Cinnabar and Alabaster

vygotsky's "core assertions include these principles":
1. "learning is mediated first on the interpsychological plane between a person and other people and their cultural artifacts"
2. and "often involves mentoring provided by more culturally knowledgeable persons, usually elders, who engage in activity with less experienced or knowledgeable persons in a process known as scaffolding" wherein, importantly, "meaning is thus constructed through joint activity rather than being transmitted from teacher to learner"
3. "the mediational tools...that are drawn on in the act of meaning construction, are constructed historically and culturally; thus cognition is 'distributed'....people, tools, and cultural constructions of tool use are thus inseparable....[which] suggests that learning is inherently social, even when others are not physically present"
4. "the capacity to learn is not finite and bounded"

passages:
35. [vera p. john-steiner and teresa m. meehan: "creativity and collaboration in knowledge-making"] "knowledge...is both reconstructed and co-constructed in the course of dialogic interaction. it involves agentive individuals who do not simply internalize and appropriate the consequences of activities on the social plane. they actively restructure their knowledge both with each other and within themselves. such reconstruction can occur as the outcome of positive shared dialogue and joint activities. it is also a consequence of criticism, rejection, and resistance to events that occur on the social level"
37. some of the more "useful aspects of creative apprenticeship": "when interaction across generations are successful and the mentor conveys his or her style of thought to the learner, their joint activity is meaningful to both parties. it provides renewal for the mentor and shared knowledge for the novice"; "long-continued collaboration between a more and a less experienced partner may lead to the beginner's becoming imitative as a result of too much internalization. the novice can resist that danger by remaining exposed to more than one mentor or distant teacher"
38. "an essential part of the dialectic of creativity is intellectual interdependence" & "just as interdependence with mentors is crucial during formative years, sustained interaction with one's peers is essential thereafter"; for successful creative peer groups "emotional support was no less essential than the intellectual stimulation" working together produced.
43. "the book" in a particular study "required many reworkings, a process that would have overwhelmed either person working alone. the power of their collaboration is in the complementarity of their disciplinary training and vision. it is also in their mutual support during this long project. it let them share risks and take artistic and emotional chances."
46. in a recent study of collaborators finishing each others' sentences, john-steiner & meehan found that "collaborators more deeply ingaged in joint thinking produced the largest percentage of co-constructed utterances. in contrast, those in complementary relationships managed their interaction somewhat differently, taking longer turns to produce their ideas and having fewer co-constructed utterances"
65. [g. wells: "dialogic inquiry in education"] "the teacher should be involved as a coinquirer with the students in the topics that they have chosen to investigate. to be able honestly to say, in response to a student's question, 'i don't know. how could we find out?' is probably more important, in creating an ethos of collaborative inquiry in the classroom, than always being able to supply a ready-made answer....to be able to wonder out loud about these issues and to take action to understand them better not only provides an excellent model for students to emulate, it also demonstrates the authenticity of the teacher's committment to inquiry"
67. the real problem with the banking model is that in its "treating knowledge as a thing that people possess, it loses sight of the relationship between knowing and acting and of the essentially collaborative nature of these processes. knowledge is created and re-created between people as they bring their personal experience and information derived from other sources to bear on solving some particular problem. what we refer to as knowledge is thus both the enhanced understanding of the problem situation gained by the participants, on the one hand, and the representation of the undersanding that is produced in the process, on the other."
81. "just as our students benefit from participation in a dialogic community of inquiry, so too do we, their teachers"; "vygotsky's theory of learning and development, with its core concept of artifact-mediated joint activity, can integrate some of the most important insights that have been gained in recent years from research in education....we can see how collaborative group work, dialogic knowledge-building, and an inquiry-oriented curriculum are essential and interdependent components of a vision of education that...recognizes that both convention and invention are necessary for the development of society as well as for its individual members"