SCIED 552: Science Teaching and Learning Developing Models of Science Teaching

As I was reading this week’s article, I kept thinking about social learning and participation. While the reading dealt with situated learning, or the social process of creating meaning and learning from an individual’s experiences rather than in his/her head, Lave and Wenger (1991) spend the majority of the reading describing a characteristic of situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. They define legitimate peripheral participation as “learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community” (p. 29). With not defining “community” as a typical classroom or traditional school setting, Lave and Wenger’s theory can be applied to all places of learning. This leads me to wonder how teachers, specifically in science classrooms, can create spaces where students and themselves engage in situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation? I can think of laboratory activities and group projects as two possible ways, but I would enjoy hearing other’s ideas.

One point I found extremely interesting in this article was the classification of “stages” in legitimate peripheral participation: newcomers, old-timers, peer, and neer-peers. It got me thinking about myself in different communities of practitioners. For Biology, I would probably be considered an “old-timer” in relation to undergraduate studies (as I have completed my undergraduate studies in Biology and currently teach the introductory to Biology lab here at Penn State) but in the field of Biology as a whole, I would most likely be a newcomer or peer (while I do not know nearly as much as individuals who have their M.S., P.hD, or work in industry within the field of Biology I do have a B.S. in Biology and have a foundation in the field). I also feel that I would be classified as a newcomer in terms of education; while I have taken some classes about secondary science education I am currently student teaching for the first time and learning from my mentor teacher (an “old-timer”) as I practice developing my skills in the classroom. As I was classifying myself in terms of the stages of legitimate peripheral participation discussed in the reading, it lead me to wonder when does one become an old-timer? What about a peer or near-peer? Lave and Wenger discuss how new-comers will eventually replace old-timers, and how old-timers can teach or even sponsor new-timers, but when do you think that occurs?

With that said, I was also drawn to the discussion of internalization in this week’s reading. Lave and Wenger (1991) state that learning is often focused on internalized knowledge “whether ‘discovered,’ ‘transmitted’ from others, or ‘experienced in interaction’ with others” (p. 47) but that learning should not be considered fully internalized or externalized. This reminded me of the Vygotsky reading (1978) we did last week, which focused on one’s personal cognition being developed through the individual’s encounters with the outside world. I always try to relate the current reading to ones we have previously done in class, and when thinking about previous readings, I felt that this article built upon Vygotsky’s ideas by adding and expanding upon the social context in which learning takes place. I am curious to see if anyone else thought about this or how Lave’s and Wenger’s article may relate to other readings we have analyzed.

References:

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental process.

Lave and Wenger (1991) pose an interesting viewpoint on the idea of “general knowledge”– an idea that created resistance to the view of situated learning. While this idea never explicitly came to mind when we initially learned about cognitive apprenticeship because we’ve been focused on relating these theories to science learning, the idea of general or common knowledge is intriguing as it is not initially clear how it can fit into this model of situated learning, which can mistakenly “carry connotations of parochialism, particularity, and the limitations of a given time and task” (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 33). I’ve often heard people in everyday life speak of common knowledge, claiming that an idea is common knowledge, or that everyone knows something, but never previously thought of how people obtain this knowledge. Lave and Wenger say that “even so-called general knowledge only has power in specific circumstances… but abstract representations are meaningless unless they can be made specific to the situation at hand” (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 33). The idea that all knowledge is gained through specific circumstances sets the stage for the theory of situated cognition.

Lave and Wenger make a conscious decision to avoid discussing school learning and thus teaching. In this way, they make an attempt to only focus on learning. When explaining their choice to avoid schooling Lave and Wenger state: “Steering clear of the problem of school learning for the present was a conscious decision, which was not always easy to adhere to as the issue kept creeping into our discussions” (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 39). This seems very similar to the problems we as a class have been having when building our models, no matter how hard we try it seems like we nearly always get caught up on the aspects of teaching rather than how learners learn. Lave and Wenger later state that schools themselves are “social institutions and as places of learning constitute very specific contexts. Thus, analysis of school learning as situated requires a multi layered view of how knowing and learning are part of social practice” (p. 40). This reminded me of our cognitive apprenticeship week when Brown Collins and Duguid state: “When authentic activities are transferred to the classroom, their context is inevitably transmuted; they become classroom tasks and part of the school culture” (Brown et al, 1898, p. 34).

This week’s reading clarifies and explains and clarifies the complexities of the social word and communities in which people are enculturated by naming specific roles within the community. Lave and Wenger mention newcomers, old-timers, and near-peers. They state: “There is anecdotal evidence (Butler personal communication; Hass n.d.) that where the circulation of knowledge among peers and near-peers is possible, it spreads exceedingly rapidly and effectively” (p. 93). I feel I’ve seen this in my life into science classes at Penn State. Many biology 110 undergrads have confided to me that they get more out of LA/TA office hours than lecture. Maybe this is because the role of the student and LA are more similar within the community and thus easier for each other to identify with. Later Lave and Wenger explain that “To take a decentered view of master-apprentice relations leads to an understanding that mastery resides not in the master but in the organization of the community of practice of which the master is part” (p. 94). This changes the way I traditionally viewed the word “mastery” and the way I think much of schooling thinks of the word mastery by shifting the view toward focusing on the role of a person within a community. This relates back to Lave and Wenger’s initial view of learning as “the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice” (p. 29). I suppose a master in this case is someone who can fully participate in the culture at hand.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32–42.

Epistemologically, I am confused about the status of the claims made about the nature of knowledge by Lave. He challenges conventional ideas about generalisability or abstraction of knowledge but also claims that ‘general’ knowledge may find applicability across contexts due to the structure of the world and specificity always implies generality. However, he also claims that this generality ‘is not to be assimilated with abstraction’ (p.34). There are two questions this raises for me

1. What is it about the structure of the world that implies this cross-contextual use of knowledge? How does a learner identify these structures and if these structures are identified doesn’t that imply that there is an abstraction of generalisable knowledge applicable across these contexts?
2. What is the status of mathematical and physical laws? While it is true that we encounter mathematics contextually, it is a valid claim to say that these laws constitute general knowledge.

Learning is considered as a dialectic process that involves “historical production, transformation and change of persons” (p.51). While I do agree with the importance of considering these changes in understanding learning, it seems like a stretch to define learning in this manner. In terms of viewing learning as being intertwined with peripheral participation, the claim is that “dissolves dichotomies between cerebral and embodied activity, between contemplation and involvement. between abstraction and experience”.  In terms of analytic tools for studying learning, the dissolution of these dichotomies is methodologicaly useful but these claims aren’t backed with enough evidence to show why cerebral activity can’t happen in the absence of embodied activity. Metacognition, for example, strikes me as a scenario that could be entirely cerebral.

Moreover, for our purposes, I am still confused about what the community of participation should be. If learning is indeed participation in a community, then learning to be a member of school qualifies as learning but for that context. For Lave, I am not sure what the role of school is in preparing students to be a member of other communities in their lives. The only consolation would be if schools provide some abstractable entities that prepare students for other communities, but he explicitly rejects that idea as being ‘general’ knowledge which doesn’t exist.

The authors also characterise situations in which peripheral activity can be a disempowering position when ‘one is kept form participating more fully – often legitimately’ (p.36). Unfortunately, they don’t quite develop this line of thought further as this idea lies at the heart of systemic inequality in certain communities. While it must be conceded that there are legitimate bases to keep people from full participation, there are cases when the criteria for participation is decided arbitrarily by the community along divisive lines such as race, gender, religion or nationality. Gender discrimination in science and engineering is profilgated by the fact that ‘masters’ or ‘full members’ of a community often belong to specific social backgrounds. The backgrounds of individuals play a key role in legitimising peripheral participation; to disregard this ambiguity and view it in terms of ‘social organisation and control over resources’ (p.36) is reductive and ignores a key aspect of the structure of communities.

I am not sure if I am missing a key element of the readings for the week but I’m still left with the impression that methodologically, this bears resemblances of cognitive apprenticeship but with the claim that abstraction of anything from these apprenticeships is rendered impossible. How that impacts schools is unclear to me

Reference:

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.

This week’s reading returned to the theme of social learning and apprenticeship. The author’s focus was on the method of learning through apprenticeship and social interaction. As such, the authors writing built on the idea of cognitive apprenticeship in the vein of Brown et al and the social interactions as made important in the writing of Vygotsky (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989; Vygotsky, 1978). The difference between this paper and the Brown et al paper is that the authors sought to better understand how apprentices learn in the role of a formal apprenticeship rather than simply using the term apprenticeship in the abstract sense. The authors termed their idea of learning through apprenticeship as legitimate peripheral participation. This term is defined as “engagement in social practice that entails learning as an integral constituent” (Lave & Wenger, 1991).  They defined situational learning as learning through social means. The situation in the parlance is any social activity in which learning takes place rather than the more restrictive idea of Brown et al. that the situation needs to be one of a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The authors do not go into much detail regarding the application of their understanding of learning. As a matter of fact, they emphasize that their description of learning is not meant as a pedagogical approach (Lave & Wenger, 1991). They do however emphasize that the school environment takes a different approach from legitimate peripheral participation in that apprenticeships involve very little direct teaching or instruction. Learning occurs through immersion in the social environment created by the pursuit of some task, i.e. tailoring, whereas schools teach through direct instruction with no immersion in any specific social environment other than the school environment (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In respect to this idea the concept of community of practice does not refer to the idea of a specific field, physics for example, but any situation in which people are participating in an activity in which everyone understands what is being done and why (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

The thing that I find interesting about the ideas put forth by these authors and Brown et al is the focus on apprenticeship. Are the authors suggesting that the apprenticeship model is an ideal approach to learning? If so, why? I understand that it can be thought of as more natural because it has been a major form of learning throughout human history but is that a valid argument for its superiority? If anything, didactic education seems to have come about as a means of making up for shortcomings in the apprenticeship model of learning. The outcome of apprenticeships is hard to standardize and traditions can be ingrained to the cost of innovation. Apprenticeship is also a difficult way to learn complex tasks such as research science or medicine. In the case of medicine, a residency program acts as an apprenticeship but only after a didactic phase, medical school, has served to standardize the practitioners knowledge. On top of this doctors have to pass their boards to make sure that they have learned what they need to from both their residency and their med school years. Even more simple practices such as falconry require practitioners to pass a written exam before they are allowed to start an apprenticeship. These kind of checks and balances were instituted to guard against poor apprenticeship programs. I personally have been through several forms of apprenticeship which makes me wonder if that is the form of education that should stand as foundation for pedagogy.

References

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational researcher, 18(1), 32-42.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (Vol. 521423740). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental process.

This weeks reading on legitimate peripheral practice raised some issues with the previous weeks reading. For me, this helped to clarify how prior theories of learning had discussed apprenticeship, what this means and what this doesn’t mean in relation to Lave & Wenger’s (1991) reading.

How individuals learn, too, is reimagined in this theory, to build upon but also renovate the idea of a community of practice and how individuals negotiate their identity within these environments.

Lave & Wenger (1991) describes a learning theory that does build upon cognitive apprenticeship and situated cognition. This idea of a legitimate peripheral practice makes sense that when a newcomer to a community begins to experience the practices of that community they are tasked with not necessarily unimportant inconsequential tasks of that community, but rather low-risk tasks that still contribute to the overall goals of that community. As the individual progresses from newcomer to old timer, the tasks get more complex with a higher degree of risk or more central to the workings of that community of practice. I think there is an important point made around how communities can have apprenticeship styles of learning that are peripheral but not legitimate and legitimate but not peripheral, both of these examples struggle to develop the learner or can form barriers to that learner achieving mastery. I am reminded of the grist and mill analogy that we discussed as a class, often the content that we are taught as a school might reflect the grist of a real institution but fails to use the content in legitimate ways. Conversely, the mill might be as close to legitimate as possible, ie. a student undertaking a ‘lab’ experiment that controls variables and tests a hypothesis, but it may be inconsequential in that the outcomes are predetermined and obvious. This reminds me of BIO 100 and ‘do plants not grow as well in a dark room vs a light room.’I think this description ties in well with the Lave & Wenger (1991) critique of formal schooling. ‘The organization of schooling as an educational form is predicated on claims that knowledge can be decontextualized, and yet schools themselves as social institutions and as places of learning constitute very specific contexts,’ (p.40). This quote is reminiscent of situated cognition and how the idea that we can learn content outside of a specific context is inherently flawed. The flip side is that we need schools, so getting close enough to a real-life professional community is probably the best we can hope for in reality. I think it is an important consideration that schools inherently operate under a totally separate community of practice also. Being a good student in biology, does not obviously equate to being a good biologist, it just means that within the school culture, that individual has been able to successfully navigate and transcend the tests of schooling, has had access to technology that has made them successful, and was likely born into a home culture that is similar to the dominant schooling culture. I think these are important things to consider why some students simply just ‘don’t get it’ and others excel.

I found the discussion on apprenticeship to be critical in order to understand how individuals learn within communities. Where Brown, Collins, and Duguid began to unpack (sorry people had to slip that word in somewhere), the idea of a cognitive apprenticeship, I see Lave & Wenger’s (1991) work as an unraveling and in-depth discussion. Lave & Wenger (1991) argues that ‘in apprenticeship opportunities for learning are, more often than not, given structure by work practices instead of by strongly asymmetrical master-apprentice relations’ (p.93). This point argues that learning is not necessarily from a senior or ‘master’ teacher directly to a student, but rather, apprentice to apprentice learning also plays a significant role in how individuals learn within a community. When I step back and this about this, it makes complete sense. In a typical classroom, if we have a question about a project or concept, unless the professor is approachable, we typically send a message to a friend in the class or hit up the group chat. ‘The effectiveness of the circulation of information among peers suggests, to the contrary, that engaging in practice, rather than being its object, may well be a condition for the effectiveness of learning’ (p.93).

This can be for a number of reasons, perhaps it is more convenient to do this, as a message can be quickly sent via an app, rather than attending office hours, or, as I sense Lave & Wenger’s (1991) progresses to, this can also be because of the power dynamic that exists between the professor and the student. This power dynamic of professor in power and student as submissive is apparent across many learning environments and particularly apparent in different cultures around the world. In some cultures, questioning the teacher is not encouraged, and students feel as though asking for help is a sign of weakness or inability. Of course, this is not always the case, but I think that Lave & Wenger’s (1991) assessment of this relationship hits home in a number of learning environments by really getting at one’s identity within a community, and how one’s position will elevate or act as a barrier within learning environments.

This leads me to consider access, as I think this is an important component of (Lave & Wenger’s (1991) discussion. If we consider this learning theory and how newcomers integrate into a community of practice, there needs to be a consideration of the barriers or opportunities that either restrict access or increase transparency. I think a pertinent example is how technology is used as a tool within some communities and being enculturated within these communities can only occur if access to it is possible. ‘Participation involving technology is especially significant because the artifacts used within a cultural practice carry a substantial portion of that practices heritage’ (p.101). Upon reading this quote I am reminded of how schooling environments have now integrated ipads and laptops within lessons. For many students this is an opportunity to enhance their capabilities through online learning, but for other students who do not have access to this technology experience, an example being might be due to coming from a lower SES family, would be on the backfoot in regards to having already developed skills in which to access the newer classroom information. I want to be clear, I do not think that technology is bad, but I do think that this is an example of a barrier to access that a student might encounter in comparison to his wealthier fellow student. Even if the school is to provide free laptops to all of its students, those who have had a lifetime of technology access in their home environments will inevitably have greater experience in skills such as using a word processor, making a powerpoint, conducting online research or just simply making use of all of the functions that the laptop provides. Students with this prior access have greater chance of connecting with the community of practice due to having a historical reference point from which to position themselves within that community, ‘understanding the technology of practice is more than learning to use tools, it is a way to connect with the history of the practice and to participate more directly in its cultural life,’ (p.101). I consider that this is a form of barrier for some students who have not already had an informal exposure to the culture in which they are now newcomers, ie. the school classroom.

 Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.

The perspective of Legitimate Peripheral Participation is framing learning as a social endeavor. The authors frame knowledge and knowing as something that is seen and located in “…the growth and transformation of identities and it is located in relations among practitioners, their practice, the artifacts of that practice, and the social organization and political economy of communities of practice.” (p. 122) This indicates that learning, according to their argument, takes place when an individual is given access to a community of practice and increasingly participates in said community by interacting with its members. This takes the form of completing more complex tasks, speaking like a member, building relations within the community, and shifts in identity. In many ways, this shift in understanding how learning occurs ignores what is happening inside a person’s mind. Instead, learning is, as in previous models, demonstrated by actions, but in this case, those actions indicate participation in a specific community that has shared knowledge and practices. Therefore, these communities decide who is “legitimate” which determines whether someone is learning because there can be many people with different ideas, values, identities, etc. in the same community. As long as a person is given access to a community of practice, they are a participant, and as they move towards becoming a full participant, they are understood to be learning. It does not matter what is actually occurring in their mind.

In this perspective, access is seen as the barrier to learning. The idea of access can lead to a plethora of issues. In fact, schools are not, as stated by the authors, the real communities of practice, but a closely related community. This can exacerbate some of the problems that can occur when using this model of learning. First, the authors do not acknowledge that school is a part of accessing many communities; especially those in science. While they state that students learn, “…how to ‘do’ school appropriately…” (p. 107), they frame it as something separate from the real communities, when in reality, this is a part of gaining access to many communities of practice. This means students, before entering many fields like science, must first begin to speak, participate in, and identify with school. If this does not happen, many students can never gain access to fields they may thrive in if given the opportunity. In my eyes, access is arbitrary and can be determined by numerous factors that may not be explicit within any given community of practice because of ideologies at play within them.

Running with this idea of access, it can lead many people believe that way to improve learning is to give access to students by way of better teachers, more materials, better networking, and the like. While I do not disagree, this is belief, in my opinion, may be partially misguided because of differences in power and specific practices that exist in communities of practice that are designed to act as barriers. While this is the role of these things, even the act of “giving access” is loaded with certain consequences. Ultimately, the members of a community of practice hold the power to grant access based on any number of factors. Additionally, those within the community that hold the most power are the “old-timers” or the full participants, potentially keeping a community from evolving to “accept” new members. Ultimately, they can choose to reject or accept anyone on any basis in alignment with the practices of that community. For example, in science, language matters, and if an outsider does not use the same language, they are never going to be a participant. Yes, they could engage in the same practices and become a legitimate peripheral participant, but this does not mean they can ever become a full participant.

Understanding access makes transparency key because it clearly demarcates “what counts” as participation (as long as these practices/attributes are explicit.) Again, this implies that if a person meets the requirements of the community of practice, they gain access. However, this assumes other communities of practice the person is a participant in will not prevent them from gaining access to a new community of practice. I also wonder how the curriculum of the new community of practice is designed in a way to allow them to continue to gain access. I realize the authors argue that access is above curriculum, but I have a hard time removing the curriculum from the equation because the curriculum is, in many ways, the community of practice initiation process. So, I wonder how curriculum and access influence each other in a community of practice? I do recognize not everyone can be a full participant in every community of practice. Yet, because learning in this model requires transformations in identity, it can make getting access difficult, potentially traumatic, and fraught with problems especially when thinking about schools.

With all this said, I do believe a situated perspective on learning open up the ability to challenge things that are troubling in how we view learning, how society is structured, and what happens in schools (I was just in the mood to be a cynic.) By viewing learning as a social endeavor, it removes the idea that some people are inherently more intelligent than others because learning is no longer about individuals alone. It also removes particular time scales to learning; if you decide at some point to simply become a scientist, there is nothing that argues you are not capable of it. Additionally, by observing practices of communities and understanding what it takes to become a full participant or a legitimate peripheral participant we can make communities more transparent. This will grant access to more diverse individuals. This will allow those communities to transform over time as the “old-timers” are replaced. Finally, access is not something that a single person grants, yet if one person wishes to grant access to anyone, they immediately become a legitimate peripheral participant and can begin to learn under this model. This model of learning is far more dynamic than previous models because of how social it is. In many ways, I see it as liberating and promising for understanding how to improve schools moving forward because we are no longer burdened by thinking about learning as something we cannot see, something that must be “right” in a child’s mind, a group of facts, or a set of behaviors.

In this reading, Vygotsky asserts that self-generated stimuli, called signs, “extend the operation of memory beyond the biological dimensional of human nervous system” (p. 39). Unlike other species, Vygotsky stresses that humans are able to use signs to develop “a specific structure of behavior that breaks away from the biological development and creates new forms of a culturally-based psychological process” (p. 40).  These signs, Vygotsky argues, are associated with memory and thinking in adults unlike thinking in children which consists of remembering and recalling isolated instances. I thought it was unique to divide thinking into these two categories, based upon age, where one is associated with signs and the other is not. After reading this, it lead me to wonder: is there any way we can teach such signs to young children? I also find it interesting that Vygotsky states that memory in is vastly different between older and younger children. He states, “for the very young child, to think means to remember” (p. 50). While I agree with this statement, I also wonder if Vygotsky thought of the distinction between the very young child and his/her older self as occurring at a specific event (for example, at the child’s fifth birthday) or if there is a transitional period (say between ages five and six) during which the transition of one type of memory to another may occur?

Another area of the paper I found interesting was chapter five when Vygotsky describes rejecting the stimulus-response framework due to it lacking the ability to address higher mental functions. When I was reading this section of the chapter, I immediately thought about behaviorism and Skinner. Skinner, from the reading we did a few weeks back, focused on the idea of reinforcing a students’ outward behavior, where students were given a specific stimuli and their response to the stimuli was measured. This idea, as mentioned in class, does not take into account an internalization and complex cognitive interactions. After reading Vygotsky, I felt that he was almost directly challenging Skinner’s stimulus-response framework, for one in favor of something that could analyze the process rather than the end result. This leads me to wonder: if Vygotsky had been translated in English when it was initially written, would more researchers have started to “provide an analysis of the higher forms of behavior” earlier? (p. 61).

Vygotski J, Cole, M., Scribner, S., John-Steiner, V., & Souberman, E. (1981). Mind in Society, Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.

The reading this week concerned Vygotsky and his writings on the subject of memory and thinking. The assigned writings did not concern themselves directly with education but more with how thinking and memory and how the process of thinking can be measured in a psychological experiment. One of Vygotsky’s goals in developing a new method of psychological study was to move away from the currently practiced method of a “stimulus response framework” (p. 58). This response was reminiscent of Skinner in that the experimenter would give a stimulus and then look for the response. The problem with this technique, similar to Skinners, is that it does not allow for analysis of the psychological underpinnings of the task. This problem reminded me of an example that an education teacher in another class gave in a lecture this semester. In an effort to back up the claim that people actively participate in language before they can even speak, she showed us YouTube videos of babies rapping or leading a church service even though they cannot speak. Her goal was to demonstrate that babies were doing more than simply mimicking adults but that claim could not be supported by the behavior shown in the videos. The only claim that could be objectively made was that the babies were behaving in a complex way that could indicate advanced mimicry or some other internal interaction in the process of learning language. This is the most fundamental problem in psychology, trying to objectively determine what is going on in the mind by observing behaviors or responses. Vygotsky’s approach to studying memory and thinking hoped to address this problem as have all of the other psychological study methodologies that have been developed in the ensuing decades. Vygotsky’s theories, derived from his studies, hold that the process of forming memories has a strong social component (p. 39). He stated that during the internalization process of a behavior first begins as a social interaction and then moves into the realm of personal understanding (p. 57). From this reading, it is easy to see how he moved on to his theory of the zone of proximal development but that is a topic for another day (p. 86).

References

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard university press.

One initial difference between Vygotsky and our previous models of learning is Vygotsky’s discussion of memory. Up until this point, we haven’t encountered explicit mention of what memory is and what it means to remember. Vygotsky explains two types of memory. The first being natural memory, which is very close to perception. The second being memory that uses aids (signs) that “extend the operation of memory beyond the biological dimensions of the human nervous system and permit it to incorporate artificial, or self generated stimuli” (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 39). In this memory, work that would normally be done by the mind is offloaded into a person’s environment. In our previous models that dealt with the inner workings of the mind, all of the “work” was done inside the person’s head– in this model, the person’s environment is now a player. Vygotsky also explains the difference between the two types memory by saying: “in the elementary form something is remembered, in the higher form humans remember something” (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 51). The act of tying a handkerchief in order to remember something or using cards to aid in remembering involves the act of actively trying or wanting to remember for the individual’s benefit.  Is this sort of wanting or desire to remember always necessary when doing higher order remembering in Vygotsky’s view? Vygotsky mentions that invention and use of signs are means of “solving a given psychological problem” (p. 52). One of my main questions while reading this portion was: In Vygotsky’s model of thinking and learning, how is solving a psychological problem different from learning (and how we thought about learning in previous weeks)? Are they similar/the same?

Vygotsky’s discussion of stimuli and responses is similar to what we saw when learning about Skinner’s learning model. In this model, we are still using a response, or performance to judge learning, as we can’t directly “see” inside a person’s head. Vygotsky mentions that the use of signs are not “invented or discovered by the child in the form of a sudden insight..” (p. 45) but rather happens through a series of transformations and each transformation “provides the conditions for the next stage and is itself conditioned by the preceding one..” (p. 46). This reminded me of the theory of Conceptual Change, where Posner says that accommodation is “a gradual adjustment in one’s conception, each new adjustment laying the groundwork for further adjustments” (Posner et al., 1982, p. 223).

The schemes that illustrate the memory experiment reminded me of the first Radiolab podcast about rats and children in rooms with biscuits in corners. The children in Vygotsky’s paper are unable to use the cards to aid them in remembering, just as the children/rats in the podcast are unable to use the colored wall to aid in directionality to find the biscuit. I wonder if the preschool-aged children in Vygotsky’s paper lack the internal dialogue to make links between their “mind islands” of the cards and the task at hand just as the children in the podcast could not connect the concepts of the blue wall with directions like left and right.

VygotskiJ, Cole, M., Scribner, S., John-Steiner, V., & Souberman, E. (1981). Mind in Society, Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.

Posner, G. J., Kenneth, S. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accomodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66(2), 211–227.