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

[Wolff-Michael Roth <mroth@uvic.ca>]

Word, Mike, another word for nothing left to loose. :-)  Freudian lapsus? Too much work? Michael
On 2010-05-16, at 6:57 PM, mike cole wrote:

Janis Joplin: "Freedom's just another work for nothing left to loose."
Very helpful thoughts, David. thanks.
mike

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 5:32 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Well, of course, the word 'revolution', in the eighteenth century, really
> meant what it says: a turning point. It was largely Burke and the French
> Revolution who were responsible for the rather sinister connotations of the
> word today.
> 
> Nevertheless I think there are at least three important senses in which
> development is not simply a matter of twisting and turning, of looking
> forward to see how far you have to go and looking back to see how far you
> have come. There are three sense in which, as Yrjo Engestrom has said, a
> turning point in learning, a step forward in development, has to be
> considered "destructive".
> 
> The only problem is that these senses really ONLY apply to the semiotic
> conception of the SSD, and not to the objectivist one. Of course, I don't
> think semiosis can be said to be psychological as opposed to sociological
> (or vice versa); it has to be one hundred percent both. But the three senses
> in which ONTOGENETIC development (as opposed to sociogenetic development) is
> destructive only apply to the destruction of semiotic systems, not to the
> destruction of political or economic relations.
> 
> The first is that learning direction and learning momentum is destroyed.
> It's well known that when the child begins to acquire GRAMMAR, as opposed to
> simple vocabulary, accuracy of expression undergoes a "U-shaped curve"; as
> soon as children begin to say "I goed" as oppose to "All gone", and the
> possiblities for error are, quite literally, infinite, and it seems at first
> small consolation to say that the possibilities for creativity are similarly
> expanded, and if we restrict schooling to testing, as we have been very
> recently encouraged to do we must inevitably correct "at first" to "at
> last". The same thing happens when children begin to point instead of grasp,
> walk as opposed to crawl, use negation as opposed to simply cry and scream.
> 
> The other two senses in which developmetn has to be considered
> ontogenetically destructive have to do with my rather ill chosen phrase, the
> "disembodiment of meaning". It seems to me that a lot of the first part of
> T&S (esp. Chapter Two) is essentially about the disappearance of SOUND from
> speech: the disembodiment of meaning through self-directed and then through
> inner speech.
> 
> The second part of T&S is about another kind of disembodied meaning: the
> disappearance of actual objects from the description of their qualities
> (e.g. the disappearance of an actual block from size, and the disappearance
> of size as a holistic category from diameter and from height, and the
> disappearance of actual objects from quanitity and actual quantities from
> numerical relations).
> 
> It seems to me that each development is revolutionary (at least in the
> eighteenth century sense of the word) and that each involves the apotheosis,
> if not the physical destruction, of the corporeal components of meaning;
> first, in the raw material of the sign, and second in its referent. And each
> involves loss, at least until such a time that Andrew can recognize that the
> silent meanings he experiences when he scans the words on a page instead of
> the people in a room are real experiences, lived experiences, and that they
> are shareable too.
> 
> I think that the restraint exercised on Andrew is objectively a step in
> that direction, just as his transmutation of roaming to scanning is
> objectively a step in that direction. But that's the problem: lived
> experience is not entirely objective; it has to acquire all the sweetness of
> experience for others and for myself, the sweetness of lived experience
> shared through words.
> 
> Kant really deceived us, deceived Hegel, deceived Leontiev, and deceived
> Andrew, when he tried to tell us that freedom is nothing more than the
> ability to make laws that we obey ourselves. That kind of freedom smacks of
> the same old slavery.
> 
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
> 
> --- On Sun, 5/16/10, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> From: Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Roaming, Scanning and the Objectivity of the
> SSD/Where is Development
> To: lchcmike@gmail.com, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Sunday, May 16, 2010, 3:18 PM
> 
> 
> 
> 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
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