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| Lois
Holzman |
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Developmental
Psychologist
Consultant • Speaker • Educator
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Vygotsky
at Work and Play
Forthcoming,
December 2008
from
the Preface
Vygotsky
at Work and Play is a qualitative inquiry,
a life history of intertwined relationships, projects
and communities in which Vygotsky plays a key role.
Mostly, it is my story of bringing Vygotsky from
the scientific laboratory to ordinary people and
their communities, and of what I and others have
created with him. It is the story of a unique kind
of intervention research and the conflicted ways
in which institutionalized psychology and educational
research relate to it. Like all that we have created
with Vygotsky, this book is consciously and thoroughly
subjective. It is written to inform, provoke and
persuade readers to the value of the “Vygotskian-Newman-Holzman
tool-and-result practice of method” -
a process of creating environments for development.
The book tries to show what it looks like when
ordinary children, youth and adults engage in this
process in a variety of everyday life settings. The
new activity they create is their (and the world’s)
development. It is, as well, a practical-critical
questioning of the distinctions, dichotomies and
boundaries of the existing ways of doing psychology
and the assumptions underlying them. As such, Vygotsky at Work and
Play is essentially a performatory text, simultaneously
a part of and a reflecting on the conceptual revolution
underway in psychology and the broader culture.
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"At
the end of the day, peaceful and profound social change depends
on people becoming able to see possibilities and having both the
willingness and the means to act on them."
Read
A Peaceful Approach to Profound
Social Development and Cultural Change and meet some grassroots
revolutionary performers I have the privilege of knowing and working
with.
"Over
the decades, Vygotsky has gone from being categorized as a behaviorist
to being a leading cognitive psychologist to most recently being
hailed as a constructivist. It could also be argued that in their
haste to make use of Vygotsky's discoveries about human learning,
development and consciousness, many Vygotskian (especially in the
Western tradition) have tended to overlook the theoretical (and
practical, I would argue) relevance of his philosophy."
Read
Activating Postmodernism
in What Kind of Theory is Activity Theory? a special issue of Theory & Psychology, which I guest edited.
"Lev
Vygotsky is my closest dead friend."
Read
Performing a Life (Story) appearing
in Narrative Identities:Psychologists Engaged in Self-Construction.
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