The Stories Children Tell by Susan Engel

The Stories Children Tell by Susan Engel

Author:Susan Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2012-02-23T16:00:00+00:00


The Social Origins of Memory

If parents help their children talk about the past, does the parent-child interaction have any effect on the development of the child’s memory of past experiences? That is, do parents just teach children how to talk about the past, or does their input actually shape the child’s memories and/or descriptions of past experience?

The American psychologist Frederic Bartlett, whose work is briefly discussed in Chapter 1, was among the first to develop the notion that memory has a social basis. Bartlett’s theory of memory, put forth in the 1930s, suggested that we reconstruct past episodes or stories around ongoing schemas we have for particular experiences. These schemas, or predictive structures, are to some extent culturally derived. Bartlett’s work with folktales and their repetition within a culture showed that cultural categories are drawn upon and strengthened by their use in reconstructing past events and stories. He argued that when individuals or groups of people recall stories and events, they change the stories in certain predictable ways: They blend, condense, omit, and invent elements. The form in which the memory is expressed reflects, in the case of the individual, personal history, and in the case of a culture, social organization and cultural priorities. He stressed the transforming role the process of memory plays on experience as it is stored and then recalled by the individual and/or by the social group.

Bartlett’s view that the telling of stories within a community constitutes a form of social memory has been seminal to current views of the interpersonal nature of many cognitive activities. Although most people tend to think of memory as a purely intraindividual process, his studies suggest that memory is also an interpersonal process.

The idea that mental processes occur between people as well as within the individual was being explored during the same time by a Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. Articulating an idea he called the “zone of proximal development,” he argued that there were two measures of a child’s cognitive ability in any given domain or on any given task. The child could reach the first level on his own without any help or instruction. The child could achieve the second level of performance with the instruction of an adult or a more competent peer. Thus, the distance between these two levels of performance is the zone of proximal development. Vygotsky argued that what the child could do with help at one point, he would be able to do on his own with further development. Interpersonal achievement, in other words, preceded and predicted intrapersonal achievement.

Vygotsky’s theory underscores the importance of viewing activities such as narrative remembering within an interpersonal and social framework. The input of the “other”—in many cases, a parent—is central to understanding what the child can do and is learning to do. Family interactions may not only be the context in which children’s thinking develops; they may also help shape how the child thinks. Irving Sigel and Luis Laosa recorded young children at home with their parents and showed that parents initiate and direct the child’s representation of experience.



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