The Wikipedia entry on 'scaffolding' corresponds to what I learned as a
student, which is that Jerome Bruner was the person who coined the term
'scaffolding' (in relation to children's language acquisition) and
developed it as a theory, but was in fact influenced by Vygotsky's work -
though Vygotsky didn't actually use the term scaffolding. But
'scaffolding' is now applied to Vygotsky's own ideas about learning.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaffolding_Theory
Margaret Boden's excellent book "Mind as machine: A history of cognitive
science" contains some descriptions of Bruner's work on scaffolding from
the 1970s(in particular, pages 310-11). Here are some quotes:
"Babies can discriminate a good deal more than had previously been thought
- and what they attend to is greatly influenced by the direction of the
mother's gaze. In that sense, 'the baby's looking' is a *joint action* of
mother and baby combined. [...] Later work...reiterated the importance of
social "scaffolding" in what had previously been assumed to be 'pure'
cognitive development, or 'individual' learning..."
"During his seven-year stay in Oxford in the 1970s, Bruner did further
important work on cognitive technologies. For instance, he and Michael
Scaife did pioneering research on the development of cooperative attention
and turn-taking in mother-infant communication, showing how these social
activities "scaffold" the growth of language - the most important cultural
tool of all (e.g. Scaife and Bruner 1975)"
David
> In the session which Kathrin Kaufhold and I presented on our AWESOME
> Dissertation Environment we were asked what we understood the term
> 'scaffold' to mean as they had a different sense of its meaning. I would
> have liked to discuss the issues more and found it a very interesting
> question. I am raising the question here for two reasons. First to thank
> the person who asked it - I had intended to come and find you later to
> talk more but never saw you again - and to ask her if she would say more
> about the different meanings / uses she associates it with. Second, I
> think it would be interesting to hear from others how they understand and
> use the term. I was recently part of an International Symposium on
> Academic Writing Development and we used a wiki to create a glossary of
> terms - it was an interesting task. How do you know whether something
> will be familiar to others or not; and how do you know that your meaning
> is the same as others?
>
> My understanding is that the term and its practice originates in English
> for Academic Purposes and was then extended into writing / learning
> development through academic literacy theorists. I think I first
> encountered it in the work of Mary Lea and Barry Stierer. As a term within
> learning theory, it can be linked back to Vygotsky's concept of the Zone
> of Proximal Development, which has been adapted and popularised by many
> writers. I think it means that you make explicit the expectations you have
> when setting learning / writing tasks and that you stage the tasks and
> model the outcomes you expect - in other words, adopting a process
> approach to the production of the final text. As I said yesterday, it is
> the difference between saying: Write an Essay on x and You are going to
> write an essay on X because .... This will involve ...... Here are some
> examples of what I do and don't expect to see in the final essay ... Shall
> we talk about it? Why don't you try ....?
>
> Note to Stu & Becca re Tweet: the themes and area of work - ie academic
> writing and social on-line environments came first and then as we were
> developing our first bid to JISC we were looking for a neat acronym and
> Melissa Highton suddenly said: Awesome and the rest is history...)
> Rebecca
>
> Dr Rebecca O'Rourke
> Senior Lecturer
> Lifelong Learning Institute
> Room 7.57 EC Stoner Building
> University of Leeds
> Leeds LS2 9JT
> (0)113 343 3181
> [log in to unmask]
> [log in to unmask]" target="_blank">http:[log in to unmask]
>
--
Dr David Hardman
Principal Lecturer in Learning Development
Associate Editor, Journal of Economic Psychology
JDM textbook blog. http://judgmentanddecisionmaking.blogspot.com
Science and reason blog. http://dkhardman.blogspot.com
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