Performing/Playing/Pretending: Vygotsky Meets Social Therapeutics

• In Event: Performance as a Social Context for Transformative Educational Praxis

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
Lev Vygotsky’s writings on children’s learning and development as cultural-social activities have important implications for educational reform and transformation. Two insights in particular play a role in the development of a performative, social therapeutic approach to teaching/learning: 1) learning—occurring in “the zone of proximal development”—is “a collective form of working together” (Vygotsky, 2004 ) and 2) in play we perform “a head taller” than we are (Vygotsky, 1978). These insights inform dozens of cultural-educational programs for children, youth and adults from inner-city communities that relate to them as performers of their lives (including their learning lives). These programs are intervention sites actualizing the “head taller” experience for people across the life span by allowing/inviting/guiding them to create zones of proximal development—to actively participate in creating the very environments in which they can perform (Holzman, 2009). This presentation highlighted the theoretical framework and scope of Vygotskian, social therapeutic practices, and their challenges to cognitively and other epistemologically-organized teaching/learning contexts.

As a cultural-performatory approach to human development, social therapeutics has been advanced in educational settings over three decades (Holzman and Mendez, 2003; Holzman, 2009; Newman and Holzman, 2006/1996). These include a Vygotskian community school; professional development in performance and improvisation for inner city teachers; outside of school programs; and a free university-style development center. This presentation highlights the youth programs and “free university” involving 1000s ages 5 – 25, and 100s of adults in activities based in a developmental understanding of performance as necessary to creating learners and fostering emotional/social development (Holzman, 2000, 2009).

Significance
Dialogue on “the achievement gap” typically focuses on educational opportunities and roadblocks of schooling, overlooking the fact children and youth in the US spend only about 25% of their time in school (Heath, 2000). Families with time and money are able to organize their children’s out of school time to supplement school learning through trips, camps, organized sports, cultural and religious programs, and individualized lessons. Such is not the case for the majority of low-income and ethnic minority students.

Many who link performing with learning and developing look to the promise offered by non-school settings given how schools fail so many young people and communities. Heath determined that the highest quality community-based programs gave youth opportunities to perform in new and different types of roles, not just on stage, but within the program itself, through which they came to see themselves as “capable of acting outside and beyond the expected” (Heath, 2000). Those who identify with performative psychology return to Vygotsky’s views on play. Babies and toddlers learn and grow through playing at being ways they aren’t yet but will grow into (speakers of language, readers of books, sketchers of pictures, etc.). In other words, in their everyday lives, they perform who they are becoming. Together with their caregivers, they perform their learning and development. Older children, adolescents and adults can do the same, if given the opportunity. They can perform both on stage and off, and learn and develop in the process.

Author

• Lois Holzman, East Side Institute