The Opening Session in the 2023/2024 Seminar on Imagination & Creativity in Vygotsky’s Work is Wednesday, September 13th at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight Savings Time.
Francine Smolucha leads a Review and Discussion of Topics raised during last year’s Seminar on Imagination and Creativity in Vygotsky’s Works. The review features a presentation by Gillian McNamee on her trip to Kyrgyzstan where she launched a preschool program. Contact Francine Smolucha at lsmolucha@hotmail.com for the ZOOM link.
Since March 2022, we have held Five Coffee Hours and a monthly Seminar on Imagination & Creativity in Vygotsky’s Works. Most of those sessions focused on Vygotsky’s 1930 publication “Imagination & Creativity in Childhood”. In April and May 2023, we introduced Vygotsky’s other papers “Imagination & Creativity of the Adolescent” (1931) and “Imagination and its Development in Childhood” (1932).
READING:
Synopsis of the Seminar on Imagination and Creativity in Vygotsky’s Work by Francine Smolucha
VIDEO ARCHIVE:
There is an important question about cultural exchange, that we can discuss further in December when we have another session on Gillian’s trip to Kyrgyzstan. By bringing her expertise and educational materials to rural Kyrgyzstan, is Gillian propagating Eurocentric
culture (colonialization)? This is a rhetorical question and by no means an accusation.
Was the Peace Corps worker who had established a connection with members of the community (prior to Gillian’s visit) propagating colonial oppression? The request for help
in setting up a preschool program came from members of the indigenous community?
How might indigenous cultural activities be brought into the preschool activities?
The previous Soviet influenced preschool model is a Eurocentric colonialism (almost military school model). But then even Karl Marx’s writings could be considered Eurocentric colonialism.
On the other hand, indigenous isolationism doesn’t have survival value in a global
technocracy. There is a dialectic here between preserving indigenous culture and
surviving/thriving in the global community.
I was deeply impressed by Gillian’s wonderful account of her work in Kyrgyzstan. The teachers Gillian worked with were clearly hungry for child-centered and play-focused ways of being with children and eager to learn from her but is there perhaps a risk that in adopting these ‘foreign’ approaches they may lose sight of what is perhaps valuable in their own culture as regards ways of understanding children and childhood? Is there a risk that ‘best practice’ might help to make ‘old’ or ‘uneducated’ practices feel inappropriate? I don’t want to be naive or romantic about the value of ‘other’ ways of being with children but I am concerned that the cultural momentum behind ‘minority world’ concepts of childhood might mean that relatively unrecorded and unstudied understandings could be swept away. Is there anything we can do to try to support, nurture and learn from the rich variety of surviving cultures, without just collecting and appropriating ‘exotic’ novelties?
We hope to address these issues further in a session on Nov 29th with Tara Ratnam
in her presentation on the dialectic between “local culture and global imperatives.”
Tara has worked in India in Teacher Education for under served communities.
A realistic appraisal of the dynamics involved in the global technocracy and its impact
worldwide is needed. I don’t know if anyone else has used the term ‘global technocracy’, but I will. Globalism began with the Spanish and Portuguese imperialism\
of the 15th century. Prior to that there was regional imperialism such as Egyptian, Persian,Hellenistic, Roman, Islamic, Mongols,Chinese, Aztec, etc.
I am not being pedantic here. Gillian is interacting with a community that has engaged
in cultural exchange for millennium, there is no pristine tribal community. Laying
along the Silk Road the indigenous people encountered numerous invasions such
as the Turkish nomads who original came from the east prior to settling much later
in Anatolia (modern day Turkey). The Persian conquest introduced the suffix ‘stan”
that we find at the end of Central Asian states such as Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, etc.
Add Imperial Russian and Soviet expansionism to the mix. And certainly trade with
the Chinese dynasties.
If I am not mistaken Western European colonialism didn’t actually reach Kyrgyzstan.
The economic imperialism of the U.S. and China are the most recent newcomers
actually, introducing the Kyrgyz people to an ‘global’ economy that is actually a technocracy.
Respecting and learning from the Kyrgyz community as it exits in the year 2023,
is something that Gillian has been engaged in, in addition to sharing her knowledge
at the request of members of the Kyrgyz community.
Rod’s Commentary doesn’t suggest otherwise.
I take Rod’s Comments to be a reminder to us that cultural exchange goes both
ways (or it is not an exchange). The storybook made of small stones placed on
the ground was an ingenious synthesis of both the local materials and foreign
media (the storybook).
Perhaps Gillian could examine the storybooks she brought to see if there was any capitalist, imperialist messaging in the storybooks that she brought? The preschool teachers did not seem to think that there was anything that might undermine Kyrgyzstan values or customs. Gillian did mention in her presentation
that should a more “conservative’ regime become dominant in Kyrgystan there
would be problems – I took that to mean a fundamentalist Islamic regime that would
not allow girls to be educated or allow the influence of a foreign culture.
The innocence of preschool play is a dear thing, and I think a wonderful gift that
Gillian shared.