r/ PressPlay
Revisiting the chapter (Tool and Symbol in Child Development) this week, left with more questions than after my first pass of the text.
One of Vygotsky's conclusions is that:
"...play constitutes the main avenue of the child’s cultural development and, in particular, of the development of the child's symbolic activity." (59)
This led me to start to think about the drastically varying forms of play that children experience during early childhood.
It's natural, and indeed rather obvious, that children's home environments (and who comprises them) would have a major impact of their early development. What is more interesting to consider are all the play experiences that they are exposed to outside of the home, both in their communities and in preschool classrooms, and what impacts these experiences have on their cultural and symbolic development.
Having spent a lot of time with preschool children, I think they would define most of their activities during waking hours as "play." In this case, I'm wondering how Vygotsky would define it.
For if play is in fact the "main avenue to "cultural development...and the development of symbolic activity," then indeed one of the main factors in the development of the child would be their social network. (59) Could the question of who children are playing with in some cases be more important than what forms of play they are engaging in or are exposed to? When considering the mixed age model used in most preschool classrooms, what impacts does this have on the cultural development and the development of symbolic activity of the older children in the classroom? How do the younger children's development fare in this setting? Are the structural changes in development that Vygotsky talks about slowed down or sped up due to age intricacies in classroom composition or other class composition factors (SES, gender, race, family size of children, etc.)? And then outside of the classroom, do children with social networks comprised of more adults develop more quickly or more slowly? Is it helpful for children to have more folks their own age with whom they can engage in meaningful play? I'm not extremely familiar with the literatures of play, classroom composition, or social networks, so perhaps some of these questions have already been answered. Curious to know other folks' thoughts on these things.
That's very interesting question to raise! When you talked about children's differential impact they would have depending on their social network along with mixed age model as well, my assumption would be that culture will play a lot even in this process. Especially power distance and idea of hierarchy can be important factors in deciding the dynamic of social interactions among different aged children. (e.g., In Korea, higher grade students tend to be bossy to lower graders.)
ReplyDeleteLogan, your questions are pretty classic which reminds me a term called more knowledgeable other (MKO). MKO is used to describe the person paired with the child in order to reach the zone of proximal development... I would definitely like to discuss more about this in the class. What I've read from CSCL literature is that children at school ages can collaboratively solve problem through meaningful discourse. In Roschelle's analysis (1992) on the conversation between a pair of high schoolers who were trying to understand velocity in physics, we can see in details that how shared knowledge contributed to the convergence of pairs' ideas. Although research like this doesn't emphasize on the criteria of "good pair", it definitely shows that shared knowledge is more fundamental than other demographical indicators (gender, ses, race, etc.).
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