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Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context

. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, (1990)

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p.7: "This book considers children as apprentices in thinking, active in their efforts to learn from observing and participating with peers and more skilled members of their society, developing skills to handle culturly defined problems with available tools, and building from these givens to construct new solutions within the context of sociocultural activity" p. 8: "cognition and thinking are defined broadly as problem solving. I assume that thinking is functional, active and grounded in goal-directed action." p. 16: "I extend the concept of the zone of proximal development by stressing the interrelatedness of the roles of children and their caregivers and other companions and the importance of tacit and distal as well as explicit face-to-face social interaction in guided participation. The thesis is that the rapid development of young children into skilled participants in society is accomplished through children's routine, and often tacit, guided participation in ongoing cultural activities as they observe and participate with others in culturally organized practices. The elaboration presented in this book, while consistent with the Vygotskian approach, provides more focus on the role of childrenas active participants in their own development. Children seek, structure, and even demand the assistance of those around them in learning how to solve problems of all kinds. They actively observe social activities, participating as they can. I stress the complementary roles of children and caregivers in fostering children's development." p. 18: "Guided participation involves adults or children challenging, constraining, and supporting children in the process of posing and solving problems through material arrangements of children's activities and responsibilities as well as through interpersonal communication, with children observing and participating at a comfortable but slightly challenging level. The processes of communication and shared participation in activities inherently engage children and their caregivers and companions in stretching children's understanding and skill to apply to new problems. Practical considerations of culturally organized activities (such as avoiding damage or waste), along with young children's eagerness to be involved, lead to structuring of children's participation so that they handle manageable but comfortably challenging subgoals of the activity that increase in complexity with children's developing skill and understanding." p. 28: "this book is built on the premise that the child and the social world are mutually involved to an extent that precludes regarding them as independently definable." Four embedded levels of development (Scribner, 1985; Wertsch, 1985) p. 32 - Ontogenetic development: changes in thinking and behaviour arising in the history of indeviduals, e.g. across childhood. - Phylogenetic development: slow changes over the history of the species, which leave their mark on the genes. - Sociocultural development: changes in cultural history that leave a legacy for the indevidual in the form of artefacts. - Microgenetic development: moment-to-moment learning by individuals in particular problem contexts. Apprenticeship p. 39 "focuses our attention on the active role of children in orgenizing development, the active support and use of other people in social interaction and arrangment of tasks and activities, and the sociocultural ordered nature of the institutional contexts, technologies, and goals of cognitive activities" Me: Elaborating and extending the ZPD model - "Shared problem solving - with an active learner participating in culturally orgenized activity with a more skilled partner - is central to the process of learning in apprenticeship. So are other features of guided participation that I emphesize: the importance of routine activities, tacit as well as explicit communication, supportive structuring of novices' efforts, and trensfer of responsibility for handling skills to novices." "Furthermore, the apprenticeship model has the value of including more than a single expert and a single novice..." Me: connecting to Lave & Wenger - Lave (1998, p. 2) "apprentices learn to think, argue, act and interact in increasingly knowledgable ways with people who do something well, by doing it with them as legitimate, peripheral participants" Institutions p. 43 "Cultural practices are influential in setting the problems that need solving, providing the technologies and tools for their solution, and channeling problem solving efforts in ways that are valued by local standards." Institutions define the goals of the learning process, as well as the evaluation criteria. This would seem obvious with respect to moral judgement, but is evident also in "pure" cognitive skills, such as memory of disconected bits of information (Cole & Scribner, 1997; Rogoff & Mistry, 1985) or syllogism word problems (Luria, 1976). (p. 49) "The taxonomic categories valued in school may not be valued by nonschooled people, as illustrated by Glick's (1975) report of Kpelle subjects treatment of a classification problem. Kpelle farmers sorted 20 objects into functional groups (e.g., knife with orange, potato with hoe) rather than into categorical groups the the researcher considered more appropriate. When questioned, the subjects ofter volunteered that that was the way a wise man would do things. "When an exasperated experimenter asked finally, 'How would a fool do it', he was given back sorts of the type that was initially expected - four neat piles with food in one, tools in another, and so on" (p. 636)" (p. 57) Tools and technologies promote the development of tool-specific skills. Broader skills, associated with these tools, do not appear out of the social context in which the tool is used. "Literacy, it has been argued, fosters the examination of propositions for their internal logic (Goody & Watt, 1968; Olson, 1976)". However, Scribner & Cole (1981) found no such evidence when studying the Vai people of Liberia. The Vai have developed their own script, and use it diferently then western cultures: "The Vai script has many important uses, but it does not involve learning new knowledge or writting essays to examine ideas." (p. 54) Cultural institutions also define what are ligitimate problems, and what counts as a good narrative. Me: compare to Cobb, sociomathematical norms. The role of the teacher (Me) Rogoff studies learning in young children's natural environments, through interactions with their caregivers. However, her observations suggest a framework for examining the teacher's role in school learning. The unit of analysis is, in a Vygotskian tradition, an activity in which the caregiver and child are involved. The caregiver structures the activity, and thus the learning process by defining its goals, breaking them down into sub-goals, providing the tools for tackling these sub-goals, and defining the level of independence of the child in each stage. Yet the child is not a passive recepient of the activity structure. She is actively involved in structuring her learning, from the selection of the activity through the adjustment of her level of participation and initiative. The actual course of activity is negotiated between the learner and the instructor, through explicit as well as tacit communication. While they are involved in shared problem solving, they are also each independently solving the problem of finding the most effective learning path. "Wood and Middleton (1975) point out that effective tutoring involves problem solving for the tutor, in terms of how to modify the approach on the basis of how the tutee responds to instruction. They liken instructional moves by the tutor to hypotheses about the most effective level of intervention. Depending on the tutee's response, the tutor modifies the hypothesis, providing a level of instruction sensitive to its effectiveness for teh tutee." (p. 101) I find this approach noteworthy for several reasons. First, it appeals to my common sense, and is in line with my personal expereience as a teachre and a parent. As Wittgenstein said, "do not use your common sense like an umbrella. When you come into the room to philosophize, bring it with you". On a more scholastic level, it brings together several prominant theories of learning. Rogoff's notions of shared managment of activity structure and learners guided participation in these activities builds upon Vygotskyian theory not only in choosing activity as the unit of analysis. It provides guidelines for operation in the ZPD. Vygotsky delineate the arena and the players. Rogoff describes the dynamics of the players interaction in this arena. Rogoff also addresses Lave and Wenger's perspective of learning, as a gradual shift of individuals from periphiral to centeral participation in a community of practice. In an attempt to highlight the social context, the "community of practice" model has been stripped from any indevidual cognitive elements. As a result, both the community and the participant become amorphous, translucent entities. Just how the individual changes her place in the community cannot be explained without acknowledging the cognitive processes. Once their status is restored, we can observe how the individual navigates herself from periphiral to central participation, and at the same time how members of the community guide her in this journey, as multiple synergetic problem solving efforts. Finally, Rogoff's ideas relate to the constructivist theme of "negotiating meaning". Piaget and Vygotsky "Differences between the two theories in the model of social influence relate to important differences in the aspects of cognitive development that the theorists sought to explain. Piaget's emphasis was on children's qualitative shifts in perspective on logico-mathematical problems, whereas Vygotsky was interested in children's development of skills anf information useful for the application of culturally developed tools for thinking." (p. 141) Piaget is interested in the child's construction of scientific and mathematical thinking. Peers play the same role as observed natural phenomena: they provide the benchmarks for existing theories, and, when in conflict or contradiction with the learners view, provide the neccesary disequilibrium to motivate theory modification. In Vygotsky's case, the focus is on learning as internalization of artifacts (in a wide sense) created over the history of a culture. With this question in mind, transfer of these artefacts from a more capable partner, who already posses them to a less capable one, seems evident. "Piaget and Vygotsky appear to be almost in opposition on the question of the age at which social influence contributes to cognitive development. For Piaget, development moves from the individual to the social, and for Vygotsky, development moves from the social to the individual" (p. 144) "Cognitive development from a Piagetian view is a product of the individual, perhaps sparked by having to account for differences in perspective with others, whereas cognitive development from a Vygotskian point of view involves the individual's appropriation or internalization of the social process as it is carried out externally in joint problem solving" (p. 150) (noted in Cobb, 1995 and others)

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