Week 4 - Mind in Society

What did I learn? I learned a lot. Vygotsky's Mind in Society was a challenge, but there was a lot to take away from it.

First, symbols are tools that enable cognition. This separates us from even the highest functioning of our ape relatives.

Internalization is the process whereby learners come to know symbols and begin appropriating them. Children engage in what Piaget called egocentric speech. They talk to themselves to aid in solving problems. As they grow, this process becomes internal, and they no longer need to talk through problems. They can conceptualize and visualize things that lie outside their immediate field.

Contrary to previous models held by psychologists, development happens gradually and in stages with some types of development overlapping others. Students, as they grow and learn, progress through proportional thinking, operational thinking, pre-conceptual thinking, formal operations, and if they advance far enough, complex thinking.

The zone of proximal development is the difference between what children can learn on their own and what they can achieve with help or modeling.

Play is learning. When children play, they are discovering meaning in their world. They are assigning rules, and they are learning. They are satisfying their unsatisfied desires and needs and making sense of their world. Play is essential to children's' development.

All of this is critical to professionals designing learning experiences. It means that collaboration, not isolation, is the best way for children to advance from basic to complex understanding of skills and concepts. It means that play should be incorporated into learning designs where appropriate and as much as is possible. It means that teachers can expose students to skills and concepts that are beyond their means, as long as more advanced mentors and peers are there to give guidance. As Vygotsky says, the skills that are in a student's zone of proximal development will become his fully assimilated skills later. I particularly loved what Vygotsky says in chapter six: "A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality."

I see all of this as particularly relevant to people like me, in museum education. People who work in museums can sometimes be blind to the benefits of "gameification". They fear that it will water down content or lead to lack of respect for serious subjects, like military history. I see things a different way. I see an opportunity to understand the way kids learn best, and to incorporate play and collaboration into museum exhibits and experiences. This will ensure that students come away with some real learning about the serious subjects that previously seemed boring or dry, and it will ensure that our great history survives the dull treatment it gets in school lectures, tests and textbooks.