Asynch Week

There was no formal class in Week 4 but we were fortunate to have a meeting with our professor Robyn, to chat about our Learning As Social Interaction presentation. Although I have been blessed to sit in on many an art meeting with More Knowledgeable Others (Powell & Kalina, 2009), which permitted me to be part of progressive conversations with highly experienced art historians, I had never had the opportunity to sit with an academic with theoretical understandings far beyond my own.

As I often do, I had read a number of resources related to the theorist Lev Vygotsky to prepare for this meeting. I was pretty pleased with myself when I was able to contribute what I had learned – until I found out my perceptions of Vygotsky was incorrect. I had confused his theory of social interaction with that of semiotics.

Over the course of the meeting, I acquired a deeper understanding of Vygotsky. It reinforced how little I knew. The most important part of the meeting was that we were able to demonstrate how our social interactions with a more knowledgeable other was allowing us to learn and grow from each other’s ideas. In many respects, we were able to become each other’s more knowledgeable other with the help of Robyn who learned where our zone of proximal development was and to move our understanding of the theory in a positive direction. It was the most fascinating example of my own learning progress that I can remember.

Reflection

Priscilla (Choi Ha) Chan, Jessica Forsyth, Rox Hayward, Dan Sooley and I attended the Zoom meeting with Robyn. We all had our own ideas about who Vygotsky was and what he contributed to the theories of educational philosophy. The meeting began with Robyn asking us what we knew about Social Interaction and Vygotsky. Jessica, Rox, Dan and I laid out our thoughts. I wondered why Priscilla didn’t contribute to the meeting.

As I got to know her and her background better over the duration of the project, I realized she was an English language learner from Hong Kong. One might wonder why this was important but it reinforces our lessons about learning, knowing, and understanding from the first three weeks of class. I took a brief trip to Asia in 1988 with a group from Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Fashion. We spent a week in Hong Kong, visiting Hong Kong Polytechnical University and speaking with students and instructors there. One of the things I learned was that many students study English but focus on the written aspect rather than oral communications. As a result, I began to understand that Priscilla could read and write English far better than she could comprehend and speak it. While preparing for the presentation, I encouraged the others to have Priscilla introduce our parts rather than take on a leading role in any of the presentation components. We could all see that she was trying hard even as she was struggling with the pronunciation. With the four of us supporting her, she made great strides in her articulation. It was easy to see how brave she was as carried on despite feeling shy. We were very proud of her last presentation which she recorded using Animaker. She has clearly made important progress.

The trust we were able to build, with each other and especially Priscilla means that we continue to keep in contact with each other, in mutual respect, over WhatsApp using our Learning As Social Interaction group.