To begin, I must admit that I don’t feel as if I fully understand the reading for this week. Even after having read it twice, much of it seemed to be beyond the scope of my understanding. What I can summarize from the reading though, was that Vygotsky was very much interested in the process that children go through when moving from externalization of thought processes to their internalization. Children move through different stages of this process, such as not being able to utilize special stimuli to organize their thought, then using special stimuli as an outside psychological tool, and finally internalization of the previously external stimuli. This portion did make sense to me, as it is common to hear children verbalizing their thoughts with others rather than themselves during early problem-solving. It would seem that according to Vygotsky, your inner monologue is something you learn to use for critical thinking over time and that it is a social process rather than isolated.
According to the reading, younger children would be expected to use elementary processes that arise biologically and are more intrinsic, where older adolescents/adults become familiar with higher psychological functions that arise socioculturally. This is justified as common sense in my mind, being that children don’t really have the skills to or understand how people interact with their culture and society, whereas as you get older you start to become more heavily influenced by the people and practices you surround yourself with. It seems as though adolescents and adults are more capable of learning from the world around them, the norms of formulating a discrete thought process, rather than rationalizing their actions to the outside world. The simple connections that children do make between bits of information can’t be too abstract or sophisticated being that they haven’t learned how to manage these types of relationships/ideas in their own thought catalogs. I really enjoyed how the author explained this as children’s thinking acts are more dependent upon their concrete recollections of a concept, rather than its logical structure.
Overall, I think I have a basic understanding of what Vygotsky advocated for, but I definitely need to discuss this in class to understand his arguments intrcacies.
Hi Nick,
I would agree that my understanding this week is pretty shaky compared to previous weeks. I like how you brought in the example of children problem-solving with each other rather than internally problem-solving alone. Maybe this is an example we can work through together when we make our whiteboard model. I also am really interested in the last point you are drawing out of the readings. I think you are getting at when he said, “for the young child, to think means to recall; but for the adolescents, to recall means to think.” This sentence seems like a big finding but it is hard for me to wrap my head around for some reason. I think it may be because I am an adult so it is hard to go back and try to make myself think like a child. I’m not sure. Sounds like we have a lot to work through this week.