Understanding Situations, Developing Scripts

Jerome Bruner
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds

Egocentric perspective

Michael Scaife and I [Bruner] discovered, as I mentioned in passing, that by the end of the first year of life, normal children habitually follow another's line of regard to see what the other is looking at, and when they can find no target out there, they turn back to the looker to check gaze direction again. At that age the children can perform none of the classic Piagetian tasks indicating that they have passed beyond egocentrism. This finding led me to take very seriously the proposals of both Katherine Nelson and Margaret Donaldson that when the child understands the event structure in which he is operating he is not that different from an adult. He simply does not have as grand a collection of scripts and scenarios and event schemas as adults do. The child's mastery of deictic shifters suggests, moreover, that egocentrism per se is not the problem. It is when the child fails to grasp the structure of events that he adopts an egocentric framework. The problem is not with competence but with performance. It is not that the child does not have the capacity to take another's perspective, but rather that he cannot do so without understanding the situation in which he is operating.

Listening to Cat Stevens "Where Do The Children Play?" Tea For The Tillerman

And so for day 1953
18.04.2012

Experience Expressed

M. Travis Lane in "Skindeep" (collected in The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand) has a stanza setting off these lines

Experience
can bruise. It sometimes mends.
It can not teach.

I'm not so sure that once lifted out of context that the lines express a perennial truth though they seem poised to do so. The lines concluding the previous stanza provide an entry into the link (or not) between teachable moments and experience.

Does experience teach?
I thought that once,
and held my inexperience as a shame.

Of course inexperience is a quantum of some sort of experience. And co-learning occurs. Even between people of unequal experiences. Worth thinking a little more about what is teaching. Of course the answer is in the line just before the question quoted above where the poem's voice asks "Does it matter that I get things wrong?" And the answer is no. And the answer is yes. In the reader's voice I ask "Does confirming what is known amount to teaching too?"

Experience teaches us that we desire to begin anew.

And so for day 847
08.04.2009