Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Activity Theory and Cognitive Development

Activity Theory ที่มุ่งเน้นไปที่ธรรมชาติ/ลักษณะทางสังคมวัฒนธรรมของการพัฒนาทางสติปัญญา(Intellectaul Development) Activity theory เป็นงานที่นักจิตวิทยาในรัสเซียในช่วงต้นและกลางของ ศตวรรษที่ 20 ที่มุ่งเน้นไปที่กิจกรรมของมนุษย์ที่ได้รับการจัดระบบ(organized human activity) โดยเฉพาะอย่างยิ่งเป้าหมายของคนเราและและวิธีการที่ผู้คนใช้เพื่อบลรรลุเป้าหมายนั้น คำวิพากษ์เหล่านี้อาจจะช่วยทำให้เข้าใจได้ง่ายขึ้นว่า ทำไมจึงต้องการใช้ activity-based appraoch เพื่อที่จะทำความเข้าใจขั้นสูงเกี่ยวกับกลไกทางสังคมของการเปลี่ยนแปลงเชิงการรู้(cognitive change) หากจะพิจารณาแหล่งทรัพยากรในเชิงสังคมที่เกี่ยวข้องอยู่กับเรื่อง cognitive development คนอื่นๆ จะถูกถือว่าเป็น Agents of cognitive socialization


  • Cognitive Development เป็นกระบวนการที่ซึ่งศักยภาพทางชีววิทยาขั้นนพื้นฐานถูกปรับแต่งไปในแนวทางที่เข้ากับบริบททางสังคมที่ซึ่งศักยภาพเหล่านี้จะถูกนำมาใช้
  • A sociocultural approach to cognitive development เน้นย้ำไปที่กระบวกการทางสังคมและวัฒนธรรมที่ให้(จัด)โอกาสสำหรับ cognitive development

Development as a product of social and cultural history

Activity theory also shares the idea that human psychological growth is a product of the cultural and social history in which an individual participates.

Vygotsky was concerned with the influence of history on psychological development in several way. He was concerned with how general cultural history, that is, material resources and socially organized activities, promotes human psychological functoning. He was also concerned with how a person's individual, or ontological, history, which contain both biological processes that regulate the development of basic mental functions and the socioculatural process that regulate the development of higher mental functions, affect intellectual development.

Cognition as a Socially Mediated Process

Finally, activity theory considers intellectaul development as as a socially mediated process-that is, people have access to the world indirectly rather than directly. Resource in social context define and direct the way that information is processed and what is learned.

That is, material and symbolic tools and social practices mediate the origin and conduct of human behavior, and they by connect the developing child not only with the world of objects but also with the world of people. In this way, a person's higher menatl fucntioning acquires an organized link to socialhistorically formulated means and operations embodied in cultural tools.

Cultures develop many types of tools to support the daily activities of people that then mediate intelligent action. Sign and symbol systems like language, numeracy, and other represenational systems, have been developed to represent, manipulate, and communicate ideas, These tools, signs ,a nd symbol provide people with the means to organize and accomplish everyday, practical actions, and their use is passed onto succeding genearations. Through the gradual incorporation of culturally constructed tools and practices over the course of mental development, culture become part of each indiviadual's nature.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Semiotic Activity

What is semiotic activity ?

I try to clarify the term, semiotic activity, from sociocultural theory.

Obviously, the problem of meaning and sign was a very important element in Vygotsky's thinking. He acknowledged that passing on culture to the younger generation is essential for the development of humanity, but he also realized that cultural meanings cannot be immutably transmitted to children in a ready-made form. Meanings develop, and they develop, in particular, in thhe learner during his or her interaction with other people. The learner is a crucial facctor in this process. With the help of other people, the child has to figure out the meaning of cultural elements. While doing so, the child makes his or her own meaning, which usually(but not always) comes close to the culturally shared meanings. Sometimes it diverts. In any event, it is always the learner's own meaning. It takes special communicative efforts to find out to what extent meanings are indeed shared. We can not do much more than assume that meanings are shared to some (a large?) extent. Actually, we would do better to speak of "taken-as-shared meanings" (see Cobb et al., 1993). As long as people can effectively communicate, there is a sound basis for the assumption that meanings are shared.

van Oers refer to the sociocognitive endeavor of (re)making meaning and symbolic means(such as signs, symbols, diagrams, schemes, models, actions) as being semiotic activity. Semiotic activity is defined as the(inter- or intra-)mental activity of creating meanings and signs, by refelcting on the interrelationships between(changes in) signs and (changes in) their corresponding meanings, and of adjusting signs and meanings accordingly.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

School Eduction

In an essay on the psychological ideas of LS. Vygotsky, Leontiev and Luria summarize some of the specific features of clasroom education :

School education is qualitatively differnt from education inthe broad sense. At school thhe child is faced with a particular task: to grasp the bases of scieentific studies, i.e., a system of scientific conceptions.

In the process of school education the child starts off from what have become his own complex generalizations and significances; but he does not so much proceed from them, asproceed onto a new path together with them, onto the path of intellectual analysis, comparison, unification, and establishment of logical realtions. He reasons, following then explanations given to him and then reproducing new, for him, logical operations of transition from one generalization to other generalizations. The early concepts that have been built inn the child in the process of living and which were assisted by rapport with his social environment(Vygotsky called them "everyday" or"spontaneous" concepts, spontaneous in the sense that they are formed aside from ant process specially aimed at mastering them) are now switched to a new process, to a new specially cognitive relationship to the world, and so in this process the child's concepts are transformed and thier structure changes. In the development of a child's consciousness the grasping of then bases of a science-system of concepts now takes the lead.

Vygotsky (1978, P.130)

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Who and What: Vygotsky and His Ideas

Who and What: Vygotsky and His Ideas

Vygotsky was a product of his time: an intellectual, a Jew, a true polymath who took as much pleasure in thinking through the intricacies of speech impediments and language acquisition as he did in contemplating Shakespeare's Hamlet or the psychology of art. His ideas spanned the usual disciplinary boundaries seemingly without effort, and his ability to think creatively in several fields and contribute at a high level in each of them has continued to intrigue scholars who have examined his work. While he was interested in problems of education and development, and while it is on those fields that his work is still studied most intensively today (perhaps also including the psychology of mental dysfunction -- retardation and schizophrenia), he was not viewed in his own time (and most likely did not view himself) as an "educational psychologist." He was, instead, a psychologist, critic, intellectual, and social activist whose work happened to touch intensively on education.

In American educational psychology, Vygotsky is remembered most commonly in connection with his notion of the "zone of proximal educational development" (sometimes the ZPD, ZoPED, or simply "the Zone"). Crudely put, the idea is that children develop by encountering concepts or tasks that lie beyond their immediate ability to accomplish, but which are within a "zone" of possible performance that may be realized if the child works along with an adult. For Vygotsky, the ZPD was specifically observable in situations where a young person's naive or individual notions of the world and its functions come into contact with an adult's more organized and "scientific" ideas, but in later Western discussions and interpretations, this focus on the interplay between pre-scientific and scientific worldviews came to be submerged under a general image of the interplay between adult and childish conceptions as aids to development.

Other aspects of Vygotsky's work have been especially interesting to Russian educators. The notion of development as growing out of the interaction of humans with one another, especially the interaction of adults and children, offers a distinctively collectivist vision of human psychological growth, substantially different from Western (and particularly American) ideas of radical individualism (i.e., behaviorism) and pre-determined stages of psycho-physiological growth (à la Piaget). In Vygotsky's conception, psychology cannot be viewed as separate from the twin concomitants of human history and human culture. In particular, Vygotsky saw the primary psychological tasks of childhood as being encounters with and learning how to assimilate and use the intellectual and cognitive "tools" developed by humans over the centuries -- language, mathematics, music and art, and so on. Absorbing the laws, conventions, ways of working with ideas and problems in the world that these tools afford are essential to becoming an educated person, a full human being, and Vygotsky was essentially interested in the processes that facilitated acquiring these tools, as well as in processes that inhibited or prevented one from acquiring them. For Vygotsky, the place where these processes came together was in education, whether defined as formal schooling or less formal encounters with an educative purpose.

Other aspects of Vygotsky's work have been developed and featured by those of his "school" -- the psychologists Luria, Elkonin, Leont'ev, and more recently Davydov and Zinchenko. Of particular importance here is the notion of "activity theory," an extension of the idea of the ZPD to encompass more sorts of interpersonal activity in more different kinds of settings, often very specific situations in which problems of a particular sort are presented to students, and in which they have to work collaboratively to try to solve them. Much of the work has been done with mathematics, although there are also examples in the sciences (especially physics), literature, and history.

These ideas may seem innocuous enough, but in their time they were seen as inflammatory and dangerous to the Soviet state. As Vasily Davydov, one of the current school of Vygotsky followers recounts from his own days as a student of psychology in Moscow in the mid-1950s, "To look at Vygotsky's book Pedagogical Psychology, one had to have a special pass from the KGB that would admit one to the restricted reading room in the Lenin Library where the book could be read" (Davydov, 1993). In the mid 1930s, Vygotsky was associated with the failed "pedology" movement among Soviet educators and psychologists, a movement that (because of its interest in Western notions of ability testing and examination of individual differences) was ruled bourgeois and anti-Soviet. Vygotsky himself died in 1934, and his works were generally unavailable until several years after the death of Stalin. Even then, educational dictionaries and encyclopedias treated his ideas gingerly, and described them as "mistaken" or as having been "subjected to wide criticism." While students were introduced to his work in pedagogical institutes, it was always through second-hand sources, and never in great depth. Graduate students and researchers, however, paid more attention, and by the 1970s there was a thriving group of scholars and educators using his ideas as guides for practice. (For other treatments in English of Vygotsky's work and influence, see Kozulin, 1990, and Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991).

The work of Vygotsky was brought more forcefully to public attention with the advent of perestroika. As old strictures fell away, those in the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (principally Davydov and Zinchenko, but also others) with an interest in Vygotsky's work began to proselytize more openly. At the same time, the educational "young Turks" among the publicists, journalists, teacher-innovators, and intellectuals sought to crystallize their interests and their newly discovered common views of the problems besetting the Soviet school system. At a meeting of the "teacher-innovators" in Peredelkino outside of Moscow in October, 1986, the notion of a "pedagogy of collaboration" (pedagogika sotrudnichestva) was put forward as an intellectual "glue" to unite the diverse approaches an interests of the reformers. The ideas of Vygotsky, particular the importance of the "cultural-historical" approach in psychology generally, and of the centrality of interaction among adult and children for humane personal development, were central to the formation of this vision.

As the movement developed, and its fortunes rose and fell, the ideas of Vygotsky have continued to play a central role in Russian efforts to restructure schools, provide an educational psychology more in tune with the needs of the individual and less focused on the needs of the state, and create new models of pedagogy that allow teachers to play more varied roles in the classroom. There have been numerous academic conferences devoted to his work and his legacy, several centers and laboratories named after him, and a major national educational association (the International Association for Developmental Teaching [razvivaiushchee obuchenie]) formed on the basis of his ideas and work. (For discussions of the development of the "social-pedagogical movement" in the former USSR, see Eklof & Dneprov, 1993; Johnson, 1997; Jones, 1994; and Kerr, 1990).



Reference : http://webpages.charter.net/schmolze1/vygotsky/

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Why Vygotsky ? (Overview)

In the mid-1980s, at the gloaming of the Communist epoch, there emerged in Russian education a group of teachers, scholars, and intellectuals intent on remaking the schools in a new and different image. The "social-pedagogical movement," as its founders came to describe it, grew out of a diverse set of circumstances -- the work of academic psychologists and social psychologists who studied the increasingly dysfunctional ways in which teachers and students interacted in schools, the "organizational-activity games" of clinical psychologist-practitioners who worked with entire cities and regions to chart institutional and social problems, the critical stance of journalists who saw the personal ruin created in many schools by thoughtless and authoritarian teachers, and the seminars, workshops and demonstrations staged by an intrepid group of "teacher-innovators" around the country. The movement flourished, contracted, transmuted itself through several incarnations, and remains a potent force for renewal in Russian education today.

Underlying the very different experiences and outlooks of those involved, however, is a single conceptual and intellectual thread: the work of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, a psychologist who lived and worked in the early years of the twentieth century. At in-service training programs for teachers, scientific conferences, and meetings of the Collegium of the Ministry of Education, citations of and attributions to the work of L. S. Vygotsky have become an expected part of the intellectual background of discourse about Russian education today. Why Vygotsky's ideas, banished for many years under the Soviet regime, came to play such a central role in the attempts to renew Russian education, and what the implications of Vygotskian psychology may be for future developments in education, are the themes of this paper.
By Stephen T. KerrUniversity of Washington