[xmca] early Vygotsky studies at Chicago

[larry smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com>]

Message from Francine Smolucha:
Here is a good question - how is that Kohlberg undertook a study of Piaget vs. Vygotskyon the social origins of private speech in the 1960's while at the U. of Chicago?Kohlberg's doctorate was from the U. of Chicago (1958?) with his dissertation on thestages of moral development (based on Piaget's book on Moral Judgement). Who wereKohlberg's doctoral advisors at U. C. in the 1950's?
Jacob Getzels was on the faculty there and he had several students who went on to becomeVygotskian researchers - Vera John-Steiner, Laura Berk, and Francine Smolucha.Getzels, was kind of like Yoda, he didn't give directions but rather asked a question.In 1975, I took Getzels' course titled Higher Though Processes which included Vygotsky's theory.But, I first read Thought and Speech in 1973 in a special topics course on Memory and Cognitiontaught by a visiting professor from Cambridge University, named Marslen Wilson.
Marslen Wilson spoke highly of Vygotsky's work and I was intrigued by passages in T & S(title mistranslated as the 1962 Thought and Language). I found it difficult to follow the 1962 translation of T & S (not knowing then that half the paragraphs were randomly omitted.) 
In 1984, as I practiced for the graduate reading exam in Russian, I started to translate the Russiantext of T&S and compare it to the only English translation available, the 1962 Hanfmann & VakarThought and Language MIT Press. What a surprise to find that the only version of T & S available had halfthe paragraphs omitted randomly within the text. Finding myself correcting the 1962 MIT publication(while still trying to pass my Russian exam at the honors level), I decided to look for something really interesting to translate and found the Russian text of Vygotsky's 1930 Imagination and Creativity in Childhood. My husband and I had already published our own pioneering research on Creativity as aMaturation of Symbolic Play and on creativity as the collaboration of consciously directed imagination and analytic thinking. Now, I was translating papers by Vygotsky with citations to Theordore Ribotthat made a similar argument.
In 1986 two complete translations of Thought and Speech were published (Kozulin's and Minick's). 		 	   		  __________________________________________
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