Gita Vygodskaya (Lev Vygotsky’s daughter) died on July 13. She was in her mid-80s. I and so many Vygotskians around the world will miss her wonderful stories, her warmth and sparkle, and the joy she took in meeting people the world over whose work was inspired by her father’s writings.

Gita was nine years-old when her father died at age 37 in 1934. His works were then banned by Stalin and   his widow and two daughters kept the manuscripts safe under their beds in their apartment in Moscow for years. When her mother died, Gita took charge of keeping the  manuscripts safe and getting a volume of them finally published in 1956. Over the next two decades she worked, along with some of Vygotsky’s students, to turn the manuscripts into six volumes of his works published in Russia in the 1980s. She received her  doctorate in psychology from Moscow University in 1959 and worked with deaf children for many years.

I first met Gita in Moscow in 1993 when she invited me to visit her in her apartment. She shared memorabilia and stories of her childhood with her father, something she continued doing with people until her final days. The next year, I and the East Side Institute brought her to the US for her first ever visit to visit with our community, visit the Vygotskian school we were running at the time (Barbara Taylor School) and give a conference presentation.  Over the years, Gita and I saw each other a few more times. Our last visit was this past November at the home outside of Moscow she shared with her daughter, son-in-law and their family. With friends Carrie Lobman, Elina Lampert-Shepel and Dot Robbins, I spent a memorable and lovely night there.

I don’t know Michael Thomas, Professor at Nagoya University of Commerce & Business in Japan, but I intend to. I want to thank him for the favorable and thoughtful review of Vygotsky at Work and Play that he wrote for the British Journal of Educational Technology.  He says so well what I was trying to do in writing the book! The review begins…

The influence of Lev Vygotsky’s thought, particularly in relation to social constructivism and socio- cultural theory, has become one of the most prominent methodologies associated with a reorientation of learning in the digital age. This book examines the development and impact of Vygotsky’s thought using an engaging first person narrative and personal account, and examines how it has been applied to a range of learning situations both inside and outside of traditional educational contexts. Although this is not a conventional academic introduction to Vygotsky’s thought then, key concepts such as the zone of proximal development (and the author’s idea of the zone of emotional development) are introduced, and Holzman skillfully interweaves theory and practice throughout the book’s six chapters.

You can read the complete review at the Reviews page

I’m so pleased and honored that my book Vygotsky at Work and Play was nominated for the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, given by Divison 7 (Developmental Psychology) of the American Psychological Association annually. I just posted the nomination on the Reviews page under Vygotsky at Work and Play. Check it out! And heartfelt thanks to the international group of nominators!

I ended 2009 with two adventures—one in Russia and the other in Serbia. Two different trips, two different countries, two different organizing milieus—connected in our collective histories with each other and with Vygotsky.

I spent a week in Moscow and its surrounds, mostly at the 10th Annual Vygotsky Memorial Conference, organized by psychologist Elena Kravtsova of the Vygotsky Institute of Psychology at the Russia State University for the Humanities and aided immeasurably by Dot Robbins. For many years, Elena has been implementing the ideas of  her grandfather Lev Vygotsky in creative and significant ways in schools and university training, along with her husband Gennady Kravtsov.  (They were featured  at a conference on Vygotsky and Culture that I and the late Leslie Williams of Teachers College Columbia University convened in 1997; a chapter in my book, Schools for Growth, is devoted to one aspect of their work, based on first-hand experience in the late 90s.)

The conference offered a lot: a chance to experience first-hand several voices of Russian non-classical/Vygotskian psychology; the fun and challenge of leading a performatory workshop for more than 100 Russian university students with my dear  colleague Carrie Lobman; the privilege of  delivering a plenary address with the incomparable translation of another dear colleague Elina Lampert-Shepel; being reunited with Gita Vygodskaya after after nearly a decade (in addition to being together in Moscow and parts of Europe a few times, I and the Institute hosted Gita’s first ever visit to the US in the mid-1990s); and walking, talking with and learning from many of the other participants.

What I offered was a “Vygotsky without truth” — by which I meant the work of the Institute and its broader performance and development community.  I shared some of the theory/practice of truthless therapy and truthless developmental learning in and outside of schools, where it has come from, and how I understand it to be a worthwhile pursuit in the current social-cultural-political climate.

I think that the talk was challenging. For one thing, it didn’t do what many talks (not just at this conference but in most academic and intellectual contexts) do, which is to focus on what Vygotsky meant by something he wrote and make the argument for the correctness of that interpretation (“the truth”). I actually love following the train of thought of such speakers and authors and admire their smarts. It’s just not what I chose—or choose—to do. For another, putting “Vygotsky” and “therapy” together in the same sentence was completely new to the majority of the audience and, understandably, it took awhile for them to wrap their heads around it. It was fascinating and gratifying to me that it was the Russian psychologists who caught a glimpse of the newness and potential of our social therapeutic approach to emotionality and were the most eager to pursue the topic. The conversation continues!

I returned home for about two weeks and then traveled to Serbia, something I’ve been doing nearly every year since 1998. I go at the invitation of Zdravo da Ste (“Hi Neighbor”) to participate in their annual meeting. Zdravo da Ste is a unique organization initiated by volunteer developmental psychologists in 1992 originally to provide support to refugees—its work is Vygotskian based and delightfully focused on play, creativity and performance in all of their programs. Each year, guests like myself create a panel discussion and lead workshops on the theme chosen by the organization (this year it was play and development). Others who have become regular participants are Volker Bunzendahl (Denmark), Lina Kostarova-Unkovska (Macedonia), Paul Murray (UK and Serbia), Thomas Sorensen (Denmark), and Leif Strandberg (Sweden)—we were joined this year by Tim Prentki (UK). We’re an odd lot—academically trained (and somewhat academically located, on the fringe) practitioners and researchers who persist in creating environments for play, and who love to theorize about it too.

At the annual meeting (which took place in Golubac, a village in northeast Serbia) and again in Belgrade, Zdravo da Ste hosted a book launch for the Serbian edition of Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth, by Fred Newman (Institute co-founder, colleague, friend and mentor). A popular seller in English since 1994, the translation and publication came about through the efforts of  Zdravo da Ste psychologists (Vesna Ognjenovic and Bojana Skorc in particular), along with publisher Dragan Stojkovic and MOSTART.

Thus completed a year of travels, rich with new performances for me and others in our modest efforts to help the world develop. Here are some slides of some of the people and places I visited and people I worked and played with. It is great privilege to be building these relationships with colleagues who playfully and passionately resist “the tyranny of the normal.”

These days, la Cuidad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico is pretty much known for one thing—violent crime. No denying the destruction of life and transformation of culture that’s hit this city so hard. But it is not the whole story (it never is).

Looking at El Paso and the fence that divides the countries

Houses near CASA

I had the privilege and challenge of spending four days last week in this city on the US-Mexico border just south of El Paso, Texas. My colleague Carrie Lobman and I were invited to share the social therapeutic approach to learning, development, therapy and community building with a diverse group of people in Juárez. Our visit was hosted by CASA (Centro de Asesoría y Promoción de Juvenil, A.C.) and the Department of the Humanities, Universidad Autónomia de la Cuidad Juárez, and arranged and organized by CASA’s Miguel Cortez, a graduate of the East Side Institute’s International Class.

Work/Play Under the Mexican Sun

Our work began Thursday morning with a presentation I made to a packed auditorium at the university, entitled, “Como debe Cambiar la Educación: Juego, Performance e Improvisación para el Desarrollo Humano y el Cambio Social.” After that about 80 of the over 100 attendees crossed the campus courtyard to the workshop room. For 3 hours that day and 4 the next, Carrie and I led the group in performing conversations and improv activities, with both words and body. Near the end of the second day, we divided the group (by now very warmed up and into creating together) into smaller groups to design projects to “grow the city and its youth” and then performatorily share them with the large group. They had great ideas, like Cultural Caravan, Urban Complement, Winds of Change, Shoot Me with Your Ball.

A Performing Group

Tere and Miguel

CASA has a strong and solid presence in the poor community of Juárez. Headed by Maria Teresa Almada (“Tere”) CASA’s staff and practice is passionately progressive—unwavering in their conviction that people CAN develop in the worst of conditions. And they have what appeared to us to be a productive, non-hierarchical working relationship with the university. Throughout our conversations with staff, university faculty and students, and young people we never heard anyone blame either the young people who are killing and being killed (hired by the drug cartels to do their bidding) or their parents. They are, instead, focused on the community as a whole taking responsibility for what is going on and working together to provide prosocial things for young people to do.

On Saturday we led another workshop, this time at CASA. The group of about 60 included many teens—some from a CASA high school project and some who don’t go to school but who volunteer with CASA—and women from the community who are involved in CASA programs. Carrie and I saw some new things of value from leading the group in improv games, especially those involving mirroring and creatively imitating each other. One of the most moving was the transformation of both teens and adults when they started playing together, and seeing the teens’ joy when adults imitated them!  In the environment we all built, Vygotsky’s views on play and creative imitation—and their advancement in social therapeutic practice—were living, breathing forms of life.

CASA Workshop Players

At the CASA Workshop

Quite a few readers have asked  to read the entire chapter I quoted from in my post, Could Developmental After School Eliminate the Need for Remediation?  So I’ve just added it to articles/chapters/talks (above). The title of the chapter is Without Creating ZPDs There is no Creativity

Popular books, especially if they relate to current events, get reviewed  as soon as they are published—and sometimes before. Not so academic books. Alas, it’s typically a year before a review appears in print. So I was pleasantly surprised today to find an email in my inbox from Routledge’s marketing department with two reviews of my book Vygotsky at Work and Play.

One appears in the August 2009 The Psychologist, a journal of the British Psychological Association. The reviewer, Tania Heap from the Open University, seemed to me to “get” the book and was completely engaged by it being a  first person account. I was happy with her concluding words: “Anyone who has in interest in human learning and development should have this original piece of work on their shelves.”

The other review, by organizational psychologist Stephanie L. Brooke, appears in the American Psychological Association’s monthly review of books (online PsycCritiques/Contemporary Psychology) also in August 2009. This review is a rather lengthy and straightforward summary of the contents of the book. This reviewer is clearly more conflicted about the personal style, commenting that “Although subjective, the work is well thought out and well referenced.” Question: When did subjectivity and thinking become opposites?

I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, feel free to write a review!!!!

I’ll keep you posted!

In the extreme, schooling transforms not knowing into a deficit; creative imitation into individualized accomplishments, rote learning and testing; and completion into correction and competition.This is the current situation. This is what schools do and don’t do. I am as concerned as the next person about it, but I am equally concerned with bringing outside of school learning to the forefront of dialogue and debate among educators, researchers, policy makers and the public. This is because that is where creativity still lives. Putting on a play or concert and playing basketball as a team require the members to create a collective form of working together. Unfortunately, doing well in school does not. My reading of the literature on outside of school programs, along with my own intervention research, shows that outside of school programs (in particular, those involving the arts or sports) are more often than not learning-leading-development environments, methodologically analogous to early childhood ZPDs in a manner appropriate to school-aged children and adolescents. Whether deliberately or not, they continue to relate to young people as creative, in both mundane and appreciative senses.

These kinds of cultural outside of school programs share important features, most notably, those that foster activities that create ZPDs: freedom from knowing and socially imitative and completive activity. First, kids come to them to learn how to do something they do not know how to do. Maybe they want to perform in a play, make music videos, play the flute, dance, or play basketball. They bring with them some expectation that they will learn. They are related to by skilled outside of school instructors, often practitioners themselves, as capable of learning, regardless of how much they know coming in to the program. Thus, while there are of course differences in skills and experience that young people bring to outside of school programs, the playing field is more level than in school. Really good programs, in fact, use such heterogeneity for everyone’s advantage (Gordon, Bowman, and Mejia, 2003; Holzman, 2006, 2009).

Second, in these programs it’s OK to imitate and complete. In fact, it’s essential. The presumption is that how one becomes an actor, music producer, musician, dancer and athlete is by doing what others do and building on it. From the fundamentals through advanced techniques and forms, creatively imitating instructors and peers — and being completed by them— is what is expected and reinforced.

I have come to view outside of school programs that have these features as learning environments created by, and allowing for, learning playfully. They are, in this sense, a synthesis of Vygotsky’s ZPDs of learning-instruction and of play, not as spatio-temporal zones but as mundane creative activity. For, as in the free or pretend play of early childhood, the players (both students and instructors) are more directly the producers of their environment-activity, in charge of generating and coordinating the perceptual, cognitive and emotional elements of their learning and playing. Most psychologists and educators value play for how it facilitates the learning of social roles, with socio-cultural researchers taking play to be an instrumental tool that mediates between the individual and the culture and, thereby, a particular culture is appropriated (as in the work of Nicolopoulou and Cole, 1993; Rogoff, 1990; Rogoff and Lave, 1984; Wertsch, 1985). Through acting out roles (play-acting), children try out the roles they will soon take on in “real life.” I am sympathetic to this understanding and yet I think there is more that play contributes to development than this. Being a head taller is an ensemble performance, not “an act.” After all, we don’t say the babbling baby is acting out a role.

I see play as both appropriating culture and creating culture, a performing of who we are becoming (Newman and Holzman, 1993; Holzman, 1997, 2009). I see creative imitation as a type of performance. When they are playing with language very young children are simultaneously performing – becoming – themselves. In the theatrical sense of the word, performing is a way of taking “who we are” and creating something new – in this case a newly emerging speaker, on the stage a newly emerging character, in an outside of school program a skilled dancer or athlete – through incorporating “the other.”

In his essay on the development of personality and world view in children, Vygotsky wrote that the preschool child “can be somebody else just as easily as he can be himself” (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 249). Vygotsky attributed this to the child’s lack of recognition that s/he is an “I” and went on to discuss how personality and play transform through later childhood. I take Vygotsky to be saying that performing as someone else is an essential source of development, at the time of life before “I.”

Early childhood is the time before “I” and the time before “I know.” We can never completely replicate the type of lived activity out of which learning-leading-development occurs and “I” and “I know” are created. Nor should we want to. But outside of school programs, to the extent that they are spaces and stages for creativity (mundane and otherwise), appear to support young people’s learning-leading-development through revitalizing play and performance. Such programs are precisely the kind of support schools need, for as long as schools continue to discourage creativity.

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“It is not only a Vygotskian atmosphere where professionals share different backgrounds, but a zone where you may improve your human skills and to help others to perform a better world.” –Ignacio Dalton, educational researcher, Buenos Aires Argentina

“The class has been such a wonderful support system, helping me to deepen my consultancy with the youth and staff I work with in non-profit organizations.  The group has inspired me to be more creative in my work, to take more risks, and to build more.  It has been an honor to be part of such a group that is dedicated to human development, even when life, social, and political circumstances challenge us.”–Kim Sabo Flores, evaluation consultant, Brooklyn NY

“The International Class has made me learn to challenge some of my old beliefs and to peel off the rigid self image that we all try to portray in our life. The cultural and economic differences of all the countries of the student has made us get an even broader viewpoint on all the topics which were discussed.”–Ishita Sanyal, psychologist, Calcutta India

The International Class is a course of study in postmodern and activity-theoretic approaches to human development and learning. Emphasis is on social therapeutics, a methodology utilized in diverse mental health, educational, youth development and community organizing settings in the US and internationally.

I began this program in the fall of 2003 and I lead it with a great faculty. We provide a unique opportunity for practitioners and scholars from the US and countries around the world to study together, learn the Institute’s cutting edge developmental methodology, and build ties and support for themselves and their communities.

A creative playground and postmodern academy, participants create a dynamic zone of development in which they can engage the philosophical, political and psychological questions emerging from their practice.

The ten-month program combines residencies in New York City and seminars, supervision and project development sessions conducted online. Students come together to work with Institute faculty and others in the broader development community and advance their programs and research.

Residencies. The International Class meets at the Institute three times during the academic year (two six-day and one twelve-day residency period) to work together as a group with Institute faculty and associates. Site visits, observations, participant observations and experiential learning activities supplement daily seminar activity.

At Home. In between residencies, students study the social therapeutic method in relation to socio-cultural activity theory, theories of performance, postmodernism, group process and community development. Learning formats include on-line seminars, mentoring, dialogues with guest colleagues of the Institute, supervision and conference calls with faculty and mentors.

The International Class is cross-disciplinary and open to practitioners and scholars with a broad range of educational and life experiences—and a passion for innovation. Applications for the 2009-2010 program will be accepted through July 2009. Tuition is $3200. A limited number of full and partial scholarships are available.

For more information, including dates, applications and scholarship forms, contact me! To read more about the program, go to http://www.eastsideinstitute.org/internationalclass/index.html

I’ve been making a series of presentations in recent months around New York City and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed speaking with diverse audiences of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staffs at universities, conferences and human service organizations. The topics of my talks have varied—”Play is the Thing,” “Learning in Groups,” “Language Learning as Vygotskian Performance”—and the conversations have taken many different directions. But they are all relate to certain concepts of Vygotsky’s that have intrigued and inspired me for a long, long time.  I try to capture these concepts with quotes from Vygotsky’s writings. What do you think? Do they resonate with you? Intrigue? Inspire?

“The search for method becomes one of the most important problems of the entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological activity. In this case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of the study.” (Mind in Society, 1978, p. 65)

“In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.” (Mind in Society, 1978, p. 102). 

“The development of a corresponding concept is not completed but only beginning at the moment a new word is learned. The new word is not the culmination but the beginning of the development of a concept. Here, as everywhere, the development of the meaningful aspect of speech turns out to be the basic and decisive process in the development of the child’s thinking and speech.” (Thinking and Speech, 1987, p. 241)

“The relationship of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a movement from thought to word and from word to thought … Thought is not expressed but completed in the word. We can, therefore, speak of the establishment (i.e., the unity of being and nonbeing) of thought in the word … The structure of speech is not simply the mirror image of the structure of thought. It cannot, therefore, be placed on thought like clothes off a rack. Speech does not merely serve as the expression of developed thought. Thought is restructured as it is transformed into speech. It is not expressed but completed in the word.” (Thinking and Speech, 1987, p. 250-1)

I am compelled to comment on this last quote, because it is so provocative and evocative! Here’s what my colleague Fred Newman and I think about its implications: If speaking is the completing of thinking, if the process is continuously creative in socio-cultural space (that is, if mind is in society), then it follows that the “completer” does not have to be the one who is doing the thinking. Others can complete for us. In doing so, they are no more saying what we are thinking than we are saying what we are thinking when we complete ourselves. This implication is key to our understanding of emotional growth in social therapeutics.