I have my undergrad in Child Development, so it was
interesting to revisit Vygotsky after 16 years or so. While I needed to read again his theory in
the book Mind in Society, one thing that I remembered vividly was the ZPD, Zone
of Proximal Development. It is
interesting that after we read something, I immediately try to either connect
it or start looking for ways to make connections. I think it helps me understand what we are
reading if I can try and put it some sort of real-life contexts. Which now makes me think of what better ways I
can present information and really work on authentic experiences.
So back to my connections – I mentioned this in class but
will put my story here. This past week I
have been reading one of the Virginia Reader’s Choice (VRC) books to all my K-2
classes. It is a fun story but in it the
characters have a major problem, lie on the ground “thinking” then sit up with
a light bulb over their heads. I was
most fascinated with my little kindergarten kiddos. They are all so new to school, most of our
school population does not attend preschool and most struggle speaking English. I was so curious of where in their upbringing
they saw the symbol of the light bulb representing an idea. Our class mentioned it was most likely
cartoons. This could be true, but I
still believe that just like most things young children learned are based on
their culture and experience as mentioned by Vygotsky. One idea of his theory states, “it may be
said that the basic characteristic of human behavior in general is that humans
personally influence their relations with the environment and through that environment
personally change their behavior, subjecting it to their control” (p.51, Mind in Society). We act on our environment, sort of like a stimulus,
while the environment also acts on our thinking process. It was just so interesting to me that all 100
of these kindergarten students knew what the light bulb meant in this situation. It made it clear to me that something was
modeled to symbolize this idea to all of us in our culture. Dawn briefly mentioned universal signs that
we all could use no matter where in the world we go, which again shows the importance
of how our culture influences our learning.
I just wanted to say that I'm really glad your students got to explore the mouse in an organic way: an immersive experience, if you will :-) I've had to deal with the problem of my little guys X-ing out before, but my worry was that if they didn't have the ability to explore on their own and make mistakes, then as a result they'd be discouraged from exploring and learning a bit more on their won. Yay for the immersive tutorial!
ReplyDeleteI try to make connections to the readings, too. Trying to apply it to our own teaching is where it makes the most sense to me. Since I was in college many moons ago, I don't remember reading Vygotsky and learned a lot from creating poems with my partner. The mind map also helped me with Vygotsky's theory and my light bulb lit up.
ReplyDeleteLast year one of the teachers on my team taught her students hand signals for the restroom, asking questions, etc. One of the students was offended by one of the hand signals because in her country it meant something bad. I have the ELL students in second grade this year and they learn best with modeling and working with a partner. They are so much happier and expressive when they work with a peer.
I love your "lightbulb" example. I have had many experiences where students just know what things mean as well as the opposite where I would expect students to know a symbol and yet they have no idea. Our culture most definitely impacts our learned. Where our learning is situated depends on what we get out of our learning. The same information or skill could look totally different in a different community or culture. We need to remember as teachers that the school culture is often very different than the culture our students go home to where learning may be very different.
ReplyDelete