23 Sep The Life of a Languager
On Wednesday October 21, I’ll be speaking at Penn State’s Center for Language Acquisition in their Invited Speaker Series. My topic?
Performing Other—The Life of a Languager
In his essay on the development of personality in children, Vygotsky wrote that the preschool child “can be somebody else just as easily as he can be himself.” Vygotsky attributed this to the young child’s lack of recognition that s/he is an “I.” Performing as someone else— simultaneously being who you are and other than who you are—is an essential source of development at the time of life before “I.” The “performance turn” among researchers and practitioners in human development and learning provides strong evidence that it is also a source of development after “I”. Implications for how we understand, relate to, research and “teach” language will be discussed.
Richard Patik
Posted at 01:46h, 25 SeptemberThank you, Lois!
“Seeking a cause doesn’t get you moving!” — that’s helpful. Maybe there are some varying set of conditions that are conducive to getting moving — but waiting around trying to figure out abstractly what they “are” before creating actions in whatever conditions are present — that doesn’t do anything except maybe create a fantasy of understanding of the “problem”.
loisholzman
Posted at 17:31h, 23 SeptemberThanks, Richard—a lovely “yes, and.”
I’m not sure your question—”What makes one actually DO something different?”—will take you/us on a creative journey of discovery. Seeking a cause doesn’t get you moving!
Richard Patik
Posted at 06:23h, 23 SeptemberLife Before “I” – that would make a great movie title — and movie. Love this quote!
It sounds bizarre to ears steeped in our [probably any] language — this notion that a child [or anyone] “can be somebody else just as easily as he can be himself.” But it’s a far more powerful and liberating notion than “finding yourself” or the effete haze of drug therapy both which largely deny power to create and shape through activity. When I was in college I used to always put my “I”s in quotes because I had a vague sense that one was as real or “playable” as the other.
Yet to actually DO it, to play a different part as an adult against the “Known I” — our and others’ cherished and expected identities — not so easy to dare to or remember how to do in a particular moment. Understanding doesn’t seem to be enough. What makes one actually DO something different? Judgment-free or judgment-lite zones definitely help.