http://parenthood.library.wisc.edu/Bronfenbrenner/Bronfenbrenner.html

Hey guys I was looking up some stuff about Bronfenbrenner and I ran across this article, Growing Chaos in the lives of children youth and families: How can we turn it around? by Bronfenbrenner and I found a quote I thought was interesting,

He talks about their being many ways of knowing and how science is the only way of knowing where you are obligate to prove yourself wrong. He mentions science in the mode of discovery.

I haven't read the entire piece but thought it may be of interest. If it is hopefully you'll read it if not have a great day anyway! (Oh the link is at the top of the page)

Lewin and parenting

I really enjoyed this reading. I was originally interested in contextual effects on children's development and I used a part of Lewin's theory in my thesis before so it was interesting to deeply look at field theory.
Specifically, the idea that people's reality level of the psychological future can be formed through subjective perception was interesting. Also, the sentence that 'the psychological past and the future are simultaneous parts of the psychological field existing at a given time' was impressive because he looked at the present with people's perceptions on the past and the future. The past, the present, and the future seemed to be highly tied in his theory. I've been thought that the present is important for individual but the past and the future should be considered as context of their life.
In addition, when I think about 'parenting' which is my research interest, I could think that parents' perceptions on parenting would be more important than just considering normed parenting styles. There are numerous studies about the relationship between parenting styles and children's development. However, there is only few research on parents' perceptions on parenting which can subjectively affect children's development. I thought that parents and children's perceptions on their experiences or situations will be important for both parents and children's life.

Lewin and life space

I really liked reading Lewin and thinking about the three areas of interest in psychology, life space, the processes in the physical/social world that do not affect the life space, and the boundary zone of the life space. When thinkning about my research interests particular adolescent development and their ecological environment I felt like it fit into both the life space and the boundary zone. For instance, my work with Anastasia Snyder focuses on youth expectations and parent expectations and educational attainment. I feel like this deals with the life space, the current motivations and desires of the youth at a given time and assessing those. Then going ahead and looking at their current educational attainment at a given time. To me parental expectations fall in the boundary zone of the adolescent's life space since they are not measured as youth's perceptions of their parent's expectations but given by the parent's themselves.

The discussion of food's existence and the knowledge of food's existence and how only the knowledge of the food's existence being must be represented in the individual's life space was interesting to me and made sense in that it is only one's knowledge of the food's presence or lack there of that can be represented in the life space as this knowledge then affects one's behavior. In my ideas about parental expectations for youth it is only the youth's knowledge or perception of their parents expectations or the lack of parental expectations that affects the youth's behavior and thus should be represented in their life space.

Perhaps I am unsure of Lewin's point here regarding understanding how the past may affect the situation at a given time. Is it only an individual's perceptions of the past and their future (their realtiy and wish levels of the past as well as their hope and planning for the future) that can be included in the present situation or the field at a given time?
That was my understanding of it. Did anyone else agree or have a different understanding? Let me know.

Lewin

So to make sense of Lewin's ideas, I'm trying to relate them to the research I have been a part of lately... one of my main interests has been attachment theory. In a way, I feel the social psychological folks interpretation of attachment theory fits with Lewin's ideas. So while attachment theory emphasizes the importance of early life experiences with primary caregivers as a foundation to "internal working models" about love and closeness, social psychologist are most often interested in assessing peoples current feelings/perceptions about close relationships (as opposed to developmental psychologists who take a more psychoanalytic approach) to see how this might impact their functioning in relationships. In a way I feel this fits with Lewin's statements about their subjective expectations about the future or assessments of the past.

So, would Lewin argue that drawing connections between parental sensitivity in early childhood and let's say, teenage social functioning, is not appropriate under field theory? And that if such associations are studies, it makes more sense to pursue them under a different name and for the sake of statistically, objectively, predicting future events across a population?

Applications

So I've been thinking really hard about how I'm going to apply all of this great information that we have been exposed to this quarter to my class next quarter. So far I really feel very strongly toward applying a combination of Bandura and Dewey's perspectives in my class. I really like the way he talks about learning, and what steps he believes are necessary in order for learning to occur. So far, my thinking about application in class consists of presenting the topics that we will cover a week in advance. For the next few days, I thought I would ask the students to read the material, and post (kind of like a blog), about what really piqued their interest and what they would like to see presented in the following class. Then, I would be able to develop a presentation that consists of models - media, visual, role playing, etc., that the students would watch. Then, I would ask them to form their discussion groups - which last quarter had no more than 5 students in each group - in order to practice the skills that I have shown them. Then, we could come back together and discuss why these skills are important based on their knowledge of reading about them, seeing them in practice, and them practicing themselves.

Dunno, just an idea...

lunch?

It just so happens that this Thursday (3/10) I do not have stats lab directly following our class - so if folks wanted to, I would love to grab a quick lunch with everyone. There is a great Indian buffet across the street from Caribou or of course Five Guys or Graffiti burger right close by on 5th too - I'm up for whatever!! (Doesn't bonding over food relate to some archetype?) ;)

archetypes...

So I find myself struggling still with this archetype concept and exactly how exactly these archetypes influence a person. How many archetypes are there? Did Jung attempt to quantify them or is that somewhat against his work (I'm leading toward the latter as he seems reluctant to be overly specific about particular archetypes and to walk a fine line between describing one enough to show its existence and becoming over prescriptive with how it manifests).

I think I may buy Freud's argument that we like distruction more than I buy this whole notion of archetypes... but I worry that I am missing part of Jung's argument.

Freud and participatory democracy

Small caveat first - this morning on WCBE (local NPR), I heard a story about legislation a group of folks are trying to pass to include 120 additional curriculum instruction hours on american's historical documents (i.e., a greater focus on american history and engagement with "seminal" documents related to said history)... I immediately thought of Dewey ;) - how does such instruction allow students to engage in relevant problem-solving in their lives and societies? It was interesting that the major "road block" in this legislation appeared to be that it is not currently tested in Ohio's proficiency test (but the relevant folks involved claimed the proficiency test needed to be updated anyway...) - I'm sure behind all of this, was a thought that such changes in education would allows students to better understand democracy (as an object). Even as I wrote that sentence - the ideas of "trust" and "permission" and "elite" are so entrenched.... what "we" "allow" the citizenry to "know," our level of mistrust in their ability to figure out and decipher on their own was is needed, the experts know what we should be doing...

But I digress ;) - one of the biggest issues I found myself wrestling with this week was how to rectify Freud's assumptions about humanity with what is presented by Dewey/Locke/Kallen - "The idea that there are competing groups with competing interests is an illusion the groups must work towards overcoming in the process of dealing with the problem. The more individuals work together as part of different groups, where the difference are defined by the particular problem, the more they realize they have the same, or similar core human interest, and that solutions to their problems can emerge from any quarter" (p. 27-28). Within this, I am lead to a a more optimistic view of humanity, a more "humanist" - positive psychology perspective, if you will, and I find myself trying to figure out if Freud's ideas about the development and maintenance of societies fit with what is presented by these other theorists.

take a look at this link!

Check this article on NY times. It's a project going on in India.
This looks very much like what we talked about. There is a five year project in underprevilieged areas in India, which moves from the traditional education of drilling and intensive memorizing. They let the children write thier own stories, and the children do proejcts of their own.

They have not seen a signficant increase in achievement scores yet... but seems to be promising considering what we talked today. Isn't this great, that in a part of the world, an educational experiment is going on! (and to the direction we like to see!)

School as life

So.. I just got home from work and I kept thinking about Dewey all day. Especially article two in his pedagogic creed, what the school is. Thinking of school as representing present life, life as real and vital to the child. This stuck out to me and kept rolling around in my head. It made me wonder that perhaps the reason why some children are unsuccessful in school is that school isnt real and vital to them. It does not represent their present life or teach them how to live in their environment outside of school and does little to teach them how to live "community life"

Dewey states that "I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living" How different this is from our current stressing of school and the education system. We tell children they have to suceed well in school in order to have a "good" future (which is true in a sense) yet is it the case that we rush them through with such a strong emphasis on the future that we forget to help them live out the present?

Although as it was stated in other posts U.S. school system was modeled after Dewey theory I don't believe that the current public school system really follows this model. How can school be changed to represent life without a complete overhaul?

Education system & Dewey

At first, I liked Dewey because he always considered social elements in education and the differences among individuals. Also, I strongly agree with the idea that child should learn from the LIFE of the school, not just knowledge. The developmental steps, 'home->school->society' seemed really attractive. In addition, teachers' role which tries to do constant and careful observation of interests was appealing. I thought that one of reasons that many Koreans have difficulties to express themselves or their curiosity is the education system which repress and humor students' interests. We could not discover the power!

Even though I agreed and liked Dewey, I had similar thoughts with Xiamei and Rachel that if it is realistic in our society, especially in Asia. People perceive a school as the place where children learn something which are helpful to enter the college (to get a higher score in the college entering exam). It came from the perception that people who graduate better college normally get a better job and they can finally enjoy better life. Also, the people who graduate the better college develop our society with their smart idea and brain. And the only standard tool which can evaluate people in our society is the TEST (I know it is too sad to say it). I thought that's why people are so struggling with the test in school and hard to follow Dewey's belief. If we change our whole education system as Dewey suggested, how can compromise these concerns? Is it really possible to change people's perception? As Glassman said, when the schools started to follow and accept Dewey's idea, was it successful?

I really liked to read Dewey's idea but it made me frustrated too because I thougt that it is really difficult for our society to accept those good ideas in our education system..

Here science and art go hand in hand

I admit that Dewey's statements are very appealing. For example, school must represent present life, and educative process will be haphazard and arbitrary without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual. If my understand is correct, he argues that learning happens through experiencing and thinking. What we have done, sitting in the classroom absorbing the teacher's words, passively, is not real or the best learning process. The point I think is very important is that moral education should be the center of school education.

I wonder whether those points are appealing just because they are not what we have experienced, in other words, unrealistic. And why most of us feel Dewey's argument about education sounds so much sense but the education system today is still not close to what Dewey proposed. And, can education be so pure/innocent?

When I think about education, the first idea is that education is the tool that government uses to brain wash their people, starting from their childhood. The government decides which textbooks to use, what should be taught and what should not be. Yes there are private schools. But the students there still need to take the same nation-wide exam in order to get in the college. So they still need to learn what public school students learn from school. Although I think it is a very good point that moral training should be the main focus of school education, maybe more important than the nature science study, I am not clear whether and how the whole education system can be altered to a different form. Or maybe it is not necessary to change the whole system, I just wonder there is something really can be done in our life.

I love Dewey!

Okay, so I got up early in the morning to read Dewey, and I loved it!
The emphasis of school as a "community" and that the school life itself has to be worth living for rather than as a preparation of a future life.
That the teachers are members of community that helps to facilitate learning for the students with the previous experiences and wisdom.
That there are two dimensions of education - sociological and psychological - and that the psychological aspect must come first.
That learning should be in connection with the actual social life that the student is living in.
That under interest lies the power, and the education is about finding that power.

And now as a retrospect my school days, those things were never never never present in the education that I received. The teachings were far too much isolated from the life that I was living - lack of connection to what I can actually use in my daily life, I just thought that someday I might need them. Lack of respect for my interest and the social motives that I had - I had to match my interest and social motives to the ones that were imposed in order to survive.

I have two questions with those in mind.
From what background did Dewey come up with such ideas? Was the education at that time very unproductive and problematic?
Second, how is those ideas appied to real school settings? From Sara's posting below, it seems that there are people who try to appy Dewey's philosophy in the classes but without fidelity. At least they try! (I'm being optimistic this morning.)

I know some "substitute" schools in Korea which have simliar philosophy as Dewey's and I don't know if they are following his idea, but it seemed really nice and helping for the students. They emphasize the school as a community including the principal, teachers and the students, and they emphasize the interest of each child and try to match the learning environment for each student. However, they struggle also, to discipline the students (they have community rules that the students themselves establish...) and to make good standards to get in the university. I don't know how well they do in the entrance examination and how well they adjust to the university environment, (I hope they do well!) but I just was wondering as I was reading the articles, so I see that Dewey's ideas are great, but how can they be applied into the school and the classrooms? Those substitute schools are not public schools and so there are small numbers of students who go to this kind of schools. So I guess that how it is possible to have such revolutionary learning environment. However they still need to educate the students to rise to the social standards. Dewey says that th ideal schools hace reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals (Article Five, the school and Social Progress). How can this be possible? (Or even, is it at all, possible?)

Dewey...

As I was reading Dewey and finding myself at home in his writing, I began to think about how his "ideas" are sometimes "utilized" in education. Like the other theorists we have read this quarter, it appears that pieces of his writing are often taken out of context and applied in a way that is counterproductive to the rest of his message.

A little story to explain. In undergrad I took a class about "mind and body" going to school - exploring the need to connect the mind and the body in educational exploration. However, as I look back on the experiences my classmates and I created, these "active learning" lessons were devoid of the children's interests... so in a way, while they incorporated movement (i.e., the body), they were not born out of the social life of the school community -so how were we really capitalizing on the whole idea of experience, thinking and learning? Our work was tied back to Dewey (among others), but I'm left here wondering what we created... and ultimately, the value in teacher training as it is currently structured. To create "lessons" in isolation, is not to take advantage of the all the knowledge (the data) of the particular classroom and group of students with who you wish to work - then how can your really be "thinking" in this endeavor, you could not begin to predict or for hypotheses about how your work with them will flow?

Freud-Erikson

Erikson's theory was more comfortable and reasonable for me than Freud's one. Freud's theory was surprisingly applied for most situations and human's characteristics, however, it was really hard to accept for me because of it's determinants (maybe it is from cultural background). I liked Erikson's arguments because he considered the future and adulthood too while Freud has concentrated on the previous experiences in childhood.
Also, I liked the concept of "identity crisis" even though this concept is still abstract. I had a conversation with my friend several days ago and we talked about continuous stressful events and anxiety in the whole life. We both agreed with the advantages of stress because we thought that human can be continuously developed by overcoming the stress until the death. When I read Erikson's identity crisis, I felt the similar thing (human is developed via each crisis stage). I focused on understanding the process during the crisis and I was curious about the difference between Freud's concept of anxiety and guilty and Erikson's anxiety and guilty during the formation of identity.

In the last week, I imagined the argument between Freud and Skinner (maybe never compromised discussion?). However, I realized that the discussion between Freud and Erikson would be more interesting! It is still hard to catch subtle distinctions between them because there is definitely Freud's basic assumptions in Erikson's theory but I felt that Erikson developed Freud's theory to adapt it for broader and normal people with new concepts. I'm wondering how Freud would argue about it.

reading Erikson

As i was reading Erikson, some of the sentences were interesting...
'

Identity is "central control over oneself, for which only the inner agency of the ego could be held responsible."
Some of the concepts that are used to indicate identity are wrong such as self-conception, self-imagery, self-etseem, role ambiguity, role conflict, and role ross.
Identity is "never established as an ahcevement in the form of a personality armor, or of anything static and unchangeable."

So WHAT IS IDENTITY?
As Jennifer wrote below, reading Erikson is quite boring which I think is due to his indirect way of explaining things. He never really defines or directlly states what he is trying to say! (seems to me...)

So I went on to the early developmental stages, which I thought was his version of explaining Freud's psychosexual development using the oral, anal, and phallic stages. I thought that he was adding some social terms and relatoinship attributes to Freud's theory.

It was when he said that the sense of initiative is important in childhood, and that the great governor of initiative is conscious, the "inner voice" that when I thought this was interesting. However, again, what is "initiative" and "who intiaties"? What is inner voice?

I was thinking that he might be emphasizing the role of Ego in balancing between the id and the superego. He elaborates how a baby makes contact to the mother in each stages, and how the baby increasingly moves away from the mother as he/she grows up.

I'm quite confused of what he wants to indicate by identity (partly because my understanding of identity was through those concepts that he categorized as wrong ones to indicate identity.), and how this is different from or the same as Ego in Freud's theory.

About a boy named Erik

Read the comment based on Erikson's prologue

Erickson

So I am on p. 20 of the prologue and I am so bored reading this after having read Freud for 2 weeks. I expect riveting discussion from pro-Ericksons after having to forgo more Freud for this!

So I'm still stuck on Freud...

I was in NYC this weekend and went to this Sushi restaurant Morimoto. I went to the restroom and there were these toilets like I had never seen before! These toilets can pulsate, wash you, dry you, etc! How is this not evidence of the importance of genitalia (and therefore Freud being right)? Why would someone create such a thing if this was not the case? And these are considered luxury toilets!

Very late randome thoughts

I've been reading the posts as people post and post and post and didn't understand why there was so many posts for this week... then I got it.

First the religious view quite struck me. (Never did we learn about what Freud thought of religion..)
It was fascinating (as other people mentioned) to see he said that religious attitudes compes from the feeling of infantile helplessness. I agree to this except for the fact that Freud treats religion as a feeling or an attitude rather than a real thing (because I believe in it). However, the part that I couldn't quite get was the mention of the father figure. "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection" (on page 19.) Why would he say "father"'s protection rather than the caregiver or the mother? I mean everytime I learn or discuss about the infant development, the mother figure is more often mentioned because the mother is (and was in Freud's time) the primary caregiver not because of the cultural bias but because the mother feeds the baby. From the baby's perspective, the presence of the person who feeds him/her, and who takes care of him/her will matter, not specifically mother or father. So, why would Freud indicate a father? I don't mean to disappoint Letisha, I too think that the father's parenting is and should be very much important for child development. But I just can't get off the feeling that once again, Freud is all about male rather than females.

Then I went on to read more of his thoughts about religion. He mentions again that the religion is "patently infantile". Again I can't disagree with this remark. Religion IS based on the humans helplessness in saving thier souls. So there comes God who saves the world, and the souls of all humans.
I don't want to go deeper into the Christian principles, but I do want to mention that I hate it when people at church make the people feel unnecesarilly infantile and make them depend on external things rather than to hold onto one's faith.

Another interesting things is that he talks about happiness. (never knew that he talked about such area!) "What decides the purpose of life is simply the program of the pleasure principle" (23p). Is he arguing that even though the humans are built to be happy (when they follow the id by the pleasure principle)? But that the civilization is what makes such limitations and rules to follow against the id that makes us unhappy (and thus suffer from the superior natural power, the bodily limiations, and the relationships with others...)? I was thinking that why the society exists, and why does it confer so much boundaries and limiations to our behaviors (and the realization of the id)? What does it get from doing that? What good does it do?

Freud and Guilt

So as I was thinking about Freud I thought it would be interesting to have a discussion about his concept of guilt. I know that we talked about it at the beginning of our discussion on Freud but seeing as how he returns to it toward the end of his essay I thought we could as well. It is my understanding of Freud that one's feeling of guilt in regards to an action is a consequence of the super ego's aggression toward the ego (or in other words how the super ego keeps the ego in check). That is to say that regardless of whether or not an action is bad or not morally if the individual thinks it is bad then it is and it produces guilt and even anxiety within an individual.

I think that this arguement is true to a ceratin extent that if someone thinks they have done something wrong even if other do not share their same belief they do experience a feeling of guilt within themselves. Still I wonder if the demands of the super ego are what produces guilt within an individual and the internalized super ego developed as a result of the banding together of brothers who killed their dominant male leader (or patriach) how then did that feeling of guilt come to be in existence?

I know that Freud argues that the super ego developed as a result of the intense remorse felt by those who originally killed their patriach and this feeling of guilt has continued throughout the evolution of men, but why did the guilt or remorse occur initially? Is his arguement that guilt is an inherrent part of human nature? Is it simply that, the aggression that resulted in the murder of the father figure what brought forth guilt? I guess my thought is if they agreed to kill the patriarchial figure why would they then feel bad after they completed the act (remorse) especially if they are driven by aggression and libido?

Maybe I am thinking too much about this but these are my thoughts? Anyone else have any ideas?

Contention among groups and issues with portrayal of women

So, I decided to start with a "positive" - I find Freud's discussion of us vs. our neighbor (and subsequently us vs. them) enlightening. It makes intuitive sense that you can strengthen the cohesion of the group by directing aggression towards an other. I can think of many examples where this plays out and as we eluded to in our last discussion, how aggressive acts against "the other" are not seen as "bad" - and in some cases just. To some extent I am willing to accept the idea that we have some aggressive instinct (perhaps that "fight or flight" mechanism that we so often refer to). I guess I have a hard time following how this relates to our "death instinct" - it makes more sense to me to relate aggression to a "survival" or "life" instinct. This part of Freud's argument was particularly hard for me to understand.

Okay - so now the "negative" - I know I brought this up last time, and I guess I'm displaying my own neuroticism, but I have major issues with Freud's assumptions of women. I realize he writes this from a particular point in history and is thus affected by the sociocultural context - however, the idea that women get their satisfaction from the care of their children (or protection/love of their children), is to me frustrating. I enjoy being a parent, but I am not comfortable with defining myself purely from this role and would argue that solely confined to life with my children would not bring happiness - I am happier having a balance and participating in some of the aspects of civilization that Freud connects to males. Can it not bring me satisfaction to "hold my love object" (i.e., keep him/her close to me)? Also to beat a dead horse, I would argue women can derive just as much satisfaction from sex as men, even if this satisfaction is now diminished by the presence of societal constraints.

I just really like Freud but...

I just want to say that I really like Freud. One of the reasons I like him so much is because I feel like he explains why fathers should be - and in my opinion are -the most important person in a child's life. It makes me get a nice feeling inside since it validates my work. :)
BUT... I really like Bandura too!! Are we going to get to a point in the quarter where we can think about these ideas in conjunction with one another? There are so many parallels that I can see, but yet so many intricate differences that really are the essence of what these men are getting at with their ideas. How can we, or simply can we, use these ideas together in order to think about our work, our position in education (both as students and teachers), and how can we use them to guide our decisions? Since my writing assignment is how to apply what we're learning to my class, I guess that's why I am interested in how it all fits together :)

The crazy cat lady returns

I thought thse were good articles (Sigmund Freud and the Art of Dog Training Part 1) and (Part 2), particularly since it contrasts behaviorism and Freud, and how behaviorism has limitations with respect to training animals. It is by this guy who is a dog trainer who realized his training techniques were Freudian-based after a discussion with one of his psychotherapist clients. The author states that Konrad Lorenz's views on dogs have been invalidated, while behaviorism as applied to dog training has lost some support due to some aspects of the theory not holding up in actual training.

So Freud wasn't so crazy.....

I posted this article last quarter in our Cognition class, but I realize not everybody was in that class. Regardless, I found this article particularly appropriate given our current focus on Freud. Basically, the author attempts to dispel some of the myths about Freud (i.e. he was unscientific, crazy, etc). Here are some of the main points of the article:

1. Freud was a neurologist and studied nerve cells
2. Freud did not "invent" the idea of the unconscious...the unconscious (or similar versions) had already been proposed by other notables, including Wilhelm Wundt, Fustav Fechner, Leibniz, etc). Thus, Freud was very much a product of his time.
3. Neuroscientists today would not deny the existence of the unconscious and implicit memory
4. One of Freud's goals was to "ground the psychological in the biological" or to have biological evidence for his theories
5. Freud believed memories were not fixed, but reconstructed (this is something that memory researchers such as Loftus have "discovered" in their research)
6. Freud proposed that memory is represented in the brain at a cellular, synaptic level (this was a precursor to long-term potentiation)

some random thoughts

I think Freud's argument about religion makes a lot of sense that only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. And I totally agree that life brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. I told my friend once that if there is a future life I would rather be a tree or a stone, because life is so hard. She laughed and said "But you can eat so many delicious food!" Yes I agree with her that it is one benefit of being a human. Now I can argue with her that because of the suffering her pleasure principle is moderated to a level that can be achieved more easily.

I'm not religious but sometimes I feel Buddhism's viewpoints about human life are attractive. It says that we need to do good things and endure suffers in order to live better in the future life. The reason why we are suffering now in the human world is because we did not accumulate enough beneficence in the preexistence life. But I don't want to believe in (not sure what verb is appropriate to put here) any religion, maybe because I have not yet experienced the "ocean feeling."

People chase for happiness and avoid unhappiness, that is somehow correlated with Skinner's theory. I think the idea of death instinct is outside of Skinner's box? I'm not exactly sure what instinct is...Is it stored in the id??

And as as today's society are more civilized than before, I guess, does it mean our liberty and happiness are more restricited?

Religion and Freud

I am completely fascinated with Freud's thoughts on religion. I think it makes so much sense that religion fulfills people's desire for a paternal/maternal figure as protector. Seriously, this idea sounds so commonsense, so practical, that it is a wonder this idea is not more widely accepted.

On pp. 48 and 49, Freud talks about how religious figures (i.e. Francis of Assis) protect themselves from disappointment and hurt by loving mankind in general rather than a specific person(s). Furthermore, they transform the sexual drive into an impulsive with an inhibited aim. What results is a general affectionate feeling towards people, or as St. Francisco experienced it, an inner feeling of happiness. Thus, this is a somewhat primitive way of dealing with our innate drives, as the individual sets it up so that they never actually have to be confronted with disappointment, and are, in a sense, avoiding.

Freud refers to substance use as a "useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the human lot" (p.25). Would Freud say the same about religion?

Random note:
p. 49 - "...not all men are worthy of love." Is Freud really saying what I think he is saying?

Importance of the Environment

So far in this class, I think I received a consistent message that the environment (or the society as we have been discussing) is important in a human development.

Vygotsky- we talked about how the culture and the society influences the organization of thought.
Bandura- people develop self-efficacy through 1) by simply talking about it, 2) vicarious modeling, and 3) personal experience. Here the person needs someone to have discussion with, and the people to model from. Therefore, the environment matters here too.
Skinner- definitely the environment works. People are reinforced, and the reinforcements differ in every human being depending on what and how they experience in life.

I don't know about Freud and there after, but until now, I think the context (rather than environment, because environments seems to be too broad and distal) that the person is situated in matters a lot, and that many of the theories agree to it even though they did not articulate it in their theories.

My question is, is there any study that looked at context in those theoretical perspectives? I bet there are, but I kind of felt that when anyone talked about environmetnal influence, Bronfenbrenner was brought up, and the minute Bronfenbrenner is mentioned, people would say like "that theory can be used for ANYTHING". So as a person who thinks context really matters, I would like to see other theories emphasizing the context in other theoretical background other than Bronfenbrenner!

random reflections on Freud thus far

Perhaps because I am agnostic, I actually find Freud's arguments in regards to religion rather compelling. The argument that religion somehow lessens suffering, or rather, puts our suffering in a context we can accept seems logical.



However, I'm struggling with some of his other arguments:

• This constant connection back to internal drives - and that society is in direct contrast with them... Sometimes I'm compelled, but other times frustrated by Freud's examples of our "primitive drives". Does everything connect to sex? Is that his basic premise? That all our internal desires (which we subvert) are connected to sex? I do not deny sex is great, but I have a hard time buying that even if society was not present I would make my choices solely based upon it. Does he believe in other internal drives?
• The existence of the id - Freud argues that psychoanalytic research has proved it's existence - but how? How can you test to show the "id" is there? How can you know that an individual is not just responding based on reinforcement (back to Skinner)?
  
• The existence of past experiences in the mind and or of earlier phases of one's self - now we can obviously recall our experiences to some extent, but I take issue with the suppressed memories he eludes to - as how can we be sure what the therapist "finds" is from the person's past? How do we know that he/she is not creating the memory in the present based on interaction (reinforcement?) from the therapist?


• The link from young children's anal interest to some form of neuroticism.... first, I struggle in general with the idea of young children's "anal obsession" - we (society/adults) are the ones asking (forcing?) them to control their bodily functions, and yet somehow we are supposed to believe it becomes a focus of the child's pleasure and then if he/she does not properly progress through this experience somehow they are impacted to be overly "anal" throughout life.

If Skinner is right

I think if it is easy to prove that Skinner is wrong, he and his theory won't stand out as one of the most important contributions for understanding human behaviors. I'm still not quite clear about why the same thing, like money, may be stronger reinforcer for some people but not the others. Is it just because for those money is not a strong reinforcer, they have been built s-r relationship or "linked" with other reinforcer already?

I watched Black Swan last night and I like this film. On my way home I started thinking about all the psyche movies that I like, but I cannot recall one movie based on behaviorism. Is there any? If Skinner is right, I just cannot think about the life with no psyche movie.

behavior without reinforcement?

I think that this class impact me a lot. After class, I found that when I behave
something, I automatically match my all of behaviors or thoughts with reinforcement. I
didn't strongly agree with skinner's world in the class and I wanted prove it when I blog but I failed. I couldn't find my behavior without reinforcement :( It was frustrating but it was amazing too. I thought that that's why skinner is one of big theorists and skinner was right... haha

Even in the relationship with my boyfriend, it was not just a relationship with only "love", but there were both positive reinforement and negative reinforcement in our behaviors. I believe that he will also have both of them even though I cannot know what is his reinforcement.
Also, I found another example. I've sent $10 every month for children in Africa for 5 years. I
believed that it is a kind of altruistic behavior. But after this class, I thought about this example again and I realized that it was not only altruistic behavior! There were surely reinforcements. They often sent me a lovely letter and I showed it to my friends or parents to get good words. Also, even though it was sometimes burden for me, I could not quit it because I didn't want to have bad feelings (I realized that it was the choice to avoid negative reinforcement.).

Is there behavior without reinforcement? I really wanted to find a good example of behavior without reinforcement to argue with Skinner and Glassman but I realized that it is almost impossible. haha.. It's really amazing and I even became to like Skinner's theory.. Also, this question brought me another question that if a reinforcement is internalized and I behave something without thinking the reinforcement, is it still considered as reinforcement?

Civilization and Its Discontents

Here is a link to a PDF of Civilization and Its Discontents. Read as much as you can by Thursday. Read, but read so you understand and think and savor the ideas.

http://www.archive.org/details/CivilizationAndItsDiscontents

What can blogging mean

I ran across this wonderful essay about blogging and thought I would share it will you all, especially those from last quarter's class.

Michael

http://www.salon.com/life/internet_culture/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/01/21/i_blog_for_my_kids_open2011

oh the Skinner world...

After the class, all I could think of is, "oh how I do NOT like Skinner..."
I don't like Skinner world, the world full of reinforcements and the belief that the human behavior can fully be explained by reinforcements. But because I can't prove it, I'm more frustrated (and as Jennifer said, I don't want to believe in what Skinner said.).

Anyway, I really like how this class is going especially the fact that we are deciding the next week's reading as we go on. At the mention of Freud and psych, I thought again, if one has a chance to choose among many different options, then wouldn't that ability to choose lie in the person's mind, by his/her preferences? I know Skinner and Glassman will think even making that choice is reinforced. But in that case, nothing is not reinforced! I mean, when we are growing up, being socialized, we may be much more dependent on reinforcements, but now, we are fully-grown adults (hopefully), who can choose even if there's not enough reward or lack of chance of avoiding negative reinforcements. (but as i'm writing this, i can hear the words, "there should be some reinforcements... so I will stop here!)


Yet, I liked the part where Glassman made the distinction between conditioning and learning. And I also still remember the Bandura's article, that there is something else going on between the stimuli and the response (maybe I should go back to that article and read it again.) Much expectation for Freud next week!

?

I was expecting to come home (after driving in the snow for two hours) and see all these blog tposts because everybody wanted to prove to me that Skinner was wrong, that you didn't need positive reinforcement - or because I told Jennifer that she was right, over and over and over again (which was hard). Or because I offered Letitia cold, hard, cash money right on the barrel. Or because I told all these great stories about drinking wine in front of fire places and stuff.

BUT NOOOOOOoooooooooo!!!

I get on and not even a palrty comment. It is all about reinforcement, that's it.

Buyt doesn't this mean people are bringing baked goods next week?

Study Reveals College Kids Learn Nothing

I found this article and thought it was interesting. It relates more to our discussion last quarter about the value of grades, etc.


Study reveals college kids learn nothing.

What you are taught to do vs. what you want to do

I just wrote a comment to Sarah's post below in which I stated, "When what you are taught to do is put up against what you want to do, what you are taught to do will win every time." This in many ways is the essence of what Skinner is talking about. It really doesn't matter in life what you want to do - the idea that you have free will is an illusion. We always wind up doing those things that we are taught to do, even if we don't see personal meaning, or even our own self-interest in the act. But what we are taught to do is complex, and becomes more complex as we go from Skinner to Bandura. We are taught by society, and again not what society says it wants to teach us, but what it does teach us through the reinforcements that we receive in response to our freely emitted activities.

Sarah uses the example of the child on the mat during circle time. The child does not behave, does not take turns, does not do any of the things the teacher desires. This frustrates the teacher who tried to get the child to cognitively understand why it is better to do these things, to behave in circle time. This is an attempt to get at the internal motivation that Sarah talks about. We say though the child can only do this if he is self-regulated - but in essence that is saying the child has the cognitive architectures that are allowing him to assimilate these ideas. But this is suggesting two things, first that this is an internal function, and second that the child's activities are basically linear in nature - "If I do A I will achieve B." I think Skinner would say that neither of these is true.

The child instead is reacting based on reinforcement received when engaging in similar activities. One of the big issues here is what exactly is reinforcement for the child, because don't we have to personalize reinforcement to some degree. Perhaps any type of attention or reaction is a form of reinforcement to a child who wants to be noticed. So the talk the teacher gives the acting out child becomes a positive reinforcement for a child to act out and get attention.

Can we be "internally" motivated?

I find that class thus far has put me in somewhat of a ethical paradox - almost of crisis of my known reality. I come, in my practical work with young children, from a view that I would have previously described as pretty "anti-behaviorist" and very "pro-social constructivism." But now I find myself questioning the very meaning of these terms, and how they translate into practice...

There are so many questions floating in my head it is difficult to narrow down a logical train of thought, but I'll attempt to start with just one... Can we truly be "internally" motivated? Ultimately this question leads me to want to define what it means to be internally motivated - and even here the road is bumpy and treacherous.

In my own work with children, I've felt most comfortable using conversation to promote optimal choices. An example - why should Billy sit and listen in group time? Not for some sticker or a "green light" or some other, what I would have called "exterior" nonsense, but because he understands and sees the benefit of listening - what I would lable the "true" reason that listening in this context is important. It allows him to hear what is happening in the day, to hear the ideas of his classmates to see what he would like to do with his time, so that he can be respectful of others words, just as they are respect of his contributions (we want others to listent to us). So, when Billy is not listening, these are the things I would mention, recognizing it is a process, and hoping overtime Billy would see the benefits of listening - the give and take of talking in a group setting.

But what is Billy's real motivator? Is it my smile or positive tone when he does listen and contribute in the appropriate ways? Is it the feedback from his peers, wanting to include him because Billy shows pro-social behavior? Is is because he has developed an internal desire to be respectful? Is it because he realizes the only way to have others hear him is to listen himself? Is it the structure of grouptime itself? Does it change overtime?

I want to believe we are cultivating respect and the internal drive to do what is "right" for its own sake, developing the basis of some sort of ethic... But I struggle with this, are we ultimately just doing what we do, what we might even call "moral" acts, because we want the same done unto us - and in that way, I would argue we are not really internally motivated. To me, internal motivation means that we can "rise above" whatever the benefit (or lack there of) may be to us.

So I tried to think of an altruistic act that would have little to no impact on the do-er. Let's take putting money in the salvation army bucket - now, as it is typically change and you have no receipt, we can probably knock off "tax benefit" - but when I step back to think about it there are quite a few motivators still lurking: the smile, nod, and thank you from the person ringing the bell, the lack of guilt - some of us (myself included) feel that when we walk buy and do not contribute, or maybe just the warm glow inside (linking back to family and "feeling loved" we have learned from our own previous experiences that Michael mentioned in class) - ooh, or maybe its so that later in casual conversations we can mention it to friends (as a sublte, "see, I am so giving"). So are we doing it because we innately do not want to have others suffer? And if so, is that truly internal? Even if we do contribute because we have developed an ethic of giving to those less fortunate, is it ultimately to ease our own guilt for having so much?

I want to believe there is more... but I do not know how to reconcile it.

Weekly blogging

I have to admit, that at the beginning of the last quarter, when Glassman suggested blogging for the class, I was very much confused. What? Blogging?

But I have to aslo admit, that to blog you have to make a stand in the topic you want to discuss- you can't hide behind the references or the theories you would like to explain. It's what YOU think, and it make it hard to start a blog post.

Anyway, now that I pretty much enjoy blogging, I would like my assginment to be weekly blogging about anything (from the class readings to anything that my mind branches out!). Just like the after class note I sent you Glassman, I'd like to put my thoughts into writings in regular basis.:)

The evolution of technology

Hello all,

Decided I would start the posting. What I hope we are going to use this blog for is determining the responsibilities to the class. This is often referred to as grading assignments - but really I am obviously not looking to grade and I don't want to assign anything. I am thinking more and more that a Malthusian, competition oriented approach to graduate, or even undergraduate work isn't really all that productive. This whole idea of individual competition is simply brutal, and it reminds me of that post I read to you guys at the beginning of class last week. What does an A mean anyway. And yet think about what motivations for the work that you do are.

Leontieve who was a student of Vygotsky broke activity down into three parts. There is operations, the things that we do as a matter of fact, without really conscious thought about it. Many of us drive as operations, we are not really thinking about the goal when we turn on the left hand signal or press the breaks when we see a red light in front of us. At the second level of activity is what Leotiev called the action. The action is goal oriented, but it is the goal at hand. It is what you do to achieve a specific goal, like driving to get to school, or writing a paper in order to get an A. The third level of activity is motivation - that is the underlying, socio-historical reason that you do something. This idea actually comes from Vygotsky who was using one of the most unique and important ideas fromthe 20th century - the idea of motivation in acting that comes from the great theatrical director Stanislavsky. This is what sort of sits as the background for everything that you do, the actual reason that you are doing something, that guides your overall action.

So why do we actually do things? My operations in writing the blog post is in just typing the letters, I type fast enough now that I don't even think about the individual letters but simply the form of the word as it appears in my mind. My action is to meet the goal of developing a blog post that you will in some way respond to. I am hoping you will write something that in some way says something about your own activities in this class. But what are my motivations. These are the most difficult to discern, but also the most important. Why do we actually do the things we do. If we don't have these do we actually really understand our operations and our actions, or at least their meanings?

I would like to explore you activities in this class in the same way and when you decide upon what you do (and it can of course be multiple things) you understand it not as a simple action but as an activity, most important you understand your motivation behind what you are doing. The way to do this according to Vygotsky is to actually score your activity, what you do, like you would a play. You want to do something and then go back and score the motivations behind what led you to the point to do this thing.

Michael