representation in learning

Description
In constructivism, Vygotsky's work on the interplay between symbolism and thought gave way to rich research in the field of learning. For example, Vygotsky and Luria studied illiterate peasants in rural Soviet Central Asia and found that their speech and reasoning echoed patterns of practical, situational activity, while for people with some formal education the relation was reversed: abstract categories and word meanings dominated situational experience and restructured it (Luria, 1976).
This work suggested that symbolic representation actually affected thought. Work by Lave (1988) in mathematics produced opposite results, however—schooling in abstract mathematics showed little connection to approaches used to solve mathematical problems in context. Educated and uneducated alike solved grocery problems in similar ways and these solutions showed no connection to abstractions learned in school.

But as we seek to organize experience for generalization and communication, we strive to coordinate perspectives, to “get into the head” of others—to attach, thereby constructing further reflective abstractions and developing “taken-as-shared” meanings.

Nelson Goodman (1978, 1984) pushes this issue even further, arguing that there is no unique “real world” that preexists independently of human mental activity. Instead, what we call the world is a product of minds whose symbolic procedures construct the world by interpreting, organizing, and transforming prior worldviews, thereby constructing new symbols. For Goodman, the difference between the arts and sciences, for example, is not subjectivity versus objectivity, but the difference in constructional activities and the symbolic systems that result.

From this perspective, learning is a constructive building process of meaning making which results in reflective abstractions producing symbols within a medium. (Fosnot. C, p. 29)

These symbols then become part of the individual’s repertoire of assimilatory schemes, which in turn are used when perceiving and further conceiving. The linguistic symbol “waterfall” represents a reflective abstraction that is the result of a generalization of lived experiences with past waterfalls, but it is then used in perception, selectively, as we isolate stimuli from the environment, transforming and organizing phenomena for coherence and meaning. The medium that is used in the representation as we attempt to communicate our meaning to the community also has an effect on the symbol. A waterfall represented musically may involve cadences, harmonies, and rhythm; represented in dance, turns, twists, and leaps; in the visual arts, form, line, and texture; in the sciences, forces, interactions, continuities, and discontinuities.

Perhaps the most that can be said is that the striving for symbolic representation and coherent meaning-making with other humans is a spiraling dynamic “dance” of interaction and evolution, a search for equilibrium—a self-organizing criticality (Bak, 1996). From this perspective, living itself is defined as knowing (Deutsch, 1997; Perry & Kolb, 2003). The new paradigm demands, in the words of Bruner (1986, p. 105), that we “abandon the idea that ‘the world’ is there, once, for all, and immutably, and that we substitute for it the idea that what we take as the world is itself no more nor less than a stipulation couched in a symbol system.” (Fosnot. C, p. 31)

Quotes
-> Thus the world a musician builds using a symbolic system that employs rhythm, cadence, and tone is indeed a different world than the one constructed by a visual artist employing space, line, repleteness, and color. Language, too, becomes its own context, for it involves the uses of signs to organize and plan sign-using activity itself. (p. 25)

-> A major function of the human brain is indeed to sustain complex structures of knowledge of the physical world, and also of plans and purposes in the social world. It is the ability to create these structures which I will call schemata, to make inferences within them, and to reuse them symbolically for new purposes in metaphors, that provides the foundation for our peculiar human adaptation. (Vygotsky, 1985, p. 32)

-> The act of representation is what makes us human. The reptilian brain, for example, is reactive and associative in nature; perceptual stimuli cause reflexive action. In humans, myelination of the visual cortex and the development of the cerebral cortex allow us to have mental images of objects and actions on them (Malerstein, 1986; Oakley, 1985) and this ability to represent allows us to reflect on our actions, consider multiple perspectives simultaneously, and to even think about our thinking.