The picture that popped up in my head when I set eyes on the notion of pivot developed by Vygotsky was the one of adults learning to function socially somehow at the expense of creativity. As noted by Dr. Bomer, children tended to be creative and as such pivot meanings to tools in a number of different ways depending on their prior contacts with the tools. And the teachers usually would go out of their way to externalize their mental processes into tools and in turn to persuade children to assign meanings similar to theirs (Bomer, 2003). And, in all likelihood, the purpose is to put students in a better position to participate in the culture/society collectively constructed to help every member in it to harbor standardized meanings of accessible tools/signs. Well, I do appreciate these standardized ways of pivoting meanings to the tools/signs we share because, after all, it is these standardized meanings that render the social functioning possible and keep the world spinning. In fact, I could barely imagine surviving in a world where everyone looks at the traffic signs in different ways, e.g. looking at the “No U-Turn” sign below as meaning “Must U-Turn.”
* This sign comes from the website at http://www.street-signs-usa.com/8/cat8.htm
However, these standardized meanings somehow prevent us as social beings from embracing different interpretations towards tools in the manner we find fit. In other words, when we mature into adulthood and are conditioned to see tools/signs in certain ways, we stop thinking and probing about other possibilities of appropriating these tools/signs, something that we are passionately enthusiastic about as we are kids. This reminds me of the drawing I saw from Le Petit Prince, a drawing that grown-ups interpreted as a hat (picture 1) while it was intended by the author to portray a boa constrictor digesting an elephant (picture 2). To be socially functioning entities, I guess losing track of creativity may be the price we grown-ups need to pay.
[Picture 1]
[Picture 2]
* These drawings come from the website at http://www.fairydream.net/html/littleprince/
II.
As revealed by Dr. Bomer (2003), children learned to manipulate the tools in ways that progressively approximated those intended by the teacher. However, some pivot problems came to present themselves in this process, viz., robust materiality, unintended affordances, and surpluses of meaning. As a teacher, I tried to bring back to mind if any of these had ever been observed in my students (college ones). And I noticed that while robust materiality and surpluses were almost absent, my adult learners were not so different from the children in terms of unintended affordances. In other words, my students would also use the tools in the way differing from what I intended for them to be used. For example, when put into groups to work on certain tasks, say, analyzing an essay for problematic statements, there were always students making the best use of this time by chatting with their friends (the tools here were the psychological tools of speaking and writing). This may well be taken as the support for what Dr. Bomer in his article referred to as transgressive uses of the tools. That is, students came into the classroom equipped with an idea about how to use the tool that unfortunately differs from what the teacher had in mind. In my classroom, students’ idea about how to use the time spent with their classmates was shooting the breeze (unintended use of the tools) whereas I would like to see the time invested on the discussion of the tasks at hand. In short, college students of mine seemed to appropriate tools in unintended ways as much as children did.
Yet, I think there still exists some differences between children and adult learners with respect to unintended affordances, the major one consisting in the fact that adults have relatively more control over whether to use the tools in the undesirable way in the classrooms. That is, adults might be more aware of their inappropriate use of the tools but consciously choose to do so whereas the children might simply misuse the tools without knowledge of their being appropriating the tools in an unwanted manner. For instance, my college students chatted with one another, clearly knowing that they were not following what was required of them while children might use spoken language to plan as opposed to communicate because this was how they came to develop this skill.
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