child's participation in these and how they in turn
> affect the child, directly and mediatedly (e.g. through caregivers, other
> participants, etc.)
>
> Their argument I think is not simply that the child adapted home patterns
> of behavior (and values) to the classroom, and that the school failed to be
> aware of this and so was ill-prepared to support the child's development,
> but more generally that transformative crises in development occur because
> of tensions and contradictions within the SSD, and that these should be seen
> again in terms of the child's relationships to its various components. Those
> relationships are presumably relationships of participation (practices),
> orientation (expectations, in both directions), and values (evaluations, in
> both directions).
>
> A crisis here seems to come about because the addition of the school's
> institutional context to that of the home provokes tensions and
> contradictions of practices (roaming and scanning), but perhaps more
> importantly of expectations and evaluations. Imagine looking at this from
> the child's point of view. School is a weird new place! an uncomfortable
> place for this child. A place where you can't do what you're used to doing,
> and where you get judged very negatively for even creatively adapting what
> has worked for you in the past (at home), and in fact where you are judged
> as abnormal, defective, and diseased just for being yourself.
>
> Moreover, I am not sure we analytically understand how to imagine the
> child's sense of difference between home and school.
>
> We are so accustomed to the idea of separate place, separate institutions,
> separate roles and behaviors that we may overestimate the child's sense of
> this. Perhaps the SSD is more unitary for him than it is for us. And thus
> its internal tensions and contradictions more perplexing, more keenly felt,
> more of a crisis than we might imagine?
>
> Institutionally, and thence also practically and immediately, the change in
> the SSD viewed by us (additive, componential), and moreso as viewed by the
> child (according to LSV and H&F, relationally, participatively) is resulting
> in changes at home. The mother is more worried about the child, and perhaps
> acting differently toward him. The teacher and others are reacting to the
> diagnosis of ADD and the recommendation of medicating him. The change in the
> relational-participatory-SSD does go both ways, which I think is part of
> what Mike was asking about.
>
> What we don't see are more of the details of this picture, and a longer
> time frame around it. More about the child's behavior in the classroom and
> at home (what else is he doing to make the teachers worry about possible ADD
> or ADHD? is he behaving any differently at home as the crisis unfolds?),
> more about the mother's behavior (how is her behavior toward him changing as
> the school-and-diagnostician impact her?) at home, and ultimately more about
> what happens next (this is the first 2 months of a much longer study).
>
> I take it that what we have here is the hypothesis of a precipitating
> crisis in the relational-SSD, and I think the paper establishes the
> plausibility of the hypothesis and of the theoretical conception of the SSD
> (though maybe not so clearly stated) behind it, but perhaps does not quite
> establish a case for "revolutionary development", but only for the first
> stages of a developmental crisis that must play out over a longer timescale.
>
> JAY.
>
>
>
> Jay Lemke
> Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
> Educational Studies
> University of Michigan
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
>
> Visiting Scholar
> Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
> University of California -- San Diego
> La Jolla, CA
> USA 92093
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On May 16, 2010, at 2:13 PM, mike cole wrote:
>
> > David et al--
> >
> > David has a far better mastery of the notions of neoformation in
> relatation
> > to SSD and central/peripheral lines of development than I do. There is
> much
> > in his note I find puzzling and interesting, but am unable to appropriate
> > sufficiently to paraphrase for purposes of the present discussion. I
> agree
> > entirely on the relational notion that SSD is a relational concept and
> > (following at least from Dewey!) reject the notion of situation as being
> > external to the child, psychologically speaking. But I struggle with the
> > idea of psychological processes that are entirely internal as well.
> >
> > Consequently, i restrict my comments here to join David in asking where
> > there is evidence of development, let along revolutionary development, in
> > this paper. It is there rhetorically in the introduction, but I cannot
> see
> > evidence of it in the data presented. Andrew scans with his eyes at
> school
> > and with his feet at home. Assuming scanning with feet preceded scanning
> > with eyes does not by itself indicate development does it?
> > The period of time for this fragment of the larger project introduces
> Andrew
> > after he has been in school for a while, so we do not know the history of
> > scanning with eyes, whatever we think of its developmental status
> relative
> > to scanning with feet. In fact, so far as I can tell, we have no evidence
> > for processes of change of any kind such that we could say, for example,
> > that practices at home influenced practices at school or vice versa, or
> that
> > we see the process of development in situ.
> >
> > What am I missing?
> > mike
> >
> >
> > On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 9:08 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
> >wrote:
> >
> >> Dear Carol and Larry (and Mike too, because I think this is really ONE
> >> thread and not two)
> >>
> >> I think Bernstein says somewhere that the key question for sociology is
> how
> >> the outside becomes inside. That is, of course, the key question for
> >> sociocultural psychology as well. It seems to me that as long as we
> conceive
> >> of the social situation of development as a physical site for activity,
> >> there is essentially no way to answer it, and we are always left
> puzzling
> >> about how one child can be two places at the same time.
> >>
> >> I think that when Leontiev and Vygotsky split (and I think the split was
> a
> >> genuine one), it was essentially over this question. Leontiev decided
> that
> >> Vygotsky had made speech the "demiurge" of thinking. and he saw this as
> >> leading in the direction of idealism. In response, Leontiev took
> >> an OBJECTIVIST position; the child develops by adapting to the
> environment,
> >> by making the demands of that environment his own, and by mastering the
> >> environment by allowing it to master his own demands. But if we replace
> the
> >> word "master" with "accomodate" and "assimilate", we have, as Kozulin
> points
> >> out, a straightforwardly neo-Piagetian theory, except that, being a good
> >> Stalinist, Leontiev does not see any basic contradiction between other
> >> regulation and self regulation.
> >>
> >> Besides the problem of the child being two places in one time, there are
> >> two additional problems with this objectivist definition: the
> >> putative mutual INFLUENCE of the child (or at any rate the child's
> central
> >> neoformatoin) and the social situation of development, and the INTERNAL
> >> nature of the crisis. Neither one sits well with an objectivist
> definition
> >> of the social situation of development, and both are completely
> >> comprehensible if we see the SSD as being semiotic in nature.
> >>
> >> Marilyn Fleer and Marianne Hedegaard, just like our previous article for
> >> discussion by Beth Ferholt and Robert Lucasey, speak of a reciprocal,
> >> dialectical, mutual influence between the child's central neoformations
> and
> >> the social situation of development. This two-way traffic provides the
> whole
> >> content of the central line of development. But if we see the social
> >> situation of development as a physical site for physical activiteis like
> >> roaming or scanning, it's very hard to see this as more than just an
> empty
> >> slogan. In what way does Andrew's roaming "change" the layout of his
> home?
> >> How does his scanning behavior fundamentally alter the school as an
> >> institution? His whole tragedy, and his LACK of development, consists in
> >> this: it does not.
> >>
> >> More--Vygotsky clearly says that the roots of the crisis are INTERNAL,
> not
> >> external, and that the content of the crisis consists of changes of an
> >> INTERNAL nature and not a conflict between the child's will and the
> >> environment (see p. 296 of Volume Five, where this is stated in
> completely
> >> unambiguous language). But if the crisis is just the result of moving
> from
> >> one environment to which Andrew has fully adapted (home) to another
> where he
> >> is less well adapted (school) then there is no serious sense in which
> this
> >> statement is true; the roots of the crisis are external, and they are
> >> precisely caused by a conflict between the child's burgenoning volition
> and
> >> the implacable brick wall of the school.
> >>
> >> Vygotsky would have none of this; he insisted on a SEMIOTIC social
> >> situation of development after the age of one, and even before one, the
> >> social situation of development is both objective (because it is social)
> and
> >> subjective (because it is semiotic).The examples he gives us of social
> >> situations of development are always RELATIONSHIPS: the child's
> >> physiological independence in contradiction with biological dependence,
> the
> >> child's hypersociality in contradiction with his lack of speech, the
> child's
> >> "autonomous" speech/walking/thinking in contradiction with the child's
> >> understanding of other's speech/actions/thoughts, etc.
> >>
> >> It seems to me that as soon as we accept that the social situation of
> >> development is a semiotic and not a physical construct, all of the
> problems
> >> simply fall away. Of course the child is NOT two places at one and the
> same
> >> time; the child simply relates to all the places that the child is
> through
> >> the same semiotic relationship: ostension, indication, naming, and only
> >> later signifying. Of course, the child DOES have a mutual influence on
> the
> >> social situation of development, because the child's semiotic system is
> both
> >> linked to and distinct from larger cultural semiotic system in which it
> >> develops. Of course, the crisis IS fundamentally internal in its genetic
> >> roots; the semiotic system at any given age period is the
> superproductive
> >> but largely untapped semiotic resource brought into being by the child's
> >> central neoformation, and the pressure of its superproductivity on the
> main
> >> line of development is what engenders the crisis.
> >>
> >> Larry, the reason why I used the term "disembodiment of meaning" to
> refer
> >> to the next zone of development (for Andrew, and also for my own mastery
> of
> >> Korean) is that I think development involves SYSTEM and not
> >> simply LIFEWORLD. In Chapter Five of Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky
> argues
> >> that children notice difference before they notice similarity because
> >> differences depend simply upon lifeworld perceptual cues, but
> similarities
> >> depend on a system: we must imagine a superordinate concept of which
> both
> >> similar objects are exemplars.
> >>
> >> The problem for both Andrew and myself is that we have locked ourselves
> in
> >> the lifeworld. Andrew and I are both dependent on concrete, tangible,
> >> physical, kinesthetic perceptible clues, and we are limited to noticing
> >> differences: he depends on roaming and scanning, and I depend on a
> losing
> >> strategy of trying to infer grammatical similarities and semantic
> meanings
> >> from the infinite pragmatic varieity of intonation and facial
> expression.
> >>
> >> Yet for both of us, the lifeworld provides abundant resources for
> breaking
> >> out of the lifeworld. In Andrew's case, it is the BOOKS to which he must
> >> apply his scanning skills. For me, it is the disembodied GRAMMAR and
> >> VOCABULARY to which I must apply my inferential bag of tricks. The
> problem,
> >> and here is where I find myself in complete agreement with you, is that
> in
> >> both cases there is no affective payoff, there is no concrete, tangible,
> >> embodied answer to the question "Why should I care?"
> >>
> >> David Kellogg
> >> Seoul National University of Education
> >>
> >> --- On Sat, 5/15/10, Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> From: Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca>
> >> Subject: Re: [xmca] Is the Transition from "Roaming" to "Scanning"
> >> Developmental?
> >> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> >> Date: Saturday, May 15, 2010, 9:50 AM
> >>
> >>
> >> 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
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> xmca mailing list
> >>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> WORK:
> >>> Visiting Researcher
> >>> Wits School of Education
> >>> HOME
> >>> 6 Andover Road
> >>> Westdene
> >>> Johannesburg 2092
> >>> 011 673 9265  082 562 1050
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> xmca mailing list
> >>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >>>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> xmca mailing list
> >> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> xmca mailing list
> >> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
> >
>
>
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca