VygotskyOSU

In reading this chapter about numerical operations of primitive man, I wondered how early men began to count and felt the need to calculate things, if ever. Though they had potential and ability to count things inherently to some degree, if they did not feel the need to exert any high level of numerical thoughts in daily lives, probably they couldn't develop the numeric operations till they actually needed. Is it that people began to think numerically based on their needs? For me, it feels like even the early men had a couple of cases when they needed to rely on numeric thinking from time to time. Going back to the example given by Manisha in last class about polygamy, wouldn't they have known at least, with how many wives they married to? As in the description from the chapter as below, "According to Thurnwald, if primitive man wishes to refer to a small group of people, he does not name the total number, but says the name of each one known to him personally; those whos...

Vocab The earlier sections of the chapter caused me to think a lot about laying the early foundations of concept development through exposure to stories and vocabulary words, particularly words that are beyond children's immediate understanding.  I found that many of Vygotsky's claims reinforced my thinking about vocabulary instruction through whole group book readings in early childhood settings.  It had planned to write my entire blog post about making a case for more robust and meaningful vocabulary exposure/instruction in the early grades through the medium of combining storybook readings (to first expose children to the words and concepts) and then play-based collaboration (to facilitate some form of early internalization of the words and concepts children were exposed to in stories).  It feels to me like in a lot of educational settings, play is the missing link that can facilitate a more effective mechanism for facilitating the understanding and intern...

I was reading about Von Foerster's conjecture the other day, and it really made me understand how the nature of trivial social interaction between human beings is being used as a way to make social influence reduce the variety we have with respect to resources that we can access. Von Foerster basically says that the long tail and the way that market shares work in society make us become reliant on recommendations. As we look at what other people have thought, we begin to trivially construct our own social realities, without any actual interactions, based on the preferences of other people. Now, this basically panders to the expectations set out by larger interlocutors, rather than allowing for an actual back and forth to co-construct knowledge. The long-tail explains why the internet is perceived as harmful today. Don't we see such trajectories in distance education today? The interactions that distance education students have with one another get more and more trivial a...

I began reading the chapter on the development of scientific concepts and it was interesting to see how Vygotsky differentiates between scientific and everyday concepts. Scientific concepts are simply learned or received in completed form (most commonly introduced as a term along with its definition) which in turn leads to understanding, learning, and comprehension. Whereas, everyday concepts do not have a formal definition, need not be universal but still helps us understand the functioning of the society and the world in which we live. When reflecting on all this, I was reminded of a middle school physics teacher I had (Sadly, we had her only for one year), who would not introduce new concepts as 'words' and definitions but instead, would begin class with a demonstration. One of which is depicted below. I so vividly remember her explaining inertia through this method:                                 ...

What impressed me most is how memory evolves when a primitive man become civilized. Here are my major takeaways. 1. Human used signs to turn the image into details.  2. When images merge with human perceptions, the visual image will be stored in memory, constant and stable. It is the image representation that proceeds the transformation of the concepts, the internalization of the culture, and the reproduction of signs and symbols. 3.  The development of memory starts from using the memory to dominate the memory. It requires an accumulation of the social-cultural practice and psychological experience in order to the creation and reconstruction of the memory. 4. Memory was evolved when a primitive man learns from memorizing magical origins to the use auxiliary means, from the natural use of memory to dominate memory (make better use of memory in a more systematic way that consists a complex representation of signs?) The evolution of Chinese characters can be a good exampl...

Last week in class we discussed the functions of play for social development. After leaving class, I realized that although we talked a lot about imaginary play, we never talked about imaginary friends. My big question was whether imaginary friends can fulfill the same type of social role as we discussed in class. I never had an imaginary friend, so I’m not privy to how those relationships function. Fortunately, my partner did have an imaginary friend growing up (though he was only willing to share so many details, even in the name of purely educational purposes and not even an ounce of mockery). Because we learned that social relationships are how we interiorize signs and organize cultural activities, I was skeptical whether imaginary friends could serve that purpose since it is not exactly a social relationship. When I asked Jed, however, he said that he had two sided conversations with his imaginary friend. Although this removes the possibility for new ideas that others introduce ...

Vygotsky, citing Levy-Bruhl, notes early in his discussion that ...in the psychology and behavior of primitive man memory plays a much greater role than in our mental life, because some of its former functions in our behavior have been transferred elsewhere and changed... The constant use of logical mechanisms and abstraction concepts has profoundly altered the functioning of our memory.  He provides several examples of this being the case.  This observation makes me wonder to what degree and in what ways current methods of teaching and learning still assume and depend on the memory capacity of primal humans. I am guilty, as are nearly all of my mathematics friends/colleagues, of requiring students to memorize certain things: derivative formulas, integral formulas, factoring formulas, etc. I think the idea here is that we wanted the students to become adept at using these formulas to such a degree that they no longer needed to reference the formulas themselves. Through pr...

From reading the Ape, Primitive and Child, I've got a sense that the main difference between humans and primitive man are our capability of using tools and signs to manipulate external resources, making them adapt to our survival needs. However, for ape and primitive people, they could merely use those external tools and signs to adapt themselves to the external environment. But how could humans be able to use signs and symbols as internalized tools to control themselves so as to manage external resources? There seems a lack of huge gap theoretically. Vygotsky mentioned the role of memory in shaping human's perceptions. While, for apes or primitive people, we could probably only say the perceptions shape their memory. As Vygotsky illustrated, although the concrete memories of primitive man (eidetic memory) could help them memorize details of their surrounding in a very fast speed, this superious capability also put boundaries in their imagination which may need people to reco...

Thank you, Clara. I found that I could not reply to you in the comments section, therefore I hope to reply you here. I totally agree with the idea that both environmental (external factors) as well as dispositional (internal factors) pose an effect on an individual’s thinking organically. Absolute independent thinking barely exists without any symbols around us.  What I cherish is that an individual could generate one’s thoughts on one’s own, with original reasoning and warrant, rather than parrot-learning and following the herd, which is extremely hard.  What environment provided us could be partial and misleading, and fine words and stories could tell a lie to us. What elicits my thinking are continuous political movements took place in Hongkong recently. It is complicated to elucidate which forms of government work better. However, I doubt whether those students (ranging from elementary to higher education level), the majority of the moveme...

Reading the chapter in which Vygotsky details the behavior of apes from Kohler and Buhler's perspectives made me flash back to the self-efficacy class where we were discussing Shamu and operant conditioning. The arguments made within the chapter discussing how the inherent instincts of animals usually guide their behavior made me think about Shamu and the operant conditioning used to train similar animals that we had some very intense discussions about last semester. The take away from those classes basically called for the adoption of pedagogy within classrooms that heightened intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic reward. I began to relate this to the notion that complex behaviors in animals are related to things within their visual field. They are adaptive. A chicken will show a "self-efficacy" (if you may) to squeeze through a tiny hole because it is the problem posed to it at that point of time. While apes will not show hyperkinesis to solve their problems, the s...

Red witch Melisandre can hide her real look <Game of Throne> This chapter,  from Primitive Man and his Behavior, argues how magical thinking is neither the inadequacy of thinking nor the developmental gap between technique and reasons. Rather, it is "the necessary product of the tendency, as yet undivided, to control both nature and one’s own behavior, from the primitive union of “naive psychology and naive physics.” (Thurnwald cited by Vygotsky, 1930). In this manner, science today might be another form of "magic". It is not the inadequacy of thinking. Rather, it is the unity of the tendency of controlling the nature and controlling our own behaviors. After class discussion: Human cannot survive by magical thinking. Magical thinking is the pre-logical thinking. I also like the break of the bias that the tribes are "undeveloped humans" could keep us blind from how civilized people come to where we are. It reminded me what Bronisław Malinowski ...

There seems to be full of loopholes in the reasoning process below, and all kinds of feedback are welcome. I wonder what's the relationship and difference between thinking skills and language skills. What is the main goal of reflection on argumentation has been frequently discussed when we emphasize cognition development as an important role in an individual's development. Some people would explain that argumentation helps students become better thinkers and to learn content knowledge more deeply. Comparatively, language skills are important but it is not the primary goal. To elaborate, whether an individual has the ability of independent thinking determines whether he or she is a thinker, and the quality of thinking decides whether he or she is a good thinker or not. When thinking makes sense to a specific individual is isolated from anyone else, no matter where the sources which trigger thinking come from, which means that thinking is an indepe...

First of all, I think it is such an interesting topic to think about how primitive man's memory developed and how different it would have been in comparison with us, who are living in this modern world.  "Livingston remarked on the outstanding memory of the natives of Africa, such as that manifested by the envoys of chiefs, who carried very lengthy messages over enormous distances and then repeated them word for word. They usually traveled in groups of two or three, repeating their message each evening as they moved along, so as not to alter its precise language. One of the arguments adduced by the natives against learning to write was that these messengers could transmit news over a long distance quite as well as the written word." It seems that the way how people perceive, digest and encode information can affect their memory at a great deal. If you think about how people would have remembered things when there was no paper to take notes or draw on, pencil o...

I remember very little about my past schooling and I am not sure if it is because I have this belief that we should spend little time reminiscing on the past and looking towards the future or is it that my classroom experiences were all “traditional” and are not stored in my active memory. The latter would seem applicable as I really do remember more key events from my “play times” but very few from the formal school settings. Lev S. Vygotsky states: “In play a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form; in play it is as though the child were trying to jump above the level of his normal behavior” (1967, 16). The interpretation of the above quote can and has taken many forms but I do not agree that children learn more from play and interactions with their peers than in a formal environment. My ...

                                               I was reflecting on the discussions we had about how conflict and change in the society happens only when there is support from a larger section of people. It reminds me of the me too movement, especially in India. Although it started off with sexual allegations against Harvey Weinstein, many women started speaking up by using the hashtag of 'me too'! In India, bringing about a change in perceptions, attitudes and behaviors towards women has always been a struggle. Many women had chosen to keep quiet as they did not have the courage to speak about the sexual assaults committed against them. However, once the me too movement started gaining support, many Indians, including those in the film industry opened up about it. Several investigations were also made. But the point is that this illustrates what Vygotsky and we were...

Been thinking a lot about the section describing the natural memory of primitive man, particularly the bits about the propensity for these early humans to remember all the words of a song, or to retell stories verbatim.  While in contemporary society this would serve as parlor tricks, void of any really practical applications that I can think of (at least while writing this post), it's still quite impressive.   I assume this research is based primarily on studying primitive tribes in remote locations.  I wonder what impact the variable of time has, and what unknown differences exist between the research subjects and the primitive humans that existed long ago.   Did Vygotsky or any of the other psychologists he is citing ever include methods sections in their publications? Vygotsky notes that "as man gradually absorbs culture, we find this type of  [natural] memory declining...." This distinction between early man and that of man "dom...

I am still dwelling on Vygotsky’s notions of internalization and interiorization.   These are two terms that appear abundantly in mathematics education research taken from a cognitive perspective (usually from the perspective of Piaget and von Glasersfeld). Please allow me to type a few quotes to being organizing my thoughts. From a more Piagetian perspective, taken mostly from Dr. Battista’s class notes. A re-presentation is a playback or recreation of experience (von Glasersfeld, 1991). When a process has been sufficiently abstracted so that it can be re-presented (visualized) in the absence of perceptual input, we say that it has been internalized . When a process has been disembedded from its original perceptual context so that it can be operated on, decomposed, analyzed, and utilized in novel situations, we say it has been interiorized . According to Steffe, Cobb, and von Glasersfeld (1988): [interiorization] leads to the isolation of structure (form), pattern (coord...