Vygotskian approach to early childhood education

Аннотация. Статья анализирует восприятие идей Л.С. Выготского в современной американской
педагогике искусства. Автор рассматривает как официальные источники, так и мнения отдельных
ученых о роли Выготского в гуманитарном знании США. Также в статье приведены примеры
практического применения идей ученого в художественном образовании США.
Abstract. Аn article analyzes different perspectives in acquiring ideas of Lev Vygotsky in the modern
system of Art Education in the USA. An author considers the official academic sources as well as
opinions of several scholars about the impact of Vygotsky’s ideas to the development of educational and
cultural studies in the USA. The article deliberates some examples of practical applications of
Vygotsky’s ideas in American Art Education.

Abstract
This small piece of qualitative research explores the musical nature of infant humour, focusing on playful interchange among a small group of children aged 2-3 in a day care setting.
Focusing on communicative interaction, this paper explores qualities of musical factors present in funniness such as rhythm, repetition and voice play – where, what I term, communicative musical funniness occurs between young children through complicitè, friendship and playfulness
The study investigates the musicality of funniness around the Multi-Modal nature of children’s interaction with the environment and those in it

Este trabalho tem por finalidade revelar os resultados de uma pesquisa bibliográfica que tem como temática as profundas relações entre o pensador russo Lev S. Vigotski (1896-1934) e a arte teatral. Para tanto apresenta os dados e a análise da biografia do autor em foco, das suas relações com o teatro e das contribuições destas na construção do seu pensamento. Apresenta um diálogo entre o teatro e a análise estética sob a forma de “crítica de leitor” proposta por Vigotski; a influência de Hamlet de Shakespeare e também da montagem simbolista realizada na Rússia por Gordon Graig/Stanislavski nos fundamentos da teoria vigotskiana sobre o pensamento e a linguagem; bem como uma aproximação deste exame na realização do monólogo (texto em cena) e o monólogo interior (construído pelo ator/personagem). Deste modo este trabalho amplia os dados e possíveis interpretações sobre a vida e obra de Vigotski, assim como aprofunda as reflexões deste autor com a prática teatral.

Palavras-chave: Vigotski, teatro, pensamentos, linguagens.

Our understanding of the cross-cultural aspects of personal epistemology is limited. In particular, cross-cultural comparisons of elementary school teachers’ and students’ personal epistemology have received very little theoretical or empirical attention. The current chapter aims to examine German and U.S. elementary schools in terms of their philosophical and practical similarities and differences in personal epistemology. Both theoretical and empirical work will be reviewed to support a more holistic model of personal epistemology, the Educational Model of Personal Epistemology. In light of this model, we discuss our expectations for differences and similarities in the epistemic climate of elementary classrooms in the U.S. and Germany. Drawing from this discussion, we suggest that researchers should approach cross-cultural research in personal epistemology from a more holistic standpoint, employ a diversity of methods, and obtain a solid understanding of the educational context under study. Regarding educational implications, we propose a possible fusion of the educational philosophies held in the U.S. and Germany concerning the implementation of teacher training and classroom education. Finally, we recommend that fostering evaluativistic thinking (i.e., a way of knowing that focuses on the evaluation and decision-making among differing viewpoints) should be a main goal for education starting at the elementary level to ensure students’ future roles as productive citizens in Western societies and stress the role of the teacher in this endeavor.

Creativity in adults is highly valued in our society. Personal creativity contributes to inventiveness, innovation, social and cultural change as well as political development and economic progression. The creator is an innovator, a problem solver, an entrepreneur, an artist. Creative people have rapid and effective responses that help them to achieve their life goals and allow them to enjoy the journey. Creativity is both a skill set and a unique and individual character structure that is developed throughout childhood and fine-tuned in adolescence and adulthood. Education has a key role to play in its development. Positive creativity inspiring experiences at every stage of the educational journey are needed. This is especially true in early childhood. Educators who rise to the creativity challenge will be well rewarded in rich teaching experiences and the joy of seeing children reach their creative potential in supportive and integrated learning communities.

Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) is globally recognized as a crucial element of education for all. Therefore, countries have intensely pursued it. After many efforts, progress towards ensuring ECCE is apparent in many countries in the world. But most of them could not either completely achieve this goal or compromised its quality due to inadequate resources, improper planning and ineffective implementation strategies; especially a vast and populous country like India. A number of initiatives have been taken by the Government of India for bringing quality in the form of policies, plans, constitutional amendments, acts, development of quality standards and curriculum framework, schemes and flagship programs like Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS); District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). In this endeavour, somewhere India has compromised with the non-negotiable quality standards for ECCE, leading the emergence of expected and unexpected issues and challenges. As a result, the country has missed the target of ensuring quality in ECCE. However, recent studies give evidence of tremendous progress towards quality reforms. Of course, there are low achievements in some aspects and in some regions, but also improvement in others which shows that ensuring quality is an attainable target. This paper intends to describe initiatives of the Government of India, assess the ground realities, identify major challenges in quality reform in ECCE and suggest possible enablers to reach out the same.

Ensuring Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) is one of the focus themes of Education for All movement conceived at the World Conference (1990) and World Education Forum (2000). Countries have keenly pursued ECCE, the first goal of Education for All and prepared well to fulfil their commitments towards this. The commitment envisages to ensure that all children, irrespective of gender and social group, get access to quality ECCE that enable them to attain necessary skills, knowledge, values and attitude. But in many countries, the progress towards Education for All goal is not enough and India is one of them. Eventually, the goal was considered to be achieved in long-term through the improved implementation of quality components of ECCE and acquiring the holistic approach to improve the functioning of ECCE programs. Realising this, the provision of 'quality ECCE' became one of the vision for education by 2030 as per the 'Incheon Declaration, Education 2030', accepted during the World Education Forum, 2015. This paper explores the synchronisation between global target for achieving quality ECCE and preparedness of India.

ABSTRACT In most cultures, play seems to matter a great deal to young children. This is evidenced by the vast amount of time children spent playing and the combination of often unsurpassed passion, imagination, and energy which they invest in this activity. This paper explores why play matters through the lens of Bakhtin’s dialogic approach combined with Vygotsky’s developmental theory. In expanding upon their insights into a framework termed “the transformative activist stance,” we suggest that play offers unique opportunities for children to develop and exercise their agency, identity, and voice. While playing, according to this perspective, children discover how to be agentive actors—that is, unique persons who have an irreplaceable role in co-authoring social interactions, communal practices, and the world itself. In this complex endeavor, children sort out the difficult challenge of becoming unique, self-determined, and free persons within the communal world shared and co-created with others. Examples from video recordings of children’s interactive play in a naturalistic setting illustrate how play paves the way for children to collaboratively create and transform the world from their unique stances and positions. This approach suggests that play is serious work for children as they develop capacities for agency. Therefore, it is critically important that early education allocates ample time for this activity.

As meaning is considered within both linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts, the “word” as the unit of analysis of traditional semiotics is replaced by “sign” as a more comprehensive one (Saussure 1959, 2006). Consequently, the discussions concerning meaning are generally based on the relation between sign and meaning. Usually, semiotic studies of meaning are conducted with reference to two allegedly different approaches: the “mentalist” approach that generally considers the mind as the source of meaning (Locke, 1999, Chomsky 2002, 2007), and the empiricist one that considers meaning as an objective relation between the signifier and the signified (Frege 1948, Russel 1995, Wittgenstein 2002).

Both approaches assume two distinct realms of reality—a mental world and an objective one—and define meaning in terms of the relation between these two. Thus, both approaches either disregard social determinations of meaning or consider them as secondary. Despite their apparent different orientations, their handling of the problem of meaning can be considered identical.

In contrast, the notion of “meaning” can be considered in parallel to Marx’s concept of “value”. Accordingly, value expresses the average necessary social time for the production of a commodity and thus is the “social essence crystalized in commodities” (Marx 2010). Value is made possible by the commodifying social relations of production. Meaning, too, is social relations crystalized in each sign. Analogically speaking, meaning resembles value while sign resembles commodity. Just as value is congealed and fixed in a specific time and space within a commodity, meaning is congealed and fixed within a sign. That being the case, the relation between meaning and sign and the process of congealing and stabilization of meaning might be explained with reference to Marx’s theory of value. Vygotsky’s theory of concept-formation provides the methodological tools facilitating such an interpretation.

For Vygotsky the development of concepts in individuals is a process mediated by the social. Accordingly, the non-verbal (pre-linguistic) thinking and unthinking speech (thoughtless/emotional vocal reactions) are conjoined in child through social mediation and amount to the formation of conceptual thinking and meaningful speech (1986). Conceptual development is neither a consequence of generalizing common properties of things, nor is a production rooted in mind. Rather, it is a continuous movement from the social toward the individual, which, in turn, is followed by a movement from the individual toward the social. Consequently, conceptual thinking emerges as a specific form of human activity, where concepts are “the tools of mental activity” (Azeri, 2013). This process also includes the formation and signification of signs. The constitution of a sign that signifies something other than itself or replaces the thing and which expresses certain relations abstractly in time and space, i.e., the process of signification of a sign, is inherent in the genesis of conceptual thinking. Furthermore, deploying a sign in a specific form or sense is a function of its social determinations.

These determinations mark the moments of disappearance of individualities and the constitution of social objectivity. The use of a sign by different individuals signifying a same meaning can thus be explained without pertaining to superficial relations between things and “mental” representations. For instance, the sign “M” signifying McDonald’s is not a mere letter; rather, it signifies a process of signification of certain social relations within a specific spatio-temporal context. Thus, following Voloshinov (1973), it can be stated that the process of embodiment of meaning in a sign can be considered a process of “congealing” of certain social relations in a sign and of “fixing of meaning” in a specific spatio-temporal context.

Ключевые слова: Л.С. Выготский, зона ближайшего развития, социо-культурное развитие, развитие эстетического восприятия, художественное образование США. Keywords: L.S. Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development, socio-cultural development, development of the aesthetic perception, Art Education in the USA. Аннотация: статья анализирует восприятие идей Л.С. Выготского в современной американской педагогике искусства. Автор рассматривает как официальные источники, так и мнения отдельных ученых о роли Выготского в гуманитарном знании США. Также в статье приведены примеры практического применения идей ученого в художественном образовании США. Abstract: an article analyzes different perspectives in acquiring ideas of Lev Vygotsky

"This study refers to the discursive transformation in perceptions of preschool age children generated by central European Union policy on early childhood education and care. This policy is representative of the pervasion of contemporary entrepreneurial culture and curricula within preschool education. At the same time, the field is also starting to become subordinated to the neoliberal trend of economising the social. This study highlights the fact that, within discourses on the child, these trends are
encouraging a particular conception of childhood and of developmental theories. This conception is also enabling entrepreneurial logic to be applied to the preschool education sector via the use of theoretical tools. Consequently, children are being shaped into so-called knowledge-workers, or gold-collar workers, as they are referred to in current employment discourse. Even authorised preschool education documents (e.g. NAEYS’s Developmentally Appropriate Practice etc.) are responding to this transformation by introducing a new type of normality into this sphere, as can be seen in the Slovak state education programme for preschool education."

Building on structurationist theory of sociology, Vygotskian sociocultural theory, Chomskyian cognitive linguistics, and postmodern and poststructural logic regarding the decentered subject and indeterminacy of meaning this work explores the origins and nature of human consciousness, cognition, social action, learning, and development within Paul C. Mocombe's phenomenological structural sociology, phenomenological structuralism. The article attempts to synthesize Vygotskian sociocultural theory with Chomskyian cognitive linguistics in order to offer a more complete understanding of human consciousness, action, cognition, learning, and development amidst the postmodern and post-structural attempt to decenter the subject. INTRODUCTION In the attempt to resolve the structure/agency debate of the social sciences, Paul C. Mocombe [1] developed his phenomenological structural sociology, phenomenological structuralism, by building on the duality language of structuration's sociolog...

Research on disrupting inequality in education can benefit from situating it within the debates on varying and often conflicting meanings of equality and its perils and promises. Especially in the wake of achievement testing and resurgent biological determinism, researchers continue to equivocate between commitment to the idea that all humans are equal in their core capacities versus the tendency to attribute developmental outcomes to differences in " natural " inborn talents and endowments. This chapter examines contemporary research and theorizing to address the tenet of fundamental equality to counter biological determinism laden with mythic racial, gender, and other types of unproven assumptions and biases. Drawing on a wide range of emerging positions and evidence across neurosciences, epigenetics, developmental systems perspective, and cultural-historical framework, the core argument is that all persons have infinite potential—incalculable in advance, unlimited, and not predefined in terms of any putatively inborn " endowments. " This potential is realized in the course of activity-dependent generation of open-ended, dynamic, and situated developmental processes that are critically reliant upon sociocultural supports, tools, mediations, and access to requisite resources, especially through education. An educational policy along these lines would be centrally premised on the imperative to remedy the effects of discrimination and marginalization.

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky menjadi sosok yang dikenal luas dalam Psikologi Amerika sejak publikasi atas monografnya pada tahun 1962, yakni Thought and Language. Lima tahun yang lalu (1973), atas desakan
seorang murid Vygotsky, Alexander Luria, kami sepakat untuk mengedit kumpulan esai Vygotsky yang mencerminkan karya teoretis umum yang mengkaji hubungan antara Pikiran dan Bahasa sebagai salah satu aspek penting. Luria mengerjakan terjemahan kasar untuk kami atas dua tulisan Vygotsky. Tulisan pertama, "Tool and Symbol in Children's Development" (1930) yang tidak pernah diterbitkan. Tulisan kedua, merupakan penerjemahan atas monograf yang berjudul “The History of
the Development of the Higher Psychological Functions, yang muncul pada volume kedua tulisan Vygotsky yang diterbitkan di Moskow pada tahun 1960. Kajian sambil lalu atas esai ini secara cepat meyakinkan kami bahwa lingkup karya Vygotsky jauh melampaui Thought and Language. Terlebih lagi, kami mulai percaya bahwa citra Vygotsky
sebagai “semacam neo-behavioris awal” bidang perkembangan kognitif−kesan yang dipegang oleh banyak rekan kami−sangat sudah terbantah lewat dua karya ini.

This is a study employing a Vygotskian perspective to examine mentors’ release and students’ appropriation of mentor control in fifth grade science mentoring lessons.The study consists of 2 parts. The first examines how mentors verbally organize their students when changing activities within each science lesson. The second part recounts how students appropriate mentors’ control of those changes.The results from part I show that mentor’s verbal control was patterned. In part 2, students’ appropriation of mentors’ control was found to depend on the’ release of mentor control but more strongly on the content of the lessons.

Building on structurationist theory of sociology, Vygotskian sociocultural theory, Chomskyian cognitive linguistics, and postmodern and poststructural logic regarding the decentered subject and indeterminacy of meaning this work explores the origins and nature of human consciousness, cognition, social action, learning, and development within Paul C. Mocombe's phenomenological structural sociology, phenomenological structuralism. The article attempts to synthesize Vygotskian sociocultural theory with Chomskyian cognitive linguistics in order to offer a more complete understanding of human consciousness, action, cognition, learning, and development amidst the postmodern and post-structural attempt to decenter the subject. INTRODUCTION In the attempt to resolve the structure/agency debate of the social sciences, Paul C. Mocombe [1] developed his phenomenological structural sociology, phenomenological structuralism, by building on the duality language of structuration's sociology while holding on to the idea of dualism through the reification of the social relations of production via the Althusserian logic of ideology and ideological apparatuses.