Reviews

March, 2009

Nomination for the Eleanor Maccoby Award given by the American Psychological Association submitted by an international team

• Ana Marjanovic-Shane Assistant Professor of Education Chestnut Hill College  Philadelphia, PA
• Vesna Ognjenovic Director NGO Zdravo da ste/Hi Neighbour Programmes for social and cultural integration of children and youth  Belgrade, Serbia
• Volker Bunzendahl Associate professor University College Nordjylland   Aalborg, Denmark
• Lina Kostarova-Unkovska, Director Centar for Psychosocial and Crisis Action – Institute for Develoment of Youth Culture and Initiatives  Skopje, Macedonia
• Bojana Skorc Professor of Psychology Faculty of Fine Arts University of Belgrade  Belgrade, Serbia
• Leif Strandberg Psychologist and Writer  Stockholm, Sweden
• Paul Murray Lecturer of Theatre and Applied Theatre, University of Winchester  UK

We wish to nominate Lois Holzman’s book “Vygotsky at Work and Play”, 2009, for the 2010 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award. “Vygotsky at Work and Play” is a book about an approach to therapeutic and educational practices. Based on a cultural historical perspective of human development, this approach regards people as whole human beings — with the cognitive, emotional and social aspects of their beings deeply intertwined and inseparable. Moreover, this approach understands that individuals not only belong to social communities, but that their development is inseparable from the development of those communities and that the two are mutually constituting each other. The book describes two important aspects of this approach. First, it describes a theoretical perspective of human development that Holzman developed over the years based on her unique reading of the works of Vygotsky. Secondly, this theoretical approach also has grown through multiple programs and practices that Holzman developed or helped develop. These two aspects of the book are inseparable, forming a unique “tool-and- result” — a new concept that Holzman coined to describe a process of human becoming.

Although she claims that she only attempted to take Vygotsky “out of a scientific laboratory to ordinary people and their communities”, Holzman, in fact, moved some of Vygotsky’s concepts one step further and, in the process, developed her own perspective. In this short description, we wish to mention only a few of the concepts that are pivotal for Holzman’s approach to individual, group and cultural development. These are becoming, i.e. creating a “tool-and-result”; “creative imitation”; “performance as creating who you are by performing who you are not”, “social completion”; and “de-dualizing cognition and emotion”.

The concept of “tool-and-result” is deeply embedded in Holzman’s understanding of human development as becoming in which individuals and groups actively create both the environments and tools of their own development as well as their own development. Humans are transformers of totalities – not of isolated aspects or parts of their environments. Development, in Holzman’s understanding, “is the activity of creating who you are by performing who you are not.” Such activities are possible based on two complementary ways of interaction. On one hand, humans, especially young children, have a propensity for “creative imitation” and on the other hand the process of creating meaning and understanding is a process of social “completion” – a specific collaboration on creating meaningful, developmental events. The concept of “creative imitation, at first glance, contains a paradox. However, imitation is not and never can be a literal copy of someone else. The act of repetition itself, leads to transformations that are not immediately visible. A child learns by repeating the behavior of others, but in that repetition the behavior is reconstructed.

Creative imitation is an individual’s movement toward understanding the world by recreating it. However, the individual would not be able to create thought and feeling about the world, if there was no complementary movement from others to complete the newly constructed meaning. Completing other’s initial thoughts/feelings creates both understanding and builds the person by acknowledging her/his meaning making offers.Thus, completion and creative imitation together enable and create the zone of proximal development as a joint collective form of tool-and-result: the developmental environment and the development itself.

Holzman describes several projects and practices that she either initiated and/or helped develop, which were built upon these ideas and also helped develop them to their present form. Her theory and practice are inseparable. Holzman and her collaborators consistently carry out the Vygotskian principle that everyone can be a head taller than her/him-self. Because of that, their research is not done primarily or only to arrive at a scientific truth, but to build, to re-build and to keep building the society in which they live. The Social Therapy movement, the Barbara Taylor School, the All Stars Program and the Youth on Stage for urban youth, are all movements that are both developmental practices and the generators of the scientific truths that Holzman presents in “Vygotsky at Work and Play”.

A concept deeply embedded in Holzman’s book that we find the most revolutionary and provocative is her notion of a “shift away from paradigms of any kind”. This is a new and carefully crafted position of creating new “ways of seeing” synthesized with discovering new “ways of being”. This notion helps us overcome all paradigmatic constraints and biases that make it so difficult to give the right value to human development, wherever it happens and whatever form it takes.

Erasing dualities between thinking and emotions, between play and work, between thinking and acting is a distinctive mark of Holzman’s work. The book presents, to us, a series of examples of constant building of new tool-and-results and new developments, thus transforming what we know about education, about emotional well being and about work as a source of knowledge and prosperity. It also leads to creating new realities for and with children and adults. In these realities they can become more of who they are by creating themselves as individuals and as groups. For Holzman, a revolution becomes an activity of social re-construction. Reading her book, one realizes that a revolution without violence is possible.

READ a review from the August 2009 issue of The Psychologist.

WATCH a clip of recorded comments on Vygotsky at Work and Play by Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Vygotskian researcher and past president of the AERA Special Interest Group  on Cultural Historical Research.

Some Words from Ana Marjanovic-Shane

READ the Foreword to the book by Kenneth Gergen.