February 13, 2008 Ren and Stimpy. Bugs Bunny. Philip J. Fry and Professor Hubert Farnsworth on Futurama.Sparx. Bi-Polar Bear. Popeye the Sailor Man. Woody Woodpecker. You may not think you have ever heard Billy West, but chances are on a television program, a movie, a commercial, or as Howard Stern’s voice guru in the 1990’s, you have heard him. West’s talent for creating personalities by twisting his voice has made him one of a handful of voice actors—Hank Azariaand the late Mel Blanc come to mind—who have achieved celebrity for their talent. Indeed, West is one of the few voice actors who can impersonate Blanc in his prime, including characterizations of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and other characters from Warner Bros. cartoons. What is the fulcrum in Mr. West’s life that led him to realize a talent to shape personalities with his voice, and how did the discovery of that gift shape him? Wikinews reporter David Shankbone found that like many great comedians, West faced more sour early in life than he did sweet. The sour came from a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic father (“I could tell you the kind of night I was going to have from the sound of the key in the door or the way the car pulled up.”), to his own problems with drug and alcohol use (“There is a point that you can reach in your life where you don’t want to live, but you haven’t made the decision to die.”). If sin, suffering and redemption feel like the stages of an endless cycle of American existence, West’s own redemption from his brutalized childhood is what helped shape his gift. He performed little bits to cheer up his cowed mother, ravaged by the fact she could not stop her husband’s abuse of young West. “I was the whipping boy and she would just be reduced to tears a lot of times, and I would come in and say stuff, and I would put out little bits just to pull her out of it.” But West has also enjoyed the sweet. His career blossomed as his talent for creating entire histories behind fictional characters and creatures simply by exploring nuance in his voice landed him at the top of his craft. You may never again be able to forget that behind the voice of your favorite character, there is often an extraordinary life. Below is David Shankbone’s interview with renowned voice actor Billy West, who for the first time publicly talks about the horrors he faced in his childhood; his misguided search for answers in anger, drugs and alcohol; and the peace he has achieved as one of America’s most recognizable voice actors. David Shankbone: You’re known for speaking about the use of famous actors to do voice-over. What is your central problem with their use? DS: What standards are those? DS: Like Robin Williams? DS: Jerry Seinfeld as well in Bee Movie? DS: What’s the solution? Not to do characters around stars? —West on laying down cartoon characters in auditions, only to have a celebrity end up doing the voice with the quirks West’s voice introduced. DS: They’ll have you come in, or someone of your caliber come in, and actually shape the voice around the character and then they’ll present it to the celebrity as the template? DS: Are you paid for that? DS: Are there legal remedies that you could pursue for that? DS: There was a similar issue involved with Crispin Glover. They had taken a likeness of one of his earlier roles. I think it was Robert Zemeckis Then they tried to pass it off later as him and he sued them for doing that. Are you familiar with that situation? DS: He did. DS: Has your speaking out on this issue hurt you in any way? DS: In your career? DS: There’s no reaction against it from the studios or from the ….? DS: You discussed in an interview issues about the weight of the character’s legacies, such as Pop-Eye or Bugs Bunny. You had said that every time they do one of these they say, ‘this time it’s going to be different. We’re putting the teeth back in those characters. Nobody is going to tell us what we can’t write and what we can write.’ And you said they always blow it. How do they blow it? DS: How do you choose a project, or does the project choose you? DS: Where do you think voice acting is going? It doesn’t seem like it’s ever an art that’s going to lose its place, but do you see it diminishing? Is it on a downturn? Is it on an upturn? Is it idling? DS: With computer animated voices? DS: Do you remember a time in your life when you started recognizing your talent for being able to shape your voice into memorable characters? DS: You had a talent that seemed very trite to you, but very few other people could do it and you didn’t recognize that? DS: You would feel a compulsion to do the plays in a voice? DS: I’m not a voice actor, but there’s times I’ll hear a person say a phrase. I covered theIranian president speaking at Colombia for Wikinews and I watched these dueling ideologues who were normal citizens. One of them was this large black woman with a Bible yelling at this secular Jewish guy. I recorded these voices. She had one of those voices that I just couldn’t get out of my head. She just kept going, “You’re evil. You’re going to burn in Hell.” I found myself saying it aloud over and over and over again because her voice and what she said made such an impression on me that I wanted to imitate it. There was such a history behind that voice. She probably could have just said, “Buy Tide detergent,” and I would still be saying it over and over and over again. DS: Is how you developed your talent when you were younger based upon imitating others? You would hear things that would leave impressions on you and you would want to imitate them? But why would you want to imitate them? —Billy West on beginning to do voices DS: It was escapism …? DS: So when you would escape into those voices, you felt a sense of safety? DS: And things that you could control through your own voice. DS: Whereas you couldn’t control what an alcoholic authority figure was going to do. DS: What was your dad’s reaction to your doing voices? DS: Where was your mom during all this? DS: It doesn’t sound like she was very successful. DS: When did you come to a realization that your voice was something that you wanted to turn into a career? —West on abusing animals to deal with his own abuse DS: Did you say fay or faggot? DS: Do you think that’s had any lasting effect on you? DS: They say that all great comedians typically have extraordinary tragedy in their lives, and they develop their humor as a response to it. DS: Even though you were hurting, it would hurt you to see her hurting over you. DS: What made you the whipping boy? DS: What would make you the one that he would unleash that upon as opposed to your brothers? DS: Like what? DS: An oedipal issue? DS: What is your relationship with your brothers like? Did they see this going on? Did they feel bad for you? DS: You said your father was a victim of abuse himself and that pattern often repeats. How did you stop that pattern? Was it through your voice work? DS: How so? DS: How did you stop the fights and the drugs? DS: Are you still sober? —West on his wilder days. DS: Were you at a point where you didn’t necessarily want to die, but you just didn’t care if you lived? DS: Whatever happens happens. DS: And that would almost egg you on? DS: Now it’s all electronic. DS: Are you in some way glad that you went through the drug and alcohol abuse? DS: Do you believe in a higher power? DS: Me too. DS: I didn’t know the mass in Latin, but I was an altar boy and I had Catholicism shoved down my face, but I’m 33, so Vatican II had happened. DS: The priest at my church got a nun pregnant and my mother, who was the president of the PTAat my Catholic grade school, helped deliver the baby and keep the whole thing hidden. DS: Yeah. And he’s still the priest. DS: Where do you see yourself now in your career? DS: At what point was that for you? [continued from previous section] DS: Well they are. It’s just things have changed. DS: Who are you talking about? DS: Yeah. DS: It’s confusing because you look at somebody like Dick Cheney, who has this lesbian daughter, who’s in a gay marriage [Poe and Cheney have not entered into a formal union - ed] and now has a baby with her partner, and you just don’t know how the situation exists. It’s hard to comprehend. That Mary Cheney exists in the Republican party, and that she seems to be fine with that existence and even works for it. DS: Has the Iraq War affected you much as a person? DS: Teach the controversy. Make it appear there are two sides to every fact. DS: Do you think we live in a fear-based society now? DS: What is the reasoning behind questions like, ‘Aren’t you afraid of saying such-and-such thing?’ DS: Are you optimistic? DS: And you think that they are equal? DS: You’re saying in today’s culture they are equal? DS: I don’t have cable, so I know how you feel. DS: It’s amazing when you hear the BBC interview British politicians. We find it shocking that they’ll say things like “Aren’t you essentially lying when you say that?” DS: That’s an argument on Wikipedia: people make the argument, ‘let’s present the information out there and let the reader decide. DS: Exactly,and it can be difficult to decide what to believe when reasonable minds can differ, but I think it’s very problematic to ever argue “just let the reader decide.” I don’t know if WIkiedia is the place for that fight, but in the news media, that is the place for the fight. I interviewed Gay Talese, who quoted Norman Mailer who said the media is like a donkey, and you must feel the donkey every day; the donkey will eat anything: garbage, tin cans, slop. And report on whatever they are fed. DS: Are your voices an attempt to understand reality? —Billy West DS: No you are. DS: Well it’s good. DS: That’s perfect. I will send you a link to the interview when it is published. DS: It doesn’t say anything negative about the Stern show. It just mentions the characters that you did and that you were on there. And the only thing it says is that “Billy has since claimed that he left the Stern show because WXRK management refused to give him a sufficient pay raise.” DS: There’s a link to your official web site on there. And there’s also a link to Voicechasers database and a link to Internet Movie database and a link to an interview with you on CNBC.
Billy West, voice of Ren and Stimpy, Futurama, on the rough start that shaped his life
From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!
I’m telling you stuff that I never said to anybody…
[edit]The use of celebrities for voiceovers
They audition us for these movies and then they play it for the A-list people, for these celebrities, so they can strip my talents’ abilities and kind of toss them over to the celebrity just to make it look better than it would be.
[edit]Iconic characters and choosing projects
[edit]Discovering his talent
[edit]“It was a horror chamber where I grew up”
[My father] used to beat the daylights out of me left and right, for any random reason. He was a raving alchie. I grew up with him making fun of me. I was forced to retreat into a world where I couldn’t get hurt or beat up or anything like that.
[edit]West moves to Boston after his parents divorce
I’d go out and kick the shit out of some little cat or something, just like you know, smack it… In a weird way, in a weird permutation of the whole situation, to me that was supposed to be love. Cause why would your parent hit you, hurt you? Why? It never makes sense to a kid. And they all used to say, ‘It’s because I care about you.’ But I got over that stuff and what I did was start to hurt myself.
[edit]How West dealt with his father’s abuse
[edit]Rehabilitation and sobriety
I got away with this kind of behavior and it was awful because I was terrorizing people. Not during the day. At night. And stories. There would always be stories and then it would make the papers.
[edit]Is West glad he experienced addiction?
[edit]West on his career
[edit]West on politics
[edit]Billy West on modern American society
[edit]Billy West on telling it like it is
I really love what I do and I don’t want people to think I’m sitting here angry all the time. I’m absolutely happy and I like what my life has become. But I still will start feeling weird if somebody asks me a question and I can’t tell the truth about it. I’m just telling it like it is.
Billy West, the voice of every cartoon character you love
March 4, 2008 by commandrine
Everyone needs to accessorize with a hot pink taser C2.
March 3, 2008 by commandrinePublished on Friday, January 25, 2008 by In These Times
Tupperware and Tasers
by Silja J.A. Talvi
Shafman’s little soirees aren’t just popular, they’re also highly profitable. Over light conversation and snacks, women are invited to handle the palm-sized C2, the latest (and smallest) civilian version of a Taser stun gun. The C2 is also the most affordable Taser to hit the market, starting at $299.99-with an option to upgrade the C2 with a $50 laser beam to better the chances of debilitating a human target. Because practice makes perfect, the women in attendance are encouraged to grab a C2 and take turns shooting at a cardboard cutout representing a male attacker.
“I felt that we have Tupperware parties and candle parties to protect our food and house, so why not have a Taser party to learn how to protect our lives and bodies?” Shafman told the the Arizona Republic. Shafman projects that the parties will be held in at least a half-dozen other states by March.
The C2 comes in four iPod-matching metallic colors: “Hot pink” has been the top seller since the weapon hit the consumer market last summer. While the company admits that men, too, might benefit from carrying the mini-stunner, Taser’s marketing strategy has been directed at the phobic and fashion-forward female consumer.
Last July, the New York Times previewed the C2’s debut with a feature article titled, “Feeling Secure With a Little Shocking Pink.” Accompanying the article was a glamour-action photo of Taser International President Kathy Hanrahan with the weapon in hand. Hanrahan made no bones about the C2’s direct marketing strategy and conceptual design: “It’s a woman’s product,” she said.
In a number of promotional media appearances and technology conference presentations since that time, Taser officials have even gone so far as to dub the C2 the “Lady Taser.”
“When you’re going out to a nightclub or you have the device clipped onto your belt at a business meeting, you don’t want to look like Dirty Harry,” company spokesperson Steve Tuttle told ABC News last summer.
In what could have easily passed as a terribly tacky infomercial, ABC News ran a December 2007 “Money Matters” segment praising the palm-sized stunner as an exciting holiday gift for women, in which anchor Laura Marquez described the C2 as a “Taser with a softened look.”
Despite a plethora of headline-making news over the course of the year-including the notorious “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” incident during Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) University of Florida speech in September 2007-ABC News showcased Taser’s own video montage of alleged male criminals being stunned into submission. For the ABC News segment, the network opted for a large-font text banner to accompany the images: “Tasers Sold to Protect Women.”
None of those video snippets actually depicted women being attacked, and the network’s Taser-friendly sloganeering (and Marquez’s ridiculously soft-balled questions) didn’t seem coincidental in the least.
The Scottsdale, Ariz., corporation has spent years honing a relentless public relations campaign-complete with a Rolodex of at-the-ready medical, legal and law enforcement stun technology “experts”-that seems to have convinced many news outlets that Taser’s word is gospel truth.
The success of Taser’s C2 sales over the past several months can largely be attributed to the company’s aggressive strategy to play on women’s worst fears of assault and rape. While the C2 might look cute, it is utterly debilitating-a serious step up, as it were, from older self-defense products like mace and pepper spray.
Just as with the “professional” model, a triggered mini stun gun shoots out two, thin nitrogen-fueled wires with dart-like tips that penetrate clothing and embed in the skin. These darts are juiced to deliver an incapacitating 50,000 volts of electricity for 30 uninterrupted seconds-ostensibly to allow the Taser-wielder to make a quick getaway.
Aside from the various bells and whistles that would appeal to paramilitary-minded weapon owners, the key difference between C2s and the much more costly civilian and “professional” versions of X-26s is that they enable the “stunner” to shock the “stunnee” over and over again.
Whether we’re talking about cutesy mini-stunners, or their beefed-up big brothers, Taser has become a household name and a veritable pop culture phenomenon rooted in either opposition or celebration of this futuristic weapon that was once but a gleam in Gene Roddenberry’s creative eye. (Unlike the Taser, the sci-fi Star Trek “phaser” could specifically be set to a specific stun level, all the way up to a deadly jolt.)
Devoted Trekkies with “Set Phasers to Stun!” T-shirts were likely never the cool kids on the block, but “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” bumper stickers and T-shirts are a different story. Some are wearing the shirts to express their outrage toward the prevalence of Tasers in use by “campus cops” on college, high school, middle school and even elementary school grounds-as well as in political demonstrations as a terrifying method of crowd control.
But you might be just as likely to spot a clean-cut fraternity member wearing the same shirt-only to find that he hasn’t given a thought as to whether being hit repeatedly with 50,000 volts of electricity should be considered an act of torture.
There’s been no shortage in the blogosphere of people poking fun of Andrew Meyer’s appeals, moans and screams that accompanied the University of Florida incident. Indeed, sites like www.dont-tasemebro.com are further proof of the ways in which even the most serious issue can be trivialized and depleted of its power. Why pass up a perfect opportunity to make a bit of money ($29.95 per T-shirt, to be exact) on a popular slogan, even if it originated in the pleading moments before the sickening crack-snap-sizzle sound of a Taser shooting electrified darts into a person’s skin?
Taking outright pleasure in the pain the weapon can inflict, the popular TV series “24″ seems to have developed a love affair with this kind of weaponry. At least two “terrorists” have been stun-gunned thus far, in addition to Abu Ghraib-style electrical torture during interrogations.
Even low-budget Asian martial arts movies shown in the United States feature the occasional stun gun stunt, alongside more familiar, high-flying punches and kicks.
People who have been tased often liken the experience to the sensation of dying-something that does not seem like an exaggeration in light of at least 250 Taser-related deaths in the United States since 2001, according to Amnesty International. The U.N. Committee Against Torture recently determined that the use of Tasers “causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture.”
Until recently, reports of Taser-related incidents and deaths have tended to involve men, typically described by police as having behaved in deranged and/or dangerous ways before being stunned.
But what once amounted to a few reported Taser encounters per month has now taken the shape of daily accounts throughout North America, including several high-profile deaths in Canada.
Last September, the death of a non-English-speaking Polish immigrant at the hands of inexplicably aggressive, Taser-wielding Royal Canadian Mounted Police at the Vancouver Airport drew international outrage when a bystander’s cell phone footage thwarted initial “official” efforts to downplay what had happened.
Increasingly, people being stunned aren’t just people with limited English-speaking skills; they’re also children, teenagers, the elderly and the disabled. In fact, with astonishing frequency, police are using Tasers on women and girls.
In November 2007, for instance, Chicago police tased an 82-year-old woman with dementia.
Last June, a homeless woman died outside an Oklahoma City shelter after she was thrown on the ground, handcuffed by police and then tased while incapacitated.
In Green Cove Springs, Fla., the family of an agitated 56-year-old wheelchair-bound woman filed suit last February after watching police shock her 10 times in response to their request for assistance. Her death was ruled a homicide.
Ohio has become an unexpected epicenter of the use of Tasers against women and girls. Last May, Crystalynn Coker, a 17-year-old African-American student was tased in Monroe, Ohio, when she refused to back down from a racist verbal barrage by a fellow student and staged her own form of a one-person, nonviolent sit-in after her teacher ordered her out of the classroom. According to Coker and her family, a police officer was called in without any justifiable cause to physically remove her from the room. Once the officer pulled Coker from her chair, he handcuffed and tased her three times without any explanation before, during or after the attack.
In the town of Warren, Ohio, footage emerged in September 2007 of a policeman shocking 38-year-old Heidi Gill repeatedly. In the video, Gill is shown crawling, moaning and pleading desperately as she tries to get away from the apparently trigger-happy officer. Footage shows Officer Rich Kovach handcuffing and dragging Gill’s body around during much of the ordeal, which is now under investigation.
One of the strangest overreactions involving Taser use occurred in, of all places, a Best Buy electronics store in Daytona Beach, Fla. Amid frenetic rush of pre-Christmas shoppers, 35-year-old yoga instructor Elizabeth Beeland had been waiting in line to purchase a CD player with her credit card. When her cell phone rang, Beeland stepped outside the store’s noisy environment to have a brief conversation. Although she left both the CD player and credit card with the cashier, the clerk somehow concluded that Beeland might be using a stolen card, and called police officer Claudia Wright over to handle the situation. Beeland took umbrage at the accusation, and raised her voice. Wright threatened to arrest her if she didn’t stop yelling. In what has become an increasingly familiar scenario-the rapid escalation from an initial encounter with a civilian, culminating with the infliction of horrendous pain, sometimes within just a few seconds-Wright opted to use her X-26 over any number of more logical alternatives. On the surveillance tape, Beeland is seen trying to back away from the Taser-wielding cop, then falling to the floor in obvious pain after the stun gun wires pierced her flesh.
Worse yet, Tasers have already begun to be used in robberies, domestic violence and hostage situations.
Among other disturbing reports, a serial rapist in Modesto, Calif., kidnapped and brutally raped a 27-year-old woman in August 2006 after stunning her with a Taser.
For the sake of those schmooze, stun and sales parties, they might do well to keep this kind of information under a tightly sealed Tupperware lid.
Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times, an investigative journalist and essayist with credits in many dozens of newspapers and magazines nationwide, including The Nation, Salon, Santa Fe Reporter, Utne, and the Christian Science Monitor. Her book, Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System was published in November 2007 (Seal Press, an imprint of Perseus.)
James Taylor is a certifiable genius even though he loved his career more than his kids
March 3, 2008 by commandrineIn my mind I’m goin’ to CarolinaCan’t you see the sunshineCan’t you just feel the moonshineAin’t it just like a friend of mineIt hit me from behindYes I’m gone to Carolina in my mindKaren she’s a silver sunYou best walk her way and watch it shinin’Watch her watch the mornin’ comeA silver tear appearing nowI’m cryin’ ain’t IGone to Carolina in my mindThere ain’t no doubt it no ones mindThat loves the finest thing aroundWhisper something soft and kindAnd hey babe the sky’s on fire,I’m dyin’ ain’t IGone to Carolina in my mindIn my mind I’m goin’ to CarolinaCan’t you see the sunshineCan’t you just feel the moonshineAin’t it just like a friend of mineIt hit me from behindYes I’m goin’ to Carolina in my mindDark and silent late last nightI think I might have heard the highway callingGeese in flight and dogs that biteSigns that might be omens say I going, goingI’m gone to Carolina in my mindWith a holy host of others standing around meStill I’m on the dark side of the moonAnd it seems like it goes on like this foreverYou must forgive meIf I’m up and gone to Carolina in my mindIn my mind I’m goin’ to CarolinaCan’t you see the sunshineCan’t you just feel the moonshineAin’t it just like a friend of mineIt hit me from behindYes I’m gone to Carolina in my mindGone to Carolina in my mindThen I’m on to Carolina in my mindGone to Carolina in my mindGone – I’m gone – I’m goneSay nice things about me’Cause I’m gone southCarry on without me’Cause I’m gone
Carolina In My Mind Lyrics » James Taylor
The US Department of Agriculture, through its commodity subsidy program for soybeans, corn, wheat and rice, deliberately and forcefully prevents the local fruit and vegetable food movement from expanding.
March 1, 2008 by commandrine
IF you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 — for one season alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might be much worse in the future.In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced — for example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.Who pays the price for this senselessness? Certainly I do, as a Midwestern vegetable farmer. But anyone trying to do what I do on, say, wheat acreage in the Dakotas, or rice acreage in Arkansas would face the same penalties. Local and regional fruit and vegetable production will languish anywhere that the commodity program has influence.Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price for this — whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have to charge to absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less access to the kind of fresh, local produce that the country is crying out for.Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and consumers need more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to meet increasing demand from local markets — without the federal government actively discouraging them.
Jeff Mangum & Neutral Milk Hotel, the best indie band you’ve never heard of
February 29, 2008 by commandrineSlate, music box
The Salinger of Indie Rock
What happened to Jeff Mangum?
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2008, at 1:45 PM ET
Ten years ago this month, a songwriter from nowhere and his ramshackle band brought out one of the few truly great albums of this generation, a musical curio so gloriously odd that it almost defies explanation. The group called itself Neutral Milk Hotel, and the record, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, is a concept album about Anne Frank in which vocals about lost Siamese twins and semen-stained mountaintops mingle with the sounds of musical saws, fuzzy tape loops, and an amateur psychedelic brass band. It seems like a formula that would blister your eardrums, yet Aeroplane is a gorgeous, much adored work of art. In 2003, the alternative music magazine Magnet dubbed it the best album of the past decade—better than Nirvana, better than Radiohead.While the record sells better today than ever, you won’t see Neutral Milk Hotel onstage anytime soon because, for all intents and purposes, they’ve vanished into thin air. At the end of Aeroplane’s final song, you can hear Jeff Mangum—the band’s singer, songwriter, and all-around mastermind—set down his guitar and walk off, and, minus a few months of under-the-radar touring, that’s exactly what Mangum did in real life. When the major labels and the glossy magazines and the half-crazed fans came calling, Mangum never responded. There was no breakup announcement, no reason given for the radio silence—he just faded out. After a decade of speculation, sightings, and hoaxes, his story remains a mystery: Why did he decide to disappear? And where has Mangum gone?
Even before his public vanishing act, Mangum was something of an elusive character. Raised in the arts vortex of Ruston, La., he bristled at his hometown’s jocks-and-booze ethic and hoped from an early age to unchain his creative spirit. In the early ’90s, Mangum and a few friends formed a now-legendary collective called Elephant Six, which grew to encompass dozens of strangely named bands creating eclectic music mostly for their own enjoyment. Yet Mangum himself seldom stayed in one place for long; he constantly hopped from city to city, acoustic guitar in hand. At home in the collective’s base of Athens, Ga., or out on his peregrinations, Mangum cut a strange figure: a long-locked, intense-looking man with a gale-strength singing voice who liked to wear garish thrift-store sweaters and embellish the cuffs of his pants with cartoon sketchings.
Because he suffered from night terrors, Mangum often stayed up until dawn working on his songs, sometimes addressing them to the ghosts in a haunted closet. At first, this method produced modest results: His first album, On Avery Island (1996), showed flashes of promise but had its sludgy and spotty patches. One day, Mangum wandered into a bookstore and happened upon a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. The book consumed him. After finishing it, he spent a few days crying over Frank’s story. As he told a Puncture magazine interviewer before Aeroplane’s release, “I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I’d have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. Do you think that’s embarrassing?” The songs and lyrics he started writing about Frank could be so nightmarish in vision that Mangum grew afraid of what was issuing from his brain: verses about “pianos filled with flames” and eating “tomatoes and radio wires.” At times, he seems possessed, singing on Aeroplane’s title track, “Anna’s ghost all around/ Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me.”
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is so expansive in its weirdness that one of its 11 songs is a rollicking bagpipe jam—yet it would be wrong to call it a “cult” record, since that would imply it’s some sort of flawed art-school project. Sure, Aeroplane occasionally sounds like a mariachi circus fed through a broken amplifier, but it all weaves together as Mangum guides the proceedings with percussive guitar strumming, singalong melodies, and his booming, emotive voice. The album plays like a document from a parallel-universe version of the 1940s, inlaid with Mangum’s haunting lyrics: “And here’s where your mother sleeps/ And here is the room where your brothers were born/ Indentions in the sheets/ Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore.” Aeroplane isn’t about airtight instrumentation or tricky songwriting—most of the songs have just three or four chords—but about a remarkable range of feeling put into melody. (Mangum recorded his part of the song “Oh Comely” in one scratch take, at the end of which you can hear a stunned band member yell “Holy shit!” in the background.)
When Aeroplane first debuted, sales took a while to warm up. Those who found the record would appear at shows and (to the annoyance of many audience members) collectively drown out Mangum’s singing with their own rendition, but this was still indie music’s dark, pre-blog era. By the time magazines started paying attention, toward the end of 1998, Mangum already had one foot out the door. Worn down by months of touring, he grew fed up with discussing himself and explaining his lyrics, eventually declining to accept any calls—yet friends say he still fixated on every word written about him. As his bandmates pressed him to capitalize on Neutral Milk Hotel’s success, he withdrew more and more. When R.E.M. offered a chance to open for them, he said no. And for the last decade, that’s nearly all he’s said.
As Aeroplane’s legend began to build, Mangum kept himself busy by having a total nervous breakdown. Laura Carter, his then-girlfriend, told the Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing that he spent entire days sitting in his house in a state of near panic, wearing a pair of old slippers and doing absolutely nothing. He became paranoid, hoarding rice for the inevitable post-Y2K apocalypse. Since 1998, Mangum has rejected every interview request save one 2002 conversation with Pitchfork in which he explained his meltdown. “I went through a period, after Aeroplane, when a lot of the basic assumptions I held about reality started crumbling,” he said. One of those assumptions was that music would somehow erase his problems. “I guess I had this idea that if we all created our dream we could live happily ever after,” he continued. “So when so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain … I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I can’t just sing my way out of all this suffering.”
It took Mangum years to rebuild himself after this spiritual crisis—and since part of that crisis was his recognition that music would never save him from his demons, he couldn’t very well embark on another record. So he wandered the globe to find spiritual balance, even spending time in a monastery. (Aeroplane’s steady sales helped finance the quest; the album still moves a reported 25,000 copies a year.) Occasionally, Mangum flitted ever so briefly into the public eye. He released a disc of field recordings of Bulgarian folk music, then disappeared. Calling himself “Jefferson,” he hosted a late-night radio show on New Jersey’s WFMU a few times until he was discovered, then vanished once again. Sometimes he’ll appear onstage at friends’ rock shows for a song, sending the crowd into paroxysms—but when those friends suggest he record his own music, they say he becomes evasive.
Mangum’s continued silence has angered some fans, who accuse him of being selfish or “indifferent to his talent,” as if musical ability comes with some sort of obligation to society. At least once a year, someone writes a hoax message from Mangum and posts it online—generally throwing in some fanciful verbal junk to bilk fans into believing it’s the genius himself wielding the keyboard. Some have announced forthcoming records or tours, while others have revealed the long-hidden sources of Mangum’s misanthropy; they’ve all been debunked. All we really know for sure is this: According to his record label, Mangum now lives in New York City. He recently married filmmaker Astra Taylor. Friends say he still creates art and that he seems “very happy.” If he has plans to record more music, he hasn’t told anyone.
And if Aeroplane really is Jeff Mangum’s final statement to the universe, maybe we should be happy with that—not because of some tired line about going out at your peak (which he likely didn’t reach), but because his story is a kind of modern fable. Many fans see his disappearance only in selfish terms: They’ve been deprived of more great music for no good reason. They can’t understand why Mangum would shun success just to shuffle through his days, and, indeed, when musicians abandon this much promise, the culprit is usually drugs or debilitating accidents or people named Yoko. So he must have gone nuts, right? Well, no. After all, what if Mangum is just being honest? What if he poured his life into achieving musical success only to discover that it wasn’t going to make him happy, so he elected to make a clean break and move on? We should all be so crazy.
As always, though, hope for Mangum’s return still glimmers. Last month brought news that he may play a guy in a lobster suit in a soon-to-be-released conceptual film. But who knows? You can’t see inside the suit.
Taylor Clark is a writer based in Portland. His first book, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture,was published in November.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2185219/
Lev Vygotsky developed his cultural-historical theory of cognitive development in the early 20th century but it has only recently been applied in American early childhood education through a program called “Tools of the Mind”. Imagine, a pre-school program that teaches children how to develop their executive function skills and control their own behavior without drugs!
February 28, 2008 by commandrine
I N N O D A T A
M O N O G R A P H S – 7
TOOLS OF THE MIND:
A CASE STUDY OF IMPLEMENTING
THE VYGOTSKIAN APPROACHIN
AMERICAN EARLY CHILDHOOD
AND PRIMARY CLASSROOMS
Elena Bodrova and Deborah J. Leong
INTERNATIONAL BUREAU OF EDUCATION
Contents
Foreword, page 3
Introduction, page 4
National/regional and local contexts
in which the innovation was
conceived, page 6
Specific problematic issues addressed,
page 8
Vygotsky’s theory of learning and
development, page 9
Subsequent developments in the
Cultural-Historical Theory
as a foundation for instructional
practices, page 13
Description of the innovation, page 17
Description of the Early Literacy
Advisor, page 22
Implementation of the innovation,
page 25
Evaluation: selected experimental
studies, page 30
Impact, page 35
Future prospects/conclusions, page 37
Notes, page 39
References, page 39
The authors are responsible for the choice
and presentation of the facts contained in
this publication and for the opinions expressed
therein, which are not necessarily
those of UNESCO:IBE and do not commit
the Organization. The designations employed
and the presentation of the material
in this publication do not imply the expression
of any opinion whatsoever on the part
of UNESCO or UNICEF concerning the legal
status of any country, territory, city or
area, or of its authorities, or concerning the
delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
About the authors
Elena Bodrova (Russian Federation)
and Deborah Leong (United States of
America)
Elena Bodrova, Ph.D., and Deborah
Leong, Ph.D., have collaborated since
1992 when Dr Bodrova came to the
United States from the Russian
Federation, where she had worked at the
Institute of Pre-School Education and
the Centre for Educational Innovations.
They co-authored one of the defining
books on Lev Vygotsky’s educational
theories, Tools of the mind: The
Vygotskian approach to early childhood
education (1996, Merril/Prentice Hall)
and four educational videos (Davidson
Films). Dr Bodrova is currently working
for Mid-Continent Research for
Education and Learning (McREL),
Colorado. Dr Leong is a professor at
Metropolitan State College of Denver
since 1976. She has also co-authored a
college textbook: Assessing and guiding
young children’s development and
learning (1997, Allyn & Bacon).
Published in 2001
by the International Bureau of Education,
P.O. Box 199, 1211 Geneva 20,
Switzerland
Internet: http://www.ibe.unesco.org
Printed in Switzerland by PCL
© UNESCO:IBE 2001
3
Foreword
The Tools of the Mind project aims to foster the cognitive development of
young children in relation to early literacy learning. The authors of the project
have developed a number of tools to support early learning and a highly innovative
method for training teachers in using these approaches. Piloting of
the approaches has demonstrated their potential to develop children’s early literacy
skills and they are being increasingly used in early childhood education
programmes across the United States. The project is the result of collaborative
work between Russian and American education researchers, based on the theories
of Vygotsky, applied to the cultural context of the United States. This
monograph describes the development and piloting of the project, including
the creation of the Early Learning Advisor, a computerized assessment system
which provides direct advice to teachers on the developmental levels of their
individual students, and gives them suggestions about how to apply the innovative
teaching concepts in their daily work in the classroom.
FIGURE 1. Play plan by Shamiso in November
4
Introduction
The Tools of the Mind project began as a search for tools to support the cognitive
development of young children. We ended up focusing on the development
of a number of teaching tools to scaffold early learning and a unique
method of training teachers in how to use these tools. On the basis of the
Vygotskian approach, we created a series of tools or strategies to support the
development of early literacy, including meta-cognitive and meta-linguistic
skills as well as other foundational literacy skills. The results of an empirical
evaluation of the project revealed that the strategies had a positive effect on literacy
achievement in young children.
As the project grew, so did the number of teachers who wanted to be trained
in how to implement these innovative strategies. The traditional
workshop/class format we used to train teachers was not as effective as we
wanted it to be—something that other researchers in staff development have
also discovered. In response to this, we took a unique approach to teacher
training by using child assessment and technology to transfer expert knowledge
to the classroom teacher. With Dr Dmitri Semenov, an expert in mathematical
modelling of psychological processes and design of artificial intelligence
systems, we developed a diagnostic-prescriptive computerized
assessment system—the Early Literacy Advisor (ELA). The ELA acts as an
‘expert teacher’ capable of giving advice on how to address the specific instructional
needs of an individual student. Consequently, instead of general
workshops on literacy development, teachers are given specific results from
the assessments of their own students described in terms of the relevant developmental
patterns. Instead of a workshop on literacy activities, the assessment
results include the literacy activities most suitable for the children in
their classroom. And instead of lectures on the Vygotskian approach, teachers
learn about the concepts of zone of proximal development and scaffolding as
they apply them in their own teaching. At many levels, the ELA was able to
break down barriers to innovation.
The Tools of the Mind project began in two classrooms with three interested
teachers. It has grown over eight years to influence hundreds of teachers and
their students through educational videos, books, articles and the use of the
ELA.
We believe that this project demonstrates that good educational practices
originating in one country can spark the creation of new practices that fit the
cultural context of another country, but still remain faithful to the theoretical
foundations underlying the original. The results can be extremely positive and
5
unique—something that would not have been developed in either country
without the exchange of ideas. A necessary ingredient for innovation is the
thoughtful exchange between researchers and practising teachers so that the
newly developed instructional practices can address critical learning problems
in a way that the teacher can easily implement in the classroom. In our case,
two early childhood teachers in particular—Ruth Hensen and Carol Hughes—
made this possible. We have seen many programmes that try to adapt the
classroom to the innovation instead of developing the innovation to fit the
structure and organization of the classroom. An innovation cannot survive unless
empirical research is used to validate the effects of the newly developed
tools. Dissemination and evaluation go hand in hand.
The INNODATA programme is designed to foster the kind of cross-fertilization
embodied in Tools of the Mind by providing a forum to share the experiences
of researchers who have tried to implement and evaluate these kinds
of innovative programmes. We hope that our experience will be useful to other
researchers struggling with similar problems and issues.
FIGURE 2. Play plan by Shamiso in February
6
National/regional and local contexts
in which the innovation was conceived
The Tools of the Mind project was conceived at a time when a national consensus
was already established about the importance of early childhood education.
Recognizing the need to increase the quality of these programmes, the National
Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) began to accredit
early childhood education programmes, using the idea of developmentally appropriate
practice as its core. Developmentally appropriate practice is instruction that
is both age and individually appropriate (Bredekamp & Rosegrant, 1992). As programmes
adapted to obtain the NAEYC accreditation, this very broad definition
of instructional practice led to several problems. First, most teachers did not have
enough knowledge about child development to be able to practically decide what
to do in the classroom. In addition, the research base used to define developmental
patterns was being modified at a rate that only academic experts in the field
could keep up with. Second, the broad and open-ended nature of the definition
was subject to a wide variety of interpretations—for some it meant no teaching at
all and for others it meant very teacher-directed instruction.
At about the same point in time, the spotlight of accountability hit elementary
schools in the United States. The standards-based movement was the result
of the American public’s growing dismay over the low levels of achievement
of American students in general and specifically on international tests in
maths and literacy. Schools in the United States have always been under the
control of local communities, so that what children learned was primarily determined
by local (city or county) school boards. Therefore, goals for student
achievement have not been set at a national level. Many people suspected that
the variability in objectives was a major cause of stagnant and often dismal
test scores, so many states began to set standards, to assess children and to
hold school districts, schools and teachers accountable for student achievement.
These new state standards have begun to supersede local control, mandating
specific levels of attainment and specific assessments that would allow
the public to compare the successes and failures of schools within the same
district or state. At the beginning of the standards movement, academic standards
did not extend to pre-school and kindergarten, but this trend is changing
(see Bowman, Donovan & Burns, 2000). Several states have now developed
standards specifically for young children, and the number of states is sure to
grow. For the first time, Head Start—a federally funded programme for at-risk
pre-school children—was mandated to identify performance standards for
7
children. With the growing emphasis on academic performance in pre-school
and kindergarten, teachers are now looking for guidance in how to choose instructional
practices that are not only developmentally appropriate but also
produce consistent achievement gains (Bodrova, Leong & Paynter, 1999).
Along with accreditation and the accountability movement, another trend in
early childhood education that influenced the Tools of the Mind project and led
to the development of the ELA assessment system was the growing dissatisfaction
in the 1990s with standardized assessment, particularly when used to assess
young children. Many professional groups—researchers, educators and test makers—
began to criticize the use of paper-pencil standardized tests with young
children (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1987;
Shepard, Kagan & Wurtz, 1998). Standardized tests were criticized because they
were not authentic, tended to underestimate children’s knowledge, and penalized
children who were from different ethnic and minority groups. In addition, standardized
testing often provided little useful information for making classroom
decisions. The outcry led to a movement to develop standardized assessment systems
(the same procedure is used for all children) that are different from traditional
standardized tests. Emphasizing the importance of authentic classroom assessment,
these new assessment systems are related more directly to classroom
decisions and must be integrated with benchmarks and standards.
Another aspect of the national context that has influenced the implementation
of the innovation is the continued diversity of American public schools.
The ethnic, cultural, linguistic and social diversity of the American classroom
has long been documented in educational research. Few countries have the
level of diversity found in the United States. Attempts to respect these differences,
while at the same time teaching all children the skills and requisite
knowledge to make them productive and literate members of society, have
been and continue to be a struggle. The search for innovation has as its highest
priority those classroom practices that work with diverse students.
Finally, the national and local context in which the Tools of the Mind project
was developed has also been influenced by the growing shortage of experienced
teachers. The need to train teachers more quickly has grown. Two trends have
been cited as possible causes for this teacher shortage. First, many states have implemented
school reforms that reduce class size, particularly in the early grades.
Secondly, because of the anomaly of the ‘baby boom generation’, more practising
teachers are retiring, and so there would be a teacher shortage even without
reduced class sizes. As a result, teachers are being hired to teach in pre-school and
kindergarten with degrees in fields other than early childhood or without experience
in the early childhood classroom. School districts are struggling even more
than normal with the need to train on the job. Cost-effective ways of conducting
in-service training in early literacy has become a top priority.
8
Specific problematic issues addressed
The Tools of the Mind project was developed to address the following issues facing
the educators of young children, from age 3.5 to 7 (pre-school to Grade 2):
• The need for developmentally appropriate teaching techniques to scaffold
both underlying cognitive skills and foundational literacy skills for a diverse
population of children;
• The need for instruments that combine the best features of standardized and
authentic classroom assessments;
• The need for a mechanism to monitor child progress towards standards and
to provide timely feedback to teachers; and
• The need for a vehicle for ongoing transfer of expert knowledge to teachers,
especially novice teachers.
FIGURE 3. Play plan by Shamiso in May
9
Vygotsky’s theory of learning
and development
The theoretical framework that forms the basis of our work is the Cultural-
Historical Theory of Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934). Of the many aspects of
this theory that profoundly influenced psychological thought in the twentieth
century, the Tools of the Mind project primarily focused on the aspects
that address issues of learning and development. The revolutionary
approach to these issues pioneered by Vygotsky has linked these two
processes together in a way that was never before considered. According
to Vygotsky, some of the developmental outcomes and processes that were
typically thought of as occurring ‘naturally’ or ‘spontaneously’ were, in
fact, substantially influenced by children’s own learning or ‘constructed’.
Learning, in turn, was shaped by the social-historical context in which it
took place. This dual emphasis—on children’s active engagement in their
own mental development and on the role of the social context—determined
the name used to describe the Vygotskian approach in the West—‘social
constructivism’.
CULTURAL TOOLS AND HIGHER MENTAL FUNCTIONS
The kind of learning (and, consequently, teaching) that leads to changes in development
was described by Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1978) as the situation in
which children acquire specific cultural tools, handed to them by more experienced
members of society. These cultural tools facilitate the acquisition of
higher mental functions—deliberate, symbol-mediated behaviours that may
take different forms dependent on the specific cultural context.
Higher mental functions exist for some time in a distributed or ‘shared’
form, when learners and their mentors use new cultural tools jointly in the
context of solving some task. After acquiring (in Vygotsky’s terminology ‘appropriating’)
a variety of cultural tools, children become capable of using
higher mental functions independently. Vygotsky called this progression from
the ‘shared’ to the ‘individual’ state the law of the development of higher mentalfunctions (Vygotsky, 1978).
Tools for higher mental functions have two faces: external and internal
(Luria, 1979; Vygotsky, 1978). On the external plane, the tool is one that
learners can use to solve problems that require engaging mental processes
at levels not yet available to children (e.g. when a task calls for deliberate
10
memorization or focused attention). At the same time, on the internal
plane, the tool plays a role in the child’s construction of his/her own mind,
influencing the development of new categories and processes. These new
categories and processes eventually lead to the formation of higher mental
functions such as focused attention, deliberate memory and logical
thought.
CULTURAL TOOLS AND THEIR EFFECT ON EARLY LEARNING
The process of learning cultural tools begins in the early years when children
first encounter cultural artifacts and procedures associated with using
them; they learn to use language first to communicate with other people
and later to regulate their own behaviour. This is also the time when they
first become participants in ‘shared activities’—from the emotional exchanges
of infants with their caregivers to the joint problem solving of
older children. One of the major outcomes of this process is the ability to
take control of their own behaviours—physical, social, emotional and cognitive—
through employing their higher mental functions. Vygotsky described
this as ‘becoming a master of one’s own behaviour’, as opposed to
being ‘slave to the environment’ (Vygotsky, 1978). In terms of young children’s
behaviours, this is easy to demonstrate with the example of memory.
In the beginning, children who are not ‘armed’ with the necessary tools
have little or no control over what they can remember and when they can remember
it. For these children, these ‘whats’ and ‘whens’ are almost totally
determined by the environment: a 3-year-old cannot recite a nursery rhyme
when asked to do it, but can do it once a teacher starts reciting this rhyme or
when this rhyme’s character appears on a television screen. This type of
spontaneous remembering is governed by the laws of association: children
only remember things when they are repeated over and over or continually
practised in a fun and engaging activity. While it is possible to employ these
rules of association in teaching limited content to very young children, the
content demands imposed by formal schooling make it necessary to engage
in more efficient and deliberate strategies of remembering. Thus, as a child
makes the transition from less formal to more formal learning contexts, the
child has to learn how to ‘take in a teacher’s plan and make it his/her own’.
For educators who share Vygotsky’s beliefs about the processes of learning
and development, the goal of early instructional years involves more than
merely transferring specific knowledge—it involves arming children with
tools that will lead to the development of higher mental functions (Bodrova
& Leong, 1996).
11
ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
The concept of the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) is by now quite familiar
even to educators working outside the Vygotskian framework.
However, the applications of this concept to instructional practice are not numerous,
and in many cases the ZPD is used as a metaphor rather than as a theory
(Bodrova & Leong, 1996). The ZPD is defined as a distance between two
levels of a child’s performance: the lower level that reflects the tasks the child
can perform independently and the higher level reflective of the tasks the same
child can do with assistance.
To successfully apply the concept to instruction, the ZPD has to be placed
in a broader context of the Cultural-Historical Theory. It is important to remember
that the ZPD reflects the view Vygotskians hold of the relationship
between learning and development: what develops next (proximally) is what
is affected by learning (through formal or informal instruction). Consequently,
the concept of the ZPD is applicable to development only to the degree in
which development might be influenced by learning (Vygotsky, 1978).
Behaviours having a strong maturational component, for example, could not
be described using the ZPD. In addition, for any developments to be influenced
by learning, there must be a mechanism that supports the progression
of a newly learned/developed process from assisted to individual. In some
cases this mechanism is absent and consequently this progression may never
occur. This leads us to the next Vygotskian idea that has generated a strong
following in the area of education—the idea of scaffolding.
SCAFFOLDING
Although scaffolding is not one of Vygotsky’s initial terms, the concept is a
useful one because it makes more explicit some of the instructional implications
of the idea of the ZPD. Introduced almost forty years after Vygotsky’s
death by Jerome Bruner (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976), scaffolding describes
the process of transition from teacher assistance to independence. It answers
the frequently asked question about the ZPD: if a child can function at a high
level only with assistance, how can this child eventually be able to function at
the same level independently?
Scaffolding answers this question by focusing on the gradual ‘release of responsibility’
from the expert to the learner, resulting in a child eventually becoming
fully responsible for his/her own performance. This gradual release of
responsibility is accomplished by continuously decreasing the degree of assistance
provided by the teacher without altering the learning task itself.
Emphasizing the fact that the learning task remains unchanged makes scaf12
folding different from other instructional methods that simplify the learner’s
job by breaking a complex task into several simple ones. While breaking the
task into simple subtasks may work for some areas (demonstrated by some
successes of programmed instruction), in other areas, breaking a task into several
component tasks actually changes the target skill or concept being
learned. This alteration leads to learner difficulty when trying to master complex
skills.
In contrast, scaffolding makes the learner’s job easier by providing the maximum
amount of assistance at the beginning stages of learning and then, as the
learner’s mastery grows, withdrawing this assistance. However, the question
remains: how does a teacher choose the right kind of assistance and then withdraw
it in such a way that the student’s independent performance stays at the
same high level as it was when the assistance was provided? Unfortunately,
without an answer to this question, scaffolding will remain more of a
metaphor for effective teaching than a description of a specific instructional
strategy for teachers to use. In search of this answer, we will turn to the work
done within Cultural-Historical Theory by colleagues of Vygotsky and generations
of his students.
FIGURE 4. Play plan by Krystine in November
13
Subsequent developments
in the Cultural-Historical Theory
as a foundation for instructional practices
Vygotsky first formulated the major principles of the Cultural-Historical
Theory, but it took several subsequent decades of work by his colleagues and
students to apply these principles to education and to develop new instructional
practices based on these principles. Vygotskians elaborated primarily
on the idea of ‘cultural tools’ and were able to identify the specific tools most
beneficial for different areas of learning and development. They were also able
to describe processes leading to the acquisition of these tools and the role of
the teacher in facilitating these processes. These subsequent developments of
the Vygotskian approach resulted in the addition of new ideas to the original
framework that—along with original Vygotskian concepts—have influenced
our work. These ideas include the concepts of the orienting basis of an action,
external mediators, private speech and shared activity and the idea of play asa ‘leading activity’
(Elkonin, 1977; Galperin, 1969; Leont’ev, 1978; Luria,
1979; Venger, 1988).
ORIENTING BASIS OF AN ACTION
According to Galperin (Galperin, 1969; 1992), ‘orienting basis of an action’
describes how a learner represents the learning task in terms of the actions
he/she will perform in relation to this task. For the learning of a new task to
be successful, the learner’s actions must be driven by the critical attributes of
the task. In identifying these critical attributes, the learner has to deal with a
variety of elements that might orient her/him within the task in a more or less
appropriate way. Failure to include some of the critical attributes results in errors
and may not produce a desired learning outcome. If the learner pays attention
to non-essential attributes of the task, he/she may be distracted from
the most relevant features, which can also result in errors in learning. For example,
if a student does not include the notion of letter orientation in her/his
orienting basis of handwriting, letter reversal will result. When the learning
task is complex and requires a variety of actions, it is usually difficult for the
students to develop the correct and comprehensive orienting basis necessary
to succeed. In this case, Galperin suggests that teachers provide scaffolding
by first helping students develop the appropriate orienting basis, and then by
14
teaching students how to monitor their actions using the orienting basis as a
reference point. An essential component of scaffolding would include using
tangible objects or graphic representations to support the development of an
adequate mental representation of the action.
EXTERNAL MEDIATORS
External mediators are among the first tools children use and include tangible
objects, pictures of the objects, and physical actions that children use to gain
control over their own behaviour. As with all cultural tools, the function of the
external mediators is to expand mental capacities such as attention, memory or
thinking, and to allow the person who uses the tool to perform at a higher level.
In his own writing, Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1978; 1987) used some examples
of external mediators to illustrate the evolution of cultural tools throughout the
history of humankind. However, when talking about cultural tools used by
modern humans, Vygotsky primarily focused on the language-based tools, although
he acknowledged that young children may still need more ‘primitive’,
non-verbal tools. It was through the work of Vygotsky’s colleagues Luria,
Leont’ev, Elkonin and Galperin, as well as the subsequent generations of
Vygotskians, that the role and the development of both verbal and non-verbal
tool use by young children was thoroughly investigated (see Elkonin, 1963;
Galperin, 1992; Venger, 1988).
PRIVATE SPEECH
With the general emphasis that Cultural-Historical Theory places on language
as a universal cultural tool, private speech presents only a small portion of the
whole picture. However, private speech is an important language tool a child
uses to master his/her own behaviour. A child who uses private speech may
seem to be talking to somebody since he or she is talking out loud; however,
in reality the only person this child communicates to is him/herself. Thus, private
speech is speech that is audible to an outside person but is not directed to
another listener. While adults occasionally use private speech, children of
pre-school or elementary school age benefit from it most. According to
Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1987), private speech in young children is a precursor of
verbal thinking since it serves as a carrier of thought at the time when most
higher mental functions are not fully developed. As was later found by Luria
(1979), and then confirmed by many studies within and outside the
Vygotskian framework, private speech has another important function: it
helps children regulate both their overt and mental behaviours (Berk &
Winsler, 1995; Galperin, 1992).
15
SHARED ACTIVITY
Since Vygotsky’s works were translated into other languages over more than
thirty years ago, the association between Vygotsky’s theories and the idea of
shared or collaborative activities has been firmly established. However, this
association has mainly led to an interest in expert–novice interactions or interactions
between peers. In reality, pedagogical applications of this idea go
far beyond the issue of optimal instructional interactions. According to
Vygotsky, partners in shared activity share more than a common task; they
also share the very mental processes and categories involved in performing
this task (see the law of the development of higher mental functions, page 9).
From an instructional perspective, this means that the mental processes employed
by a teacher or by a more experienced peer tutor should be the same
ones as would be eventually appropriated by the learner.
Another instructional application of the concept of shared activity applies to
a group of mental processes traditionally described under the name of ‘metacognition’
or ‘self-regulation’. These essential learning processes are typically
studied in older children when they become able to regulate their cognitive
functioning. However, from the Vygotskian perspective, the origins of these
processes can be found much earlier, when young children start practising
self-regulatory functions by regulating other people’s behaviour. Thus, engaging
young children in activities where they can practise other-regulation as
well as self-regulation will contribute to the development of their meta-cognitive
abilities (Bodrova & Leong, 1996).
PLAY AS A LEADING ACTIVITY
Symbolic or dramatic play occupies a special place in Vygotsky’s theory of
learning and development (Berk & Winsler, 1995; Bodrova & Leong, 1996).
Play is the activity that is most conducive to development in young children. For
children to have the full benefit of play, the play itself must have specific features.
For Vygotskians, these features include imaginary situation, roles and
rules. While the roles are explicit, the rules that govern the relationship between
these roles are typically hidden or implicit. When children enter play they are
expected to know what the rules are and the players are only reminded of these
rules when they fail to follow them. Thus, as long as everyone follows the same
set of rules, these rules will be hidden from an outside observer, which might
create an illusion of free-flowing play unconfined by any regulations.
Vygotsky and his colleagues argue that play is not the most unrestricted,
‘free’ activity, but rather that it presents the context in which children face
more constraints than in any other context. Although it is constraining, play is
16
also one of the most desirable activities of childhood because children are extremely
motivated to abide by these limits. Thus, play provides a unique context
in which children are motivated to act and at the same time develop the
ability to self-regulate their behaviour. The psychological nature of play facilitates
the practice of deliberate and purposeful behaviours at a child’s highest
attainable level (Elkonin, 1977; 1978). As play matures, there is a progressive
transition from reactive and impulsive behaviours to behaviours that are more
deliberate and thoughtful.
THE LINK BETWEEN THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
AND THE TOOLS OF THE MIND PROJECT
The Vygotskian approach has influenced not only the development of teaching
strategies, but also the choice of areas where these strategies are applied
and the time at which they are expected to be most effective. The teaching
strategies described in the next section directly apply the ideas of the ZPD,
scaffolding, external mediators, private speech and shared activity. The idea of
the orienting basis of activity was used in identifying the exact procedures and
materials needed to implement each of the strategies.
The ideas of the Cultural-Historical framework are also reflected in the design
of the ELA. The computerized system is designed to give the best estimate
of the child’s ZPD and to recommend teaching techniques to provide the
optimal level of assistance within this ZPD.
FIGURE 5. Play plan by Krystine in February
17
Description of the innovation
In this section, we will describe the innovations created using the Vygotskian
framework outlined above. We have selected a sampling of strategies, a description
of the ELA computerized assessment system, and a description of
the educational videos developed for dissemination.
PLAY AND PLAY PLANNING
True to Vygotskian beliefs about the importance of dramatic play in the development
of young children, in our classrooms, dramatic play occupies the
central place among daily activities (Bodrova & Leong, 1998a; 1999).
Throughout the entire pre-school year and at the beginning of the kindergarten
year, elements of dramatic play permeate most of the activities. In addition,
pre-school classrooms have a designated dramatic play area where children
spend forty to fifty minutes per day in sustained play. Kindergarten children
spend closer to forty minutes at the beginning of the year and then as most
kindergartens begin more formal instruction in January, the time spent in play
in the classroom drops to twenty minutes. Special instructional strategies are
used to support all elements of play. In typical early childhood classrooms in
the United States, teachers will set aside this amount of time, but children will
wander around the room, unable to sustain play. Teachers and school administrators
who visit the Tools of the Mind classrooms are surprised at the level
of intensity and involvement of the children.
To help children first initiate and then sustain an imaginary situation, the
teacher in the project makes sure that the children have a sufficient repertoire
of themes that would serve as inspiration for pretend play. To expand this existing
repertoire of themes, the teachers use such sources as field trips, visitors’
presentations, videos and books. The choice of themes is determined by
the children’s interests and by the themes already in their repertoire. For example,
among themes introduced over several years are space, farm, treasure
hunt, store, hospital, veterinarian’s office and restaurant.
Props also sustain the imaginary situation. Today’s toys so closely replicate
their ‘grown-up’ counterparts (for example, plastic food and toy kitchen utensils)
that only when play is at its most mature do children use their imaginations
to create props. Many children believe that they cannot play without the
specific prop. Instead of pretending the Barbie doll is a dentist, a child will
want to buy the ‘Dentist Barbie’. In the Tools of the Mind project, teachers try
to wean children from the need for specific props by introducing games in
18
which children think of different ways to play with ordinary objects. They
brainstorm ways in which a wooden block can be used—as a baby, a ship or
a chair for a doll. Teachers transition children from using realistic props to using
minimal props. In playing hospital, for example, a piece of cloth can be
used as a nurse’s cap, to make a sling for a patient’s broken arm or to wrap another
patient’s sore throat. Children pretend that a bead on a necklace is a
stethoscope. Generally, children need only minimal props to indicate the role
they are playing and those props can be re-used later for other themes.
To increase the level of mature play, teachers in the project also help children
to expand the number of roles in a theme. If children have a limited repertoire of
roles or do not quite know what they are supposed to do when acting out a specific
role, they cannot sustain dramatic play for a long period of time. For example,
if children play hospital they are not limited in their choice by the roles of
doctor and patient. They can also play roles such as nurse, pharmacist, x-ray
technician or patient’s parent. Having such a variety of characters makes play
richer in content and also helps prevent children from fighting over one specific
role. During field trips or visitors’ presentations, teachers focus children’s attention
on what people do and not on the objects they use. For example, a visit to a
fire station is not likely to lead to a rich play afterwards if children spend all their
time exploring the inside of a fire truck. On the contrary, it may even produce
conflicts in a play area if there is only one toy fire truck or only one fire-fighter
hat. A much more productive use of this field trip would be to introduce children
to various activities that people at the fire station are engaged in: answering the
phone, driving the truck, putting out fires, administering first aid, etc.
PLAY PLANNING
One of the most effective ways of helping children to develop mature play is
to use ‘play plans’. A play plan is a description of what the child expects to do
during the play period, including the imaginary situation, the roles and the
props. Play planning goes beyond the child saying, ‘I am going to keep
house’, to indicate what the child will do when he/she gets there such as, ‘I
am going to play shopping and making dinner’ or ‘I’m going to be the baby’.
Two or more children can plan together if they are interested in playing the
same thing or going to the same area. If children want to change their plans,
they are encouraged to do so. It is the action of mentally planning that is the
major benefit to the child. The figures appearing at the ends of chapters show
the progression of play plans for two pre-school children: Shamiso (Figures 1,
2 and 3) and Krystine (Figures 4, 5 and 6). The progression of play plans
shown begins with messages dictated to the teacher and ends with the child’s
attempts to write his/her own message.
19
In some other early childhood programmes, children plan their activities
aloud. However, we found that planning on paper is much more effective than
planning orally. Both the children and the teacher often forgot the oral plan. The
drawn/written plan is a tangible record of what the child wanted to do that other
children as well as that child and the teacher could consult. Many of our teachers
take dictation and write what the child dictates about their plan at the bottom
of the page, thus turning the planning session into a literacy activity.
For Vygotskians, the external mediation feature of planning on paper
strengthens play’s self-regulation function. It provides a way for both the child
and the teacher to revisit the plan because it serves as a mediator for memory.
In creating, discussing and revising their plans, children learn to control their
behaviours in play and beyond, thus acquiring self-regulatory skills. Finally,
teachers use play planning to influence dramatic play without intervening in
and disrupting the play as it is occurring. The teacher suggests to children
ahead of time how they can try out new roles, add new twists to the play scenario,
or think of a way to substitute for missing props. Potential ‘hot spots’
are worked out in advance.
In the Tools of the Mind classrooms, play plans increased the quality of
child play and the level of self-regulation, both cognitive and social. When
teachers did planning every day, children showed gains in the richness of their
play. In addition, there was less arguing and fighting among the children.
Asking the parties if the argument was ‘part of their plan’ easily solved the
disputes. Of course, they had not planned to argue and immediately returned
to their original plan. Arguments seldom blew up into situations where there
were power struggles with the teacher. In the long run, after plans had been
used for several months, there were few fights since potential problems were
defused before the play began.
There are several other benefits to play plans that are worth noting. First, the
play plans provided a wonderful way for parents to find out about what goes
on in the classroom. They provided a context for parents and children to discuss
the day and help parents to feel more involved. Second, the written plans
documented the child’s progress in both symbolic representation and literacy
skills. Third, the plans provide a meaningful context in which to use literacy
skills. In our findings, many children began to act like writers by drawing and
writing their plan in ‘pretend writing’ and then telling the teacher what the
‘words’ meant. For the at-risk children who have not had opportunities to
‘write’ at home, this is a good place to start literacy activities. Finally, teachers
reported that play plans provided a special moment of connection with each
child. They gave the teacher time to talk about what the child was interested in
doing. The play plans also provided time to talk about what the children had
drawn. Although the play plans required ten to fifteen minutes to complete,
20
once teachers really began using them, they found that the time was well spent.
After using plans for only the dramatic play area, many of our teachers ended
up using them at other times because they helped children to practise self-regulation
in a number of contexts.
SCAFFOLDED WRITING
Scaffolded Writing is a technique invented in the Tools of the Mind project by
applying the ideas of the orienting basis of activity, external mediation, private
speech and shared activity (Bodrova & Leong, 1996; 1998b). In Scaffolded
Writing, a teacher helps a child plan his/her own message by drawing a line
to stand for each word the child says. The child then repeats the message,
pointing to each line as he or she says the word. Finally, the child writes on
the lines, attempting to represent each word with some letters or symbols.
During the first several sessions, the child may require some assistance and
prompting from the teacher. As the child’s understanding of the concept of a
word grows, the child learns to carry the whole process independently—selfscaffolded
writing—including drawing the lines and writing words on these
lines.
The figures appearing at the ends of chapters show how Scaffolded Writing
influences writing development. Figure 7 shows a kindergarten-aged child’s
writing prior to using Scaffolded Writing. Figure 8 shows his first attempt to
use scaffolded writing with teacher assistance and Figure 9 shows the same
child’s self-scaffolded writing two months later.
Through our research, we found that Scaffolded Writing must be implemented
differently for children, depending on their background knowledge
about literacy. While the major components of Scaffolded Writing—childgenerated
message, line as an external mediator, private speech engaged during
the writing process—remain unchanged, the contexts in which the technique
is introduced and then practised might differ. In addition, the particular
order of steps children follow when progressing from teacher-assisted
Scaffolded Writing to using self-scaffolded writing may also vary.
All children watch the teacher model the use of Scaffolded Writing. The
teacher models that the words convey a message and shows the children how to
plan the message using the lines. The teachers use messages designed to highlight
different aspects of literacy, changing the emphasis as the year progresses.
For example, many messages modelled early in the year are used to just reinforce
the relationship between spoken and written language—they might be
about what is for lunch or what children will do on a particular day. When children
are already using the lines on their own, modelled messages highlight
meta-linguistic features of words, such as long and short words, or words that
21
begin with the same sound. Later, the modelled messages are used to teach
sound-to-symbol correspondence.
If children have little literacy knowledge, the child’s own use of scaffolded
writing occurs in specific contexts such as their play plans. The message
written usually starts with a stem, such as ‘I am going to’ or ‘My plan is’.
After using the stem in the first sentence, children can go on and add more
sentences. Children are encouraged as quickly as possible to make their own
lines to represent each of the words in their own oral message. At this stage,
the teacher focuses on learning voice-to-print match by emphasizing that
each word spoken has a corresponding ‘line’ or representation. A second emphasis
is on the idea that writing carries a message. The fact that letters represent
sounds is discussed, but children are not expected to write letters and
words. They are asked instead to use whatever they wish to help them remember
the message—a scribble, a letter-like form or a letter.
When children are familiar to some degree with letters and letter–sound
relationships, the procedure adopts a more directed format. This is an evolving
process and is individualized to fit the child’s emerging skills. The child
dictates the message, the teacher draws the lines to stand for the words, and
then both the child and the teacher repeat the message, pointing to the line as
they say each word. Once the child can repeat the message, the child attempts
to write words on the lines. After several sessions of teacher-assisted scaffolded
writing, the child is encouraged to try planning the message with the
lines all by him/herself. Children are encouraged to write long and complete
oral messages to prompt attempts at encoding or writing as many different
sounds as possible. Children have a special alphabet chart, called a ‘sound
map’, to help them find the corresponding letter if they do not know it.
At this more advanced stage, children are asked to reread their messages to
the teacher after they have finished writing on their own. At this time, the
teacher and the child will work on ‘editing’ the message. Editing consists of
working on a certain aspect of literacy at the assisted level. For example, when
a child has one phoneme represented in each word of the message, the teacher
will help the child hear more sounds by drawing out one of the words. If a
child has represented more than one phoneme in the word, the teacher will
work on another missing phoneme. In addition, the teacher may reinforce
meta-linguistic concepts already introduced in modelled messages. Editing is
very individualized and requires that the teacher be very knowledgeable about
patterns of literacy development and what kind of assistance would work best
with a specific child. At this point, ‘estimated spelling’ (spelling that is phonologically
accurate but not conventionally correct) is acceptable and conventional
spelling is not emphasized.
22
Description of the Early Literacy Advisor
To facilitate the transfer of expert knowledge to the classroom teacher, the
Tools of the Mind project developed the ELA system with Dr Dmitri
Semenov. Dr Semenov is an expert in mathematical modelling of psychological
processes and in the design of artificial intelligence systems. The ELA is
conceived as an advisor to the teacher—helping the teacher to assess children
more effectively, to analyse assessment data, and to make choices between a
number of appropriate teaching techniques. Teachers receive expert advice in
the form of individual student profiles that make possible a truly individual approach
to address the unique needs and strengths of each student.1
Each profile has four parts that could be printed out in any combination. The
first part contains the report on the student’s performance in a test (such as an
overall score and the specific items answered correctly or incorrectly). The second
part contains the analysis of error patterns detected in the student’s performance.
The third part provides the interpretation of these error patterns. The
fourth part lists instructional strategies recommended for this particular student.
Expert knowledge derived from research and collective expertise of master
teachers is built into each component of the student profile, so that teachers
will receive accurate and research-based information. Without fully understanding
the expert knowledge behind the recommendations, teachers can still
use effective instructional recommendations that would otherwise require attending
many hours of in-service training. However, for those teachers who
want to become experts themselves, the student profiles provide detailed information
about developmental trajectories in literacy acquisition and specific
error patterns.
The major components of the ELA include a battery of early literacy assessments,
a set of instructional strategies, and computer software designed to
interpret the results of the assessment in terms of student literacy development
and recommended interventions.
THE ELA ASSESSMENTS
The battery of assessments consists of instruments that target the skills and
concepts most critical for early literacy development along with the development
of meta-cognitive and meta-linguistic skills. The design of the ELA instruments
is based on the Vygotskian principles on the ZPD and scaffolding,
and combines assessment of a child’s independent performance with the assessment
of the child’s ability to respond to the teacher’s assistance.
23
An authentic assessment, the ELA uses game-like formats and activities
similar to what children would experience in school. Unlike on the typical machine-
scored answer sheet used in many assessments, children are not asked
to ‘bubble in’ their answers. Since the assessment battery is designed for nonreading
children and emergent readers, adults record the child’s actual response
on special forms (student response protocols). These forms are then
scanned into the computer and processed to generate individual student profiles.
THE ELA INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES
The set of instructional strategies contains new strategies developed within the
Tools of the Mind project along with other instructional strategies empirically
proven to be effective in supporting early literacy development. Instructional
strategies are recommended on basis of the ‘window of opportunity’ for each
strategy estimated to be most beneficial for an individual child. Thus, depending
on the assessment results, different strategies could be recommended
for different children. To make the strategies’ implementation more feasible,
similar strategies are grouped into larger categories to be recommended for
groups of children with similar instructional needs.
THE ELA EXPERT SYSTEM
The core of the ELA is a proprietary artificial intelligence engine that combines
pattern analysis algorithms with an expert system. The expert system is
programmed to emulate the decision-making process of master teachers by
making connections between an individual student’s raw assessment data and
effective instructional strategies that are most likely to benefit a particular student
at a specific time. In addition, the expert system defines where a child is
in the developmental trajectory and estimates the range of skills that will be
emerging next. It also identifies the patterns of a child’s errors that can be critical
in attaining the next milestone in the child’s development. The modular
design of the expert system makes it applicable to other subject areas and
grade levels, but it was first adapted to early literacy instruction.
Thus, the ELA is a logical outgrowth of the previous developments in the
Tools of the Mind project designed to facilitate the delivery of its theoretical
foundations and effective instructional strategies to classroom teachers.
The ELA has been field-tested on over 3,000 children in various samples
ranging from pre-kindergarten to Grade 1. Teachers who have used the ELA
in their classrooms have found it easy to administer and engaging for the
children.
24
The ELA has been correlated with a general set of standards and benchmarks
derived from the most current research on literacy as well as from state
documents, documents from professional organizations with set literacy standards,
and research reports (e.g. National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow, Burns
& Griffin, 1998). From this body of information, a set of general standards and
benchmarks were compiled as well as a set of developmental patterns.
DESCRIPTION OF DISSEMINATION MATERIALS AND TEACHING
VIDEOS
To increase public knowledge about Vygotsky and the principles on which
this project was built, we wrote a book, Tools of the mind: the Vygotskian approachto early childhood education (Bodrova & Leong, 1996) and participated
in the creation of a video series on Vygotsky with Davidson Films.
Three of the teaching videos cover a general introduction to Vygotsky, the role
of play in development, scaffolding, and the tactics that are used in teaching—
external mediation, private speech and shared learning. The fourth video,
which covers literacy, includes much of the Vygotskian approach to the development
of literacy.2
FIGURE 6. Play plan by Krystine in May
25
Implementation of the innovation
The implementation of the Tools of the Mind project can be divided into four
phases. The first phase involved our preliminary attempts at adaptation of the
Vygotskian approach to the classroom and the creation of new strategies that
better fit the American classroom while staying true to Vygotskian theoretical
foundations. In the second phase, we attempted to train a large number of
teachers to use these strategies. In the third phase, we evaluated the effects of
our approach on student achievement and experimented with methods of
training teachers. In the fourth phase, we further developed the computerized
assessment system, continued to develop strategies and applied them in more
diverse settings. In this phase, we worked on aligning the assessment with
standards and benchmarks.
PHASE I: ADAPTATION OF VYGOTSKIAN-BASED STRATEGIES
TO THE AMERICAN CLASSROOM
The Tools of the Mind project first implemented Vygotskian activities in two
classrooms, a mixed-aged classroom with children from kindergarten to
Grade 2 (5-7 years of age) and in a large kindergarten class that had three
teachers in a private school. Each teacher had more than ten years of classroom
teaching experience. These teachers had shown an interest in the techniques
and had volunteered to participate.
As we began to implement the strategies, we discovered that many of them
did not work when they were imported directly into classroom practices. The
classroom practices and the content taught differed substantially. For example,
training teachers using the same method to teach reading skills did not translate
from Russian to English without major changes to accommodate a different
language system. Also, the curriculum in kindergarten and Grade 1 was
not the same in different countries. Children in the United States were actually
introduced to reading earlier than in the Russian Federation. American
children are allowed to attempt to write using ‘estimated’ spelling before they
know all of the sound-to-symbol correspondences and prior to reading, while
Russian children are taught to write conventionally from the very beginning.
We had to adjust Vygotskian activities so that the content in the activities was
meaningful, and we had to synchronize them with American expectations for
children of this age. Many of the Russian activities were designed for children
who were developmentally much older than their American counterparts,
although the learning tasks were similar. Thus, even the level of directions re26
quired to complete the task had to be changed to meet the developmental level
of American children since younger children’s memory skills are not as advanced.
As a result, we began to create new techniques that used Vygotskian principles
but that addressed the needs of American children. Luckily, we were
working with a wonderful group of very thoughtful teachers who were able to
help us adjust the activities to meet the needs of the American classroom. In
fact, these teachers had much higher degrees and more education than teachers
in the Russian Federation of equivalent grade levels. This made modifications
of our programme much easier. Finding a strong group of practitioners
with inquiring minds was crucial to this phase of our project and proved to be
very important all the way along.
PHASE II: LARGE-SCALE IMPLEMENTATION
AND TEACHER TRAINING
In 1996, we began a massive implementation of our programme in a large
urban school district. We worked with seventy-eight teachers in teams in
eight schools. The teachers taught pre-school (4-year-olds), kindergarten
(5-year-olds), Grade 1 (6-year-olds) and Grade 2 (7-year-olds). We met with
small groups of teachers and support staff (special education teachers, reading
specialists) for a one-hour session. These sessions were scheduled so
that we were able to meet with all seventy-eight teachers once every three
weeks. In addition, trained district staff developers provided support in the
classroom.
The intensive training process involved in this phase was very timeconsuming
and yielded inconsistent results. We did not have a full-blown curriculum
with teacher manuals and activity kits, and so it was more difficult for
teachers to implement our techniques. Teachers who understood and learned
the Vygotskian approach did better at implementing the techniques in the
classroom. When we gave specific suggestions to teachers, such as after child
evaluations, teachers were better able to implement suggestions. Using the assessment
data as the basis for teacher training was even more successful than
watching the teachers’ videotapes of classroom problems. This led us to the
idea of making the assessment more closely tied to teaching strategies and developmental
patterns.
At the end of the year, the school district administration was reluctant to
have the entire project evaluated and blocked the final assessment. The district
felt that the assessments should only be given to the children who would pass
the test. Otherwise, they argued, it was too painful and difficult for the children.
Thus, we were not able to complete an empirical study or even an eval27
uation of our programme. We learned that the word ‘evaluation’ had different
meanings for researchers and school district staff and that this had to be negotiated
at the beginning of the project.
However, of the children we were allowed to assess, we found that in those
classrooms where our Vygotskian-based programme was faithfully implemented,
the children’s progress was very strong, much greater than expected.
All of the children progressed relative to their initial literacy levels. In addition,
progress outweighed the effects of demographic—African-American and
Latino students did as well as their Caucasian and Asian counterparts.
During this phase we developed our first three videos.
PHASE III: EVALUATION OF TEACHING STRATEGIES
Realizing the need for a complete and real evaluation of our programme, in
Phase III we began an empirical study using control and experimental groups.
We narrowed our focus to kindergarten with a small pilot sample of preschools.
For the kindergarten study, we worked with a small district with a
large population of at-risk children. The plan was to have a six-month trial
(January to the end of school) and evaluation of the programme. The preschool
programmes were in an urban district.
This marked the first large-scale use of the computerized assessment system.
It required that all of the children’s assessments (control and experimental)
be analysed within a week. By this time the system could analyse an individual
protocol and produce a profile in five to ten minutes. More than 500
protocols had to be scanned and analysed in the course of a few weeks. Just
the logistics of working this out showed that the computerized assessment system
could handle a large volume and still perform flawlessly. The procedures
used in this phase of the project and the results of the study are described in
the section entitled ‘Evaluation’.
The implementation was more successful than we had expected. The children
had benefited greatly from the project; even the large number of non-
English-speaking students had progressed during the six months to a greater
extent than those in the control group. The techniques were successful with atrisk
populations. We believed that a more intensive effort would prove them
to be even more successful.
The introduction of the computerized assessment allowed us to give less
support compared with Phase II, but we ob tained more potent results for children.
Thus, tying the techniques directly to the assessment speeded up implementation
of the teaching strategies.
When we statistically controlled for fidelity to the programme, we found
that those teachers who were most faithful in the implementation of the pro28
gramme every week were the ones who had the strongest results, even though
their children as a whole began the year at a lower level. These teachers had
the greatest gains overall.
In this phase we came across several unexpected problems due to the population
we were working with. In some classrooms, 30–60% of the children
who began the school year left before the end of the year. A significant number
of children were absent for substantial amounts of time—for weeks and
months. This complicated issues such as the child’s exposure to the techniques
as well as data collection for the evaluation.
PHASE IV: CONTINUED DEVELOPMENT OF THE ELA
AND ALIGNMENT WITH BENCHMARKS
During this phase, we moved our project to McREL (Mid-Continent Research
for Education and Learning), one of ten regional educational laboratories
sponsored by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of
the United States Department of Education.
The move to McREL increased development of training materials and the
degree to which both the assessments and techniques addressed state and national
standards for early literacy. This occurred at a time when the field of
early childhood education underwent a move to more accountability and the
need to address child outcomes. McREL is known nationally for its work in
school reform and the development of standards; McREL staff made valuable
contributions to the original Vygotskian-based techniques and assessments. At
this time, we divided our project into three parts:
• Technique development;
• Dissemination and distance learning; and
• Test and computerized assessment development.
Technique development
We began to work intensively in only two model classrooms as the sites for
the development of techniques. We could closely interact with both teachers
and children and could receive constant feedback. From this effort, we developed
a more coherent curriculum with activities covering more of the components
of a pre-school or kindergarten daily programme. With the support of
nationally known consultants in reading and early childhood education, the
techniques continue to improve and develop as new problems arise.
Dissemination and distance learning
The computerized assessment programme, which included assessments and
techniques, became one of the products offered by McREL to school districts
29
across the United States. The ELA is being used in thirty districts as the accountability
measure for kindergarten. Distance training of teachers using the
ELA has begun. In addition, we worked with Davidson Films to complete our
fourth video to teach early childhood educators about literacy.
Test and computerized assessment development
Test development included setting numerical indicators for the benchmarks
using the ELA and the correlation of the assessments with standards and
benchmarks. The Best Teachers with At-Risk Children Study, completed in
1999, established numerical indicators for the assessment profiles. For this
study, a group of teachers were chosen because of high child achievement
scores and school district recommendations. The teachers in the final sample
were teaching in schools with a history of very low test scores on standardized
assessments in the upper grades and a large number of at-risk children. The
computerized assessment was administered at the beginning and at the end of
the year. Teachers received all developmental information but did not receive
any information about techniques and strategies. The study was designed to
identify how far during one year good teachers were able to take at-risk children.
In addition to test development, we have been engaged in an intensive survey
of the literature that has resulted in a compilation of the standards, benchmarks
and developmental patterns in the area of literacy. These developmental
patterns have been used to refine the profiles that were generated from the
assessments. The compilation has also been posted on the web for states and
school districts to use when setting their own standards.
The primary problem at this time is establishing a stable base of funding for
the project. Because the approach to literacy development advocated in the
project is not mainstream, it has been difficult to obtain funding through traditional
avenues.
30
Evaluation: selected experimental studies
KINDERGARTEN EVALUATION DATA
In January 1997, the Tools of the Mind project began collaboration with a
public school district to improve the underlying cognitive and early literacy
skills of kindergarten students. The study was conducted with ten kindergarten
teachers—five experimental and five control. Each teacher had two sessions—
in the morning and in the afternoon. Each session had twenty to twenty-five
students. There were a total of 426 children in the selected schools—218 children
in the project classrooms and 208 in non-project classrooms.
Experimental and control classrooms were selected so that demographic characteristics
of students as well as teachers’ educational background and teaching
experience would match. In addition, all kindergarteners in the district
were given a writing test prior to the beginning of the study. The analysis of
the writing samples collected allowed us to make sure that children in the experimental
and control classrooms did not differ significantly in their early literacy
development.
Teachers implemented three teaching techniques: Scaffolded Writing, written
learning plans and sound analysis (using Elkonin boxes and the sound
map). We estimate that this comprised (in the best case) about 10% of the
classroom instructional time per week. A staff member was assigned to each
of the project teachers to assist him/her in implementing these techniques and
to collect samples of the children’s work. These aides were available for each
of the project teachers for one day a week.
To compensate for the extra time during which an aide was available to
work with children in the project schools, project staff spent one day a week
in the non-project schools doing whatever the teacher asked them to do. For
some teachers, this meant reading or writing with the children. In other cases,
the staff member freed the teacher up to do other things. In only one case was
the aide asked to not participate in the classroom, and so she sat on the sidelines.
Both children in the project and non-project schools attended the IBM Writeto Read ® lab, a computerized phonics programme. Children in the non-project
schools had a literacy period during which they practised writing, looked
at books or read a story. This was similar in all kindergartens. Both project and
non-project schools were held accountable for a specific set of crucial skills.
Children were also assessed using a district-wide assessment.
31
Children were assessed twice—at the beginning of the semester (January)
and at the end of the semester (May). Both times testing was done during a
one-week period. Assessments were administered primarily by undergraduate
college students majoring in education. About 40% of the children in the project
schools were assessed by their teachers. Of all the children participating
in the study, 231 were assessed on all assessments—pre- and post-tests. In addition,
for some children partial pre- and post-test data were available (e.g.
January and May data on the sound-to-symbol correspondence test were collected
for 316 children). The significant decrease in the number of children
tested in relation to the initial sample size can be attributed to a high turnover
rate and high absenteeism typical of urban school districts.
All of the assessments, except the writing sample, were administered in a oneto-
one session that lasted about twenty minutes per child. When the writing sample
assessment was administered, children began writing in a large group, and
then as each child finished, the tester would have the child read his/her writing
on an individual basis. Five assessments were given in the pre-test and these five
were repeated with two additional assessments in the post-test. The assessments
used both for pre- and post-tests were letter recognition, sound-to-symbol correspondence,
words versus pictures, instant words and writing sample. Reading
concepts and the Venger Graphical Dictation Test, which measured self-regulation,
were only administered in spring (Venger & Kholmovskaya, 1978).
Assessment data were analysed using S-Plus statistical software. General accuracy
scores were calculated for four assessments: letter recognition, soundto-
symbol correspondence, words versus pictures and instant words. Multiple
scales were used to analyse the writing sample and reading concepts tests.
The scales for the writing sample analysis included scribbling versus writing,
number of words, message complexity, word complexity, message decoding, controlled
vocabulary usage, accuracy of word encoding, completeness of phonemic
representation, correctness of phonemic representation and concepts of writing.
The scales for the analysis of the reading concepts data included voice-to-printmatch, concept of a word, concept of a sentence and comprehension.
Owing to the time-consuming nature of the manual coding involved in the
analysis of the Venger graphical dictation test, analysis of the data collected
with this instrument was not completed.
RESULTS
On all pre-tests, the children in the project and non-project schools had very
similar distributions on all assessments. Thus, project and non-project samples
did not differ statistically on any measures before the introduction of the innovative
teaching techniques.
32
Comparisons of the pre-test and post-test results between the project and
non-project schools were made. The students of the project schools demonstrated
both higher levels of performance and faster rates of progress than the
students of the non-project schools. Significantly stronger growth was documented
in several pre-literacy variables most closely associated in the literature
with reading achievement in later grades. Overall, children in the project
schools performed at higher levels on all measures. In no case did the techniques
have a negative effect on development on any scale.
Statistically significant differences between project and non-project classrooms
in the area of writing included:
• The number of words written by children who were not writing on the pretest;
• The number of words written by children who were writing some words on
the pre-test;
• Increase in the complexity of the child’s written message;
• Better correspondence between the written story and the re-read of that
story by the child;
• More consistent use of writing conventions;
• More words that are new and fewer words from controlled vocabulary;
• More accurate spelling; and
• Better phonemic encoding of words that are not a part of the controlled vocabulary.
Statistically significant differences between project and non-project classrooms
in the area of pre-reading competencies included:
• Improvement in sound-to-symbol correspondence;
• Better voice-to-print match;
• Better understanding of the concept of a sentence; and
• Better understanding of the symbolic function of a printed word.
In the following areas no statistically significant differences were found between
project and non-project classrooms: letter recognition, instant words
and words versus pictures. Two of these assessments—letter recognition and
words versus pictures—proved to be too easy for most of the children by the
end of the year to reliably discriminate between those who made greater
progress and those who did not. The instant words measure, on the other
hand, appeared to be too difficult even for the end of the year assessment: the
median post-test result was only three words recognized out of 100 administered.
Given the comparable performance of children in the project and non-project
schools on measures of letter recognition and sight words, the difference
in writing at the time of the post-test is even more indicative of the specificity
of the techniques used. Although children began at the same initial levels, chil33
dren in the project schools demonstrated significantly higher levels of writing—
a strong argument for the effectiveness of Scaffolded Writing, written
learning plans and sound analysis.
PRE-SCHOOL DATA
The pre-school project compared two teachers using the Tools of the Mind
curriculum with two control classrooms. In project schools all of the children
were included in the study, while in non-project schools only about half—
those who had permission slips from their parents to be tested—participated.
There were a total of seventy-five children in the selected schools, fifty-three
children in the project school and twenty-two in non-project schools. All of
these children were assessed on all assessments pre- and post-tests. Three assessments—
letter recognition, sound-to-symbol correspondence and words
versus pictures—were given in the pre-test and these three were repeated in
the post-test with the addition of the reading concepts assessment. The pre-test
was given in January and the post-test in May.
Assessment data were analysed using S-Plus statistical software. For three
assessments—letter recognition, sound-to-symbol correspondence and words
versus pictures—general accuracy scores were calculated. For the reading
concepts assessment, data were analysed using four scales: voice-to-print
match, concept of a word, concept of a sentence and comprehension.
In project classrooms, teachers implemented two teaching techniques:
Scaffolded Writing and play plans. These two strategies were typically implemented
in a combined fashion and required ten minutes of classroom time daily.
Since the adult–child ratio was higher in pre-school classrooms than in
kindergarten classrooms (two adults per eighteen children in pre-school compared
with one adult to twenty children in kindergarten) no additional personnel
were placed in either project or non-project classrooms.
RESULTS
Since the sub-sample of children from non-project schools was ‘self-selected’
in the sense that only children whose parents signed permission slips were included,
the following procedure was used to make project versus non-project
schools comparisons meaningful.
Each child from a non-project school was paired with a child from a project
school so that their pre-test scores on letter recognition and sound-tosymbol
correspondence tests were as close as possible. This step resulted in
twenty-two pairs. On the post-test, data were compared for these twenty-two
pairs of children.
34
The results for both pre- and post-tests are reported for the following measures:
letter recognition, sound-to-symbol correspondence and words versus
pictures. The reading concepts test was used to compare children from project
and non-project schools on the post-test only.
The children in the project school showed statistically stronger growth compared
with children in non-project schools in many pre-literacy variables
closely associated in the literature with reading achievement in later grades. In
no case did the techniques used have a negative effect on development on any
scale. Statistically significant increases included:
• Improvement in letter recognition;
• Better sound-to-symbol correspondence;
• Better comprehension of pattern in a text;
• Better understanding of the symbolic function of a printed word; and
• Better separation of a printed word into its component letters.
Thus, the statistical analysis of the results for both groups (kindergarten and
pre-school) proved that the innovative teaching techniques used in the project
classrooms produced gains in children’s early literacy development beyond
what was accomplished by the teachers in non-project classrooms. In the absence
of comprehensive normative data on literacy development for this age
group, it is difficult to evaluate the magnitude of these gains. However, data
reported by many researchers in the field suggest that the results demonstrated
by the children in the Tools of the Mind classrooms exceed expectations
for the respective grade levels, given the demographic characteristics of the
samples.
While the data collected provide strong evidence of the innovation’s shortterm
effects, there is not enough data to demonstrate its long-term effects.
Collection of follow-up data was made difficult by the fact that participating
schools use different instruments to assess reading and writing achievement
beyond kindergarten, and thus students’ scores could not be compared. The
state of Colorado, however, mandates that all fourth graders take the same
achievement test. As the two cohorts participating in the study will take this
test at the end of fourth grade, we will be able to compare reading and writing
scores for children who were initially in project and non-project classrooms.
Although longitudinal data are yet unavailable, teachers’ reports provide
some encouraging evidence of lasting effects of the innovative teaching strategies
on the students. Teachers from the project classrooms quote first and second
grade teachers who notice that students who participated in the study are
usually more self-regulated learners, express more interest in writing and
reading, produce more writing than their peers, and demonstrate mastery of
reading and writing at higher levels.
35
Impact
The reaction of the teachers involved in the project was mainly positive. The
teachers who were more intensively involved in the project, and consequently
whose results were better in terms of their students’ achievement, continued to
implement the instructional strategies they learned in the project even if they
received less support or no support from the project staff. Their students’
scores continued to improve. For example, when the school district began
mandating standardized assessments in kindergarten, 97% of students in the
project classroom scored at the ‘proficient’ level, while the average level for
the district was 50%. The following year, when the district results were reported
in terms of grade levels, students in this classroom scored between 1.4
and 1.8 at the moment of testing. This means that their literacy level in the
eighth month of their kindergarten year equalled what was expected by the
district to be accomplished only in the fourth or even eighth month of Grade 1.
These results are especially impressive given that in this classroom one-third
to one-half of the students started the year with limited English proficiency
and would usually be placed in an ‘at-risk’ category on the basis of their
socio-economic and demographic characteristics. Teachers attributed their
success to the new instructional strategies they were using.
Impact on the local level also included interest and growing support from
the school administration. The teachers who participated in the project were
invited to speak at local and national conferences and to describe their experiences
in articles addressed to classroom teachers.
It is hard to isolate the impact of the innovation on the larger educational
community from the impact of other events that were taking place at the same
time. However, there is some indication that the scope of the impact of our
project has been substantial. For example, the videotapes that explain the theoretical
foundations for the project and demonstrate some of the instructional
strategies used in project classrooms are currently used in more than 900 colleges
and universities nation-wide in their teacher preparation programmes.
Local educational agencies and school districts also use the innovations for
their professional development workshops. Tools of the Mind, which describes
the philosophical foundations and the theoretical principles underlying the instructional
strategies, remains one of the best-selling books on the subject. We
have been invited to speak on early childhood assessment at the national office
of the Head Start programme.
The greatest unintended consequence of the project has been increased
awareness in the educational community about the potential for early literacy
36
in pre-school and kindergarten. In our model classrooms, children demonstrate
that they can go far beyond current expectations for their age group. In
one classroom, which has a particularly high number of at-risk non-Englishspeaking
children, all of the children exceeded the district kindergarten expectations
and scored at the Grade 1 level. This was the first time in the district
that children from a classroom with this demographic make-up had
performed so well.
In addition, the developmental patterns and benchmarks developed in the
course of creating the ELA are now being used by other states and school districts
to set expectations and standards for young children. As these have been
posted on the Internet, the number of people who are interested in them has
grown.
Finally, since so many school districts have begun to use the ELA, we have
had a chance to collect data from diverse populations in a way we never could
before. We are now collecting data from many different types of schools, and
we have data from teachers with different levels of implementation to help us
refine our tools.
FIGURE 7. Five-year-old Aaron’s independent journal writing prior to Scaffolded Writing technique.
37
Future prospects/conclusions
Currently, we are working in several arenas. First, we are establishing the
reliability and validity of the ELA for younger children through a study of
340 children in a Head Start programme. Head Start is the federally funded
early childhood intervention programme for at-risk children. This empirical
study will not only show the validity of the assessment battery, but will
also validate a number of special early childhood teaching strategies designed
to improve both self-regulation and foundational literacy skills. The
teaching strategies are heavily play-based and lead into the kindergarten
curriculum we have already developed. This study will be completed in
June 2001.
We are increasing the quality of the distance training provided through the
computerized assessment programme by creating CD-ROM-based training
clips to be used in the current training model and eventually to be housed on
the Internet.
We have begun to explore the use of the techniques with non-standard-
English speakers (African-American Vernacular English) and with non-
English-speaking populations (immigrant populations from a number of countries).
One of the most interesting results of the last four years of work is that
these children make substantial progress in our programme, much more than
those children who begin at similar levels without our interventions.
A site licence version of the software system was developed and has been
used in thirty school districts, assessing over 1,000 children. In total, the assessment
has been administered in various forms for over 3,500 children, and
these have all been analysed by computer. This fact shows the promise of the
use of the computer as a support to the teacher instead of merely as a teacher
replacement. Instead of directly teaching the children, the computer is used to
help teachers decide what children need to learn next.
In addition, advances in computer technology have been and will continue
to be incorporated into the ELA computer system. For example, the assessments
are all JAVA-based, so that they are platform-independent. We will have
an Internet-ready version of some assessments available within the year. We
are exploring additional kinds of data entry—other than scannable forms—
that would still be user-friendly.
The story of the Tools of the Mind project does not end here. We continue
to apply the Vygotskian approach to help young children and their teachers.
In the future, we hope to extend the types of tools we develop to older children
and to other areas of learning.
38
FIGURE 9. Aaron’s journal two months after using the Scaffolded Writing technique.
FIGURE 8. Aaron’s writing after the teacher helped him to use the Scaffolded Writing technique.
39
Notes
1. http://www.mcrel.org/resources/literacy/ela
2. The titles are Vygotsky’s developmental theory: an introduction; Play: a Vygotskian approach; Scaffolding self-regulated learning in the primary grades; and Building literacy
competencies in early childhood. See http://www.davidsonfilms.com
References
Berk, L.E.; Winsler, A. 1995. Scaffolding children’s learning: Vygotsky and earlychildhood education. Washington, DC, National Association for the
Education of Young Children.
Bodrova, E.; Leong, D.J. 1996. Tools of the mind: The Vygotskian approach toearly childhood education
. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Merrill/Prentice Hall.
——; ——. 1998a. Development of dramatic play in young children and its effectson self-regulation: the Vygotskian approach.
Journal of early childhood teacher education (Stamford, CT), vol. 19, no. 2, p. 38–46.
——; ——. 1998b. Scaffolding emergent writing in the zone of proximal development.
Literacy teaching and learning (Columbus, OH, Ohio State University,
Reading Recovery Council of North America), vol. 3, no. 2, p. 1–18.
——; ——. 1999. Play and its role in development and learning: the Vygotskian
approach. In: Guddemi, M.; Jambor, T.; Skrupskelis, A., eds. Play in achanging society. Little Rock, AR, Southern Early Childhood
Association.
Bodrova, E.; Leong, D.J.; Paynter, D.E. 1999. Literacy standards for pre-school
learners. Educational leadership (Alexandria, VA), vol. 57, no. 2,
p. 42–46.
Bowman, B.; Donovan, M.S.; Burns, M.S. 2000. Eager to learn: educating our
preschoolers. Washington, DC, National Academy Press.Bredekamp, S.; Rosegrant, T. 1992.
Reaching potentials: appropriate curriculum
and assessment for young children. Washington, DC, NAEYC.Elkonin, D.B. 1963. The psychology of mastering the elements of reading.
In:
Simon, B.; Simon, J., eds. Educational psychology in the U.S.S.R.
London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
40
——. 1977. Toward the problem of stages in the mental development of the child.
In: Cole, M., ed. Soviet developmental psychology. White Plains, NY,
M.E. Sharpe.
——. 1978. Psichologija igry [The psychology of play]. Moscow, Pedagogika.
Galperin, P.Y. 1969. Stages in the development of mental acts. In: Cole, M.;Maltzman, I., eds.
A handbook of contemporary Soviet psychology. New
York, NY, Basic Books.
——. 1992. Organization of mental activity and the effectiveness of learning.
Journal of Russian and East European psychology (Armonk, NY), vol. 30,
no. 4, p. 65–82.
Leont’ev, A. 1978. Activity, consciousness, and personality. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ, Prentice-Hall.
Luria, A.R. 1979. The making of mind: a personal account of Soviet psychology.
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
National Association for the Education of Young Children. 1987. Standardized
testing of young children 3 through 8 years of age: a position statement
of the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
Washington, DC, National Association for the Education of Young
Children.
National Reading Panel. 2000. Teaching children to read: an evidence-based assessment
of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications
for reading instruction. Washington, DC, National Reading Panel.
Shepard, L.; Kagan, S.L.; Wurtz, E. 1998. Principles and recommendations forearly childhood assessments
. Washington, DC, National Education Goals
Panel.
Snow, C.E.; Burns, S.M.; Griffin, P. 1998. Preventing reading difficulties in youngchildren. Washington, DC, National Academy Press.
Venger, L.A. 1988. The origin and development of cognitive abilities in preschool
children. International journal of behavioral development (Hove,
UK), vol. 11, no. 2, p. 147–53.
Venger, L.A.; Kholmovskaya, V., eds. 1978. Diagnostika umstvennogo razvitijadoshkol’nikov
[Assessment of cognitive development in pre-school children].
Moscow, Pedagogika.
Vygotsky, L. 1978. Mind and society: the development of higher mental
processes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.——. 1987.
The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky. New York, NY, Plenum Press.
Wood, D.; Bruner, J.; Ross, S. 1976. The role of tutoring in problem solving.
British journal of psychology (London), vol. 66, p. 181–91.
Good intentions; unintended consequences
February 27, 2008 by commandrine
Transplant Surgeon Charged in Patient’s Death
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — On a winter night in 2006, a disabled and brain damaged man named Ruben Navarro was wheeled into an operating room at a hospital here. By most accounts, Mr. Navarro, 25, was very near death, and doctors hoped that he might sustain other lives by donating his kidneys and liver.
But what happened to Mr. Navarro quickly went from the potentially life-saving to what law enforcement officials say was criminal. In what is believed to be the first such case in the country, prosecutors have charged the transplant surgeon, Dr. Hootan C. Roozrokh, with trying to hasten Mr. Navarro’s death to retrieve his organs sooner.
A preliminary hearing begins here on Wednesday, with Dr. Roozrokh facing three felony counts relating to Mr. Navarro’s treatment as a donor. At the heart of the case is the question of whether Dr. Roozrokh, who studied at a transplant fellowship program at the prestigiousStanford University School of Medicine, was pursuing organs at any cost or had become entangled in a web of misunderstanding about a lesser-used harvesting technique known as “donation after cardiac death.”
Dr. Roozrokh has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer said the charges were the result of overzealous prosecutors. But the case has already sent a shudder through the tight-knit field of transplant surgeons, because if convicted on all counts, Dr. Roozrokh could face eight years in prison. The case is also worrying donation advocacy groups that organ donors could be frightened away.
“If you think a malpractice lawsuit is scaring surgeons off,” said Dr. Goran Klintmalm, the president of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, “wait to see what happens when people see a surgeon being charged criminally and going to jail.”
David Fleming, the executive director of Donate Life America, a nonprofit group that promotes donations, said the case had “given some support to the myths and misperceptions we spend an inordinate amount of time telling people won’t happen.”
Mr. Fleming said about 18 people a day die in the United States waiting for transplants. That has created a tremendous demand for donor organs and over the years the medical community has established strict protocols to govern organ harvesting.
Cardiac-death donations began to go out of vogue in the late 1960s and early 1970s after medical advances like life support and subsequent changes in the legal definition of death made brain-death donations more appealing. But the procedure has been encouraged by health officials in recent years.
There were a decade-high 670 cardiac-death donations through the first nine months of 2007, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees organ allocation. In all, there were 13,223 organ donations over the same period, the vast majority with brain-dead donors
In brain-death donations, the donor is legally dead, but the organs are kept viable by machines.
In cardiac-death procedures, after the patient’s respirator is removed, the heart slows. Once the heart stops, the brain function ceases. Most donor protocols also call for a five-minute delay before the patient is declared dead. Transplant teams are not allowed in the room of the potential donor before that.
Cardiac-death donations can make some doctors and nurses skittish if they have not previously witnessed one, said Dr. Robert Sade, the former chairman of the American Medical Association’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs.
“It all works exactly the same, the cuts and the procedure,” Dr. Sade said. “But the circumstances are quite different.”
Several days after Mr. Navarro was hospitalized at the Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center here, a decision was made to remove his respirator. According to the criminal complaint, Dr. Roozrokh ordered excessive doses of morphine and Ativan, an anti-anxiety medicine, both of which are commonly used as comfort medicines for dying patients. He also ordered the introduction of Betadine, an antiseptic usually used after death to clean organs for transplantation, the criminal complaint says.
Mr. Navarro died about eight hours later of what the coroner would later rule as natural causes. In the end, because the death was not more immediate, his organs had deteriorated so much that they were unusable for a transplant.
Prosecutors have charged Dr. Roozrokh with felony counts of dependent adult abuse, mingling a harmful substance and unlawful controlled substance prescription. The doctor’s lawyer, M. Gerald Schwartzbach, said Dr. Roozrokh, a 34-year-old Iranian émigré and academic All-American swimmer who grew up in Wisconsin, did “nothing that adversely affected the quality or length” of Mr. Navarro’s life.
“Dr. Roozrokh is a brilliant young surgeon, who has dedicated his life to saving lives,” Mr. Schwartzbach said. Neither the police nor prosecutors would comment on the case.
Mr. Navarro was diagnosed with adrenal leukodystrophy, or A.D.L., a debilitating nerve disease, when he was 9. “He would walk like he was drunk,” said his mother, Rosa, a Guatemalan immigrant. “And when he would play, he would fall like Bambi.”
By his early 20s, however, Mr. Navarro’s mental and physical condition had deteriorated to a point where he was placed in an assisted-care facility.
On Jan. 29, 2006, Ms. Navarro received a call from the facility that her son had been found unconscious, in cardiac and respiratory arrest, but that he had been revived and transported to Sierra Vista. His brain had been damaged from lack of oxygen.
Several days later, with no sign of improvement, Ms. Navarro says she was told by a doctor at the hospital, whose name she did not know, that her son would never recover and that he would be disconnected from life support.
Ms. Navarro, a disabled machinist from Oxnard, Calif., said she did not have enough money to stay another night near her son. She said that
shortly after leaving the hospital, she received a call from the California Transplant Donor Network, a nonprofit organ procurement organization. On a tape recording made by the transplant network, Ms. Navarro agreed to donate her son’s organs, saying she did not want her “boy to suffer too long.”
Late on Feb. 3, a transplant team including Dr. Roozrokh arrived at the hospital. .
According to a police interview with Jennifer Endsley, a nurse, Dr. Roozrokh stayed in the room during the removal of the respirator and gave orders for medication, something that would violate donation protocol. Ms. Endsley, who stayed to watch because she had never seen the procedure, also told the police that Dr. Roozrokh also asked an emergency room nurse to find and administer more “candy” — meaning drugs — after Mr. Navarro did not die after the removal of his respirator.
Mr. Schwartzbach, the lawyer for Dr. Roozrokh, said he would address the allegations in court. “I think a great many people, — lay and medical, — will realize they have been significantly misinformed,” he said.
Several months after the incident, , federal health officials cited the hospital for a series of lapses, including allowing a person without clinical privileges, Dr. Roozrokh, to prescribe controlled substances. Last February, the United Network for Organ Sharing reprimanded the California Transplant Donor Network, for breaking “established protocol” in the case. The donor network declined to comment.
Ms. Navarro has filed a civil suit against Dr. Roozrokh, the donor network and other doctors in the operating room and has settled a lawsuit against the hospital. A spokesman for the hospital, Ron Yukelson, said it was correcting the problems raised by the case.
Ms. Navarro said she remained angry about the way her son’s life ended.
“He didn’t deserve to be like that, to go that way,” she said. “He died without dignity and sympathy and without respect.”
Melanie Carroll contributed reporting from San Luis Obispo.
If the races had been reversed; i.e. white home owner & carloads of black teenagers, do you have any doubt that the charge would have been dismissed?
February 27, 2008 by commandrine
THE NEW YORKER, LETTER FROM LONG ISLAND
THE COLOR OF BLOOD
Race, memory, and a killing in the suburbs.
by Calvin TrillinMARCH 3, 2008
John White’s trial made two fathers the focus of Suffolk County’s racial divide.
hat happened at the foot of the driveway at 40 Independence Way that hot August night in 2006 took less than three minutes. The police later managed to time it precisely, using a surveillance camera that points directly at the street from a house a couple of doors to the north. The readout on the surveillance tape said that it was 23:06:11 when two cars whizzed by going south, toward the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. At 23:09:06, the first car passed back in front of the camera, going north. A minute later, a second car passed in the same direction. In the back seat of that second car—a black Mustang Cobra convertible—was a seventeen-year-old boy named Daniel Cicciaro, Jr., known to his friends as Dano. He was unconscious and bleeding profusely. He had been shot through the cheek. A .32-calibre bullet was lodged in his head.
Normally, at that time of night, not many cars are seen on Independence Way, a quiet street in a town called Miller Place. Just east of Port Jefferson, on the North Shore of Long Island, Miller Place is in the part of Suffolk County where the commuters have begun to thin out. To the east is a large swatch of the county that doesn’t seem strongly connected to the huge city in one direction or to the high-priced summer resorts and North Fork wineries in the other. The house at 40 Independence Way is part of a development, Talmadge Woods, that five or six years ago was a peach orchard; it’s now a collection of substantial two-story, four-bedroom houses that the developer started offering in 2003 for about half a million dollars each. The houses vary in design, but they all have an arched front door topped by the arched glass transom known in the trade as a Palladian window—a way to bring light into the double-height entry hall. When people are asked to describe the neighborhood, they tend to say “upper middle class.” The homeowner with the surveillance system is an orthodontist.
Miller Place could also be described as overwhelmingly white. According to a study released a few years ago, Long Island is the single most segregated suburban area in the United States. The residents of 40 Independence Way—John and Sonia White and their youngest son, Aaron—are African-American and so are their next-door neighbors, but the black population of Miller Place is less than one-half of one per cent. The Whites, who began married life in Brooklyn in the early seventies, had moved to Miller Place after ten years in North Babylon, which is forty minutes or so closer to the city. “You want to raise your family in a safe environment,” John White, a tall, very thin man in his early fifties, has said, explaining why he was willing to spend three hours a day in his car commuting. “The educational standards are higher. You want to live a comfortable life, which is the American dream.” One of the Whites’ sons is married, with children of his own, and a second is in college in the South. But Aaron was able to spend his senior year at Miller Place High School, which takes pride in such statistics as how many of its students are in Advanced Placement history courses. Aaron, an erect young man who is likely to say “sir” when addressing one of his elders, graduated in June of 2005. He was one of four black students in the class.
In an area where home maintenance is a priority, 40 Independence Way could hold its own. John White is a serious gardener—a nurturer of daylilies and clematis, a planter of peel-bark birch trees—and someone who had always been proud, maybe even touchy, about his property. People who have been neighbors of the Whites tend to use the word “meticulous” in describing John White; so do people who have worked with him. He has described himself as “a doer”—someone too restless to sit around reading a book or watching television. He says that he’s fished from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas. He’s done a lot of hunting—a pastime he was taught by his grandfather Napoleon White, whose family’s migration from Alabama apparently took place after a murderous attack by the Ku Klux Klan. At the Faith Baptist Church, in Coram, Long Island, John White sang in both the men’s choir and the mixed Celebration Choir. A couple of polished-wood tables in the Whites’ house were made by him. He’s a broadly accomplished man, and proud of it. His wife, who was born in Panama, works as a manager in a department store and has that Caribbean accent which, maybe because it’s close to the accent of West Indian nurses, conveys both competence and the firm intention to brook no nonsense. The Whites’ furniture tastes lean toward Stickley, Audi. Their sons dress in a style that’s preppy. Sitting in his well-appointed family room, John White could be taken for middle management.
But he doesn’t have the sort of education or occupation that would seem to go along with the house he lives in. After graduating from a technical program at Samuel Gompers High School, he worked as an electrician for seven or eight years and then, during a slow time for electricians, he began working in the paving industry. For the past twenty-five years, he has worked for an asphalt company in Queens, patching the potholes left by utility repair crews. He is often described as a foreman, which he once was, but he says that, partly because of an aversion to paperwork, he didn’t try to reclaim that job after it evaporated during a reduction in the workforce. (“I’m actually a laborer.”) On August 9, 2006, a Wednesday, he had, as usual, awakened at three-thirty in the morning for the drive to Queens, spent the day at work, and, after a stop to pick up some bargain peony plants, returned to what he calls his “dream house” or his “castle.” He retired early, so that he could do the same thing the next day. A couple of hours later, according to his testimony, he was awakened by Aaron, who, with a level of terror John White had never heard in his son’s voice, shouted, “Dad, these guys are coming here to kill me!” Instead, as it turned out, John White killed Daniel Cicciaro, Jr.
here had been a birthday party that evening for Craig Martin, Jr., a recent Miller Place High School graduate. Craig lives with his parents and his younger sister, Jennifer, in Sound Beach—a town just to the east that grew into a year-round neighborhood from what had begun as beach lots purchased in the twenties as part of a Daily Mirrorcirculation-promotion scheme. The party was mostly in the Martins’ back yard, where there was an aboveground pool, a lot of cold beer, and a succession of beer-pong games. This was not the A.P.-history crowd. Craig was connected to a number of the boys at the party through an interest in cars. Some of them were members of the Blackout car club, a loose organization of teen-agers who, in good weather, gather in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop mall in Miller Place on Thursday nights for an informal car show—displaying cars whose lights and windows are likely to have been tinted in pursuit of sleekness. Dano Cicciaro (pronounced Danno Cicero) was a regular at Stop & Shop, driving a white Mustang Mach 1 with two black stripes. Dano had grown up in Selden, a blue-collar town to the south, and finished at Newfield High School there after his family moved in his senior year to one of a half-dozen houses clustered around a cul-de-sac called Old Town Estates, in Port Jefferson Station.
His father, Daniel Cicciaro, Sr., runs an automobile-repair shop in Port Jeff Station called Dano’s Auto Clinic—a two-bay operation that also has some used cars parked in its lot, their prices marked on the windshields. Dano’s Auto Clinic is where Dano, Jr., spent a lot of his spare time. As a boy, he had the usual range of interests, his father has recalled, but “as he turned into a teen-ager it was all cars.” Even as a teen-ager, he ran a car-detailing business out of the shop, and he’d planned to keep that up when he started at Suffolk County Community College in the fall. Dano, Jr.,’s long-term plan was to take over Dano’s Auto Clinic someday and expand its services. “He did exactly as I did, in that he set goals for himself and conquered them, never sitting idle,” a Newsday reporter was told by Daniel Cicciaro, Sr., a father who’d felt the validation of having a son who was eager to follow his calling and work by his side.
Aaron White, who had finished his first year at Suffolk County Community College, was having dinner that evening in Port Jefferson with Michael Longo, his best friend from Miller Place High School. From having attended a few of the Stop & Shop gatherings, Aaron knew some of the car crowd, and, while phoning around for something to do, he learned about the birthday party at the Martins’. Craig greeted Aaron cheerfully enough, but a few minutes later Jennifer, who was then fifteen, told her brother that, because of a past incident, she felt frightened in Aaron’s presence. Dano Cicciaro was assigned to ask Aaron to leave. It isn’t clear why he was given that task. It couldn’t have been his size: Dano was five feet four and weighed a hundred and twenty-nine pounds. It certainly wasn’t his sobriety. Dano was drunk. When his blood-alcohol content was checked later at the hospital, it was almost twice the level required to prove intoxication. Still, Dano, who thought of himself as a protective older brother to Jennifer, handled the situation smoothly, saying to Aaron something like “It’s nothing personal, but you’ll have to leave.” Aaron later said that he was puzzled (“I never get kicked out of parties”), but he got into his car and drove back to Miller Place.
When Dano learned exactly why Jennifer felt uncomfortable around Aaron, she later testified, “he freaked out.” While in an Internet chat room with a couple of other boys, Jennifer told Dano, Aaron had posted a message saying that he wanted to rape her. Obtaining Aaron’s cell-phone number from Michael Longo, Dano touched off what became a series of heated calls involving several people at the party. Dano wanted to confront Aaron immediately. It didn’t matter that Aaron denied having posted the message. It didn’t matter that the posting had taken place nine months before and that Jennifer’s real older brother, Craig, had actually forgotten about it. In court many months later, Jennifer Martin was asked if she’d eventually learned that the offending message had not, in fact, been sent by Aaron—it had grown out of something said on a MySpace account set up in Aaron’s name as a prank—and she answered in the affirmative. That didn’t matter, either, because by then it was much too late. On the evening of August 9th, when Jennifer told Dano about the rape posting, there were other elements involved. A lot of beer had been consumed. It was late in the evening, a time when the teen-age penchant for melodrama tends to be in full flower. Dano was filled with what Paul Gianelli, one of John White’s defense attorneys, called “a warped sense of chivalry” and Dano’s godfather, Gregg Sarra, preferred to characterize as “valor, protecting a woman, honor.” For whatever reason, Dano Cicciaro and four of his friends were soon heading toward the Whites’ house in two beautifully painted and carefully polished cars that passed the orthodontist’s surveillance camera when its readout said 23:06:11.
What happened when they got there remains a matter of sharp dispute. There is no doubt that the boys were displaying no weapons when they got out of their cars, although one of them, Joseph Serrano, had brought along a baseball bat that remained in the back seat of the Mustang. There is no doubt that John White emerged from his garage carrying a pre-Second World War Beretta pistol that he kept there—part of an inheritance from his grandfather that had also included, White later said, “rifles and shotguns and a lot of advice.” Aaron was a few steps behind him, carrying a 20-gauge shotgun. There is no doubt that Dano “slapped” or “whacked” or “grabbed” the Beretta. There is no doubt that, before the shot was fired, there had been shouting and foul language from both sides. The tenor of the conversation, the defense team eventually maintained, could be surmised from the tape of a 911 line that the boys did not realize was open as they rushed their friend to a Port Jefferson hospital in the black Mustang Cobra. The 911 operator can be heard saying, “Sir . . . hello . . . hello . . . sir, pick up the phone.” The boys, their muffled voices almost hysterical, can be heard shouting directions to one another and giving assurances that Dano is still breathing. The operator keeps saying, “Hello . . . sir.” Then the voice of Joseph Serrano, sitting in the back seat with his bleeding friend and his baseball bat, comes through clearly: “Fucking niggers! Dano, I’ll get ’em for you, Dano.”
Back at 40 Independence Way, John White and his son were sitting in front of their house, hugging. Sonia White was screaming, “What happened? What happened?” In the trial testimony and police reports and newspaper accounts and grand-jury minutes dealing with what occurred in the meticulous front yard of 40 Independence Way after the cars had sped away, three statements attributed to John White stand out. One was in the testimony of Officer David Murray, the first Suffolk County policeman to reach the scene, who said that John White approached him with his arms extended, saying, “I did what I had to do. You might as well put the cuffs on me.” Another is what Officer Murray said he heard John White say to his son: “I told you those friends of yours would turn on you.” The third is what Sonia White testified that her husband said to her as he walked back into their castle: “We lost the house. We lost it all.”
week after the death of Daniel Cicciaro, Jr., several hundred people turned out for his funeral, held at St. Sylvester’s Roman Catholic Church, in Medford, Long Island. The gathering was heavy with symbolism. Some of the younger mourners displayed “Dano Jr.” tattoos. Dano, Jr.,’s main car was there—the white Mustang that was familiar from Stop & Shop and had won Best Mach 1 Mustang in a competition at McCarville Ford. Gregg Sarra, a boyhood friend of Daniel Cicciaro, Sr., and a local-sports columnist for Newsday, gave the eulogy, praising his godson’s loyalty and his diligence and his gift for friendship. After the burial, some of Dano, Jr.,’s car-club friends revved their engines and chanted, “Dan-o, Dan-o, Dan-o.” As a tribute to his son, Daniel Cicciaro, Sr., attended the service in a Dano’s Auto Clinic tank top. The Stop & Shop car show that Thursday, according to a Newsday piece, turned into a sort of vigil for Dano, Jr., with Jennifer Martin helping to light a ring of candles—red and white candles, for the colors of Newfield High—around his Mustang and his first car, a Mercedes E55 AMG.
The sadness was accompanied by a good deal of anger. John White found that understandable. “I know how I would feel if someone hurt my kid,” he said in a Times interview some weeks later. “There wouldn’t be a rock left to crawl under.” Speaking to one reporter, Daniel Cicciaro, Sr., had referred to White as an “animal.” For a while after the shooting, Michael Longo—the friend who had accompanied Aaron White to the birthday party and had, as it turned out, telephoned to warn him that there were plans to jump him if he returned—slept with a baseball bat next to his bed. Sonia White later testified that after some particularly menacing instant messages (“i need ur adreass you dumb nigger”), to which Aaron replied in what sounded like a suburban teenager’s notion of gangster talk (“u da bitch tlaking big n bad like u gonna come down to my crib n do sumthin”), the Whites decided that he was no longer safe in the house, and they sent him to live outside the area.
The mourners who talked to reporters after the service rejected the notion, brought up by a lawyer for the White family shortly after the shooting, that Dano Cicciaro and his friends had used racial epithets during the argument in front of 40 Independence Way. Daniel Cicciaro, Sr.—a short man with a shaved head and a Fu Manchu mustache and an assertive manner and a lifelong involvement in martial arts—had called any connection of his son with racism “absurd.” But by the time a grand jury met, a month or so after the shooting, even the prosecutor, who would presumably need the boys as witnesses against John White, was saying that racial epithets had indeed been used. The district attorney said, though, that if John White had simply remained in his house and dialled 911, he wouldn’t be in any trouble and Daniel Cicciaro, Jr., would still be alive. The grand jury was asked to indict White for murder. Grand juries ordinarily go along with district attorneys, but this one didn’t. When the trial finally began, in Riverhead, fifteen months after the shooting, the charge was second-degree manslaughter.
The grand-jury decision may have reflected public opinion in Suffolk County, where there are strong feelings about a homeowner’s right to protect his property and his family. Suffolk County is a place where a good number of residents are active or retired law-enforcement officers, and where even a lot of residents who aren’t own guns—a place where it is not surprising to come across a plaque that bears the picture of a pistol and the phrase “We Don’t Dial 911.” James Chalifoux, the assistant district attorney who was assigned to try the case against John White, apparently had that in mind when, during jury selection, he asked jurors if they would be able to distinguish between what might be considered morally right—what could cause you to say, “I might have done the same thing”—and what was permissible under the law. He asked jurors if they could put aside sympathy when they were considering the case—meaning sympathy for John White. Judging by comments posted online in response to Newsday articles, public opinion seemed muddled by the conflict between two underpinnings of life in Suffolk County—a devotion to the sanctity of private property, particularly one’s home, and an assumption that the owner of the property is white.
Dano’s mother—Joanne Cicciaro, a primary-school E.S.L. teacher who had grown up in Suffolk County—said she was extremely disappointed that the grand jury had declined to indict John White for murder. Daniel Cicciaro, Sr., told a reporter, “Here this man points his gun at the boys and says, ‘I’m going to shoot.’ He says it three times. Then he shoots my son. To me, that’s intentional murder.” On the other hand, some of White’s strongest supporters—people like Lucius Ware, the president of the Eastern Long Island branch of the N.A.A.C.P., and Marie Michel, a black attorney who joined the defense team—believed that if a white homeowner in Miller Place had been confronted late at night by five hostile black teen-agers there would have been, in Marie Michel’s words, “no arrests, no indictment, and no trial.” The homeowner would have been judged to have had “a well-founded fear,” they thought, and if the justice system dealt with the incident in any way it would have been to charge the boys with something like breach of the peace or aggravated harassment (“What were they doing in that neighborhood at that time of night?”). For that matter, these supporters would argue, would Dano have “freaked out” if the male accused of wanting to rape Jenny Martin hadn’t been black? Wouldn’t teen-agers spoiling for a fight have dispersed if a white father walked out of the house, with or without a gun, and told them in no uncertain terms to go home? In other words, before a word of testimony had been heard, some people attending the trial of John White believed that in a just world he would have been on trial for murder instead of only manslaughter, and some believed that in a just world he wouldn’t have been on trial at all.
he Arthur M. Cromarty Court Complex is set apart from Riverhead, the seat of Suffolk County, on a campus that seems to be mostly parking lots—a judicial version of Long Island shopping malls. Those who were there to attend John White’s trial, which began just after Thanksgiving, seemed to be roughly separated by race, on opposite sides of the aisle that ran down the center of the courtroom’s spectator section. That may have been partly because the room was small and on many days the prosecution’s supporters, mostly Cicciaro relatives and young friends of Dano’s, nearly filled half of it. Dano, Jr.,’s parents did not sit next to each other—they had separated before their son’s death—but they came together as a family in hallway huddles of supporters and in speaking to the press. The people who stood out on their side of the courtroom were a couple of friends of Daniel Cicciaro, Sr., who also had shaved heads, but with modifications that included a scalp tattoo saying “Dano Jr.” Although they looked menacing, both of them could be described as designers: one is a detailer, specializing in the fancy painting of motorcycles; the other does graphic design, specializing in sports uniforms.
People on the Cicciaro side might have felt some menace emanating from the phalanx of black men, all of them in suits and ties and many of them offensive-tackle size, who escorted Aaron White (wearing a bulletproof vest) through the courthouse on the first day of his testimony and then took seats across the aisle, near some women from John White’s church choir. The escorts were from an organization called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. On that first day, their ranks were augmented by members of the Fruit of Islam, wearing their trademark bow ties, although the black leader called to mind by John White’s life would probably be Booker T. Washington rather than Louis Farrakhan. As it turned out, there was no overt hostility between those on either side of the courtroom aisle, and, at the end of testimony, the Cicciaros made it clear that they would accept any decision the jury brought in—none of which, Joanne Cicciaro pointed out, would bring their son back. Talking to a Newsday reporter after the trial about prejudice, Daniel Cicciaro, Sr., maintained that bias existed toward what some people called skinheads. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” he said.
The four boys who accompanied Dano Cicciaro to Aaron White’s house that night are all car enthusiasts who now hold jobs that echo their high-school hobby. Alex Delgado does maintenance on race cars. Joseph Serrano is a motorcycle mechanic. Tom Maloney, who drove the Mustang Cobra, sells Volkswagens. Anthony Simeone works for his father’s auto-salvage business. Among those who testified that they’d tried to prevent Dano from going to the Whites’ house were Alex Delgado, who drove him there, and Joseph Serrano, who brought along a baseball bat. (“He’s stubborn,” Anthony Simeone had explained to the grand jury. “When he wants to do something, he wants to do it.”) Although there had been testimony that Dano Cicciaro used the word “nigger” once or twice in the cell-phone exchange with Aaron White, his friends denied using racial slurs at 40 Independence Way. (With the jury out of the courtroom, Paul Gianelli brought up an incident that had been investigated by the police but not included in the notes and reports that they are required to turn over to the defense: according to two or three witnesses, Daniel Cicciaro had gone to Sayville Ford with a complaint a few weeks before he was shot and, when approached by a black salesman, had said, “I don’t talk to niggers.” The judge wouldn’t admit that into evidence, but the headline of the next day’s Newsday story was “ATTORNEY: COPS HID MILLER PLACE VICTIM’S RACISM.”) The friends who’d gone with Dano, Jr., to the Whites’ house that night testified that after John White’s gun was slapped away, he raised it again and shot Dano in the face. As they described how Dano Cicciaro fell and how he’d been lifted from the street by Tom Maloney and rushed to the hospital, there were occasional sobs from both Joanne and Daniel Cicciaro.
Dano’s friends had said that both of their cars were in the street facing north, but the Whites testified that one was in their driveway, with the lights shining up into the house—a contention that the defense bolstered by analyzing the headlight reflections on the orthodontist’s mailbox in the surveillance tape. The boys testified that they’d never set foot on the Whites’ property—that contention was bolstered by pictures showing Dano’s blood and his cell phone in the street rather than in the driveway—but the Whites claimed that the boys had been advancing toward the house. “They came to my home as if they owned it,” Sonia White said on the stand. “What gall!”
John White testified that, believing the young men had come to harm his family, he backed them off his property with Napoleon White’s old pistol. In the frenzy that followed his abrupt awakening, he said, he had yelled, “Call the cops!” to his wife as he raced into the garage, but she hadn’t heard him. He described Dano Cicciaro and his friends as a lynch mob shouting, among other things, “We could take that skinny nigger motherfucker.” Recalling that evening, White said, “In my family history, that’s how the Klan comes. They pull up to your house, blind you with their lights, burn your house down. That’s how they come.” In White’s telling, the confrontation had seemed over and he was turning to go back into the house when Dano Cicciaro grabbed the gun, causing it to fire. “I didn’t mean to shoot this young man,” John White said. “This young man was another child of God.” This time, it was John White who broke down, and the court had to take a recess. One of the jurors was also wiping away tears.
o convict someone of second-degree manslaughter in the state of New York, the prosecution has to prove that he recklessly caused the death of the victim—“recklessly” being defined as creating a risk so substantial that disregarding it constitutes “a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe”—and that he had no justification. In its decision in the case of Bernard Goetz, the white man who in 1984 shot four young black men who had approached him on the subway demanding money, the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, ruled that justification could have a subjective as well as an objective component—fears raised by the defendant’s past experiences, for instance. By bringing up the history that White’s family had with the Klan, the defense team raised a subjective component of justification, along with the objective component of home protection. “We are all products of our past,” Paul Gianelli said of his client during one of the breaks in the trial. “He brought to that particular evening who he is.” The defense was making a case for, among other things, the power of race memory.
The racial divide is obviously less overt in John White’s Long Island than it was in Napoleon White’s Alabama. Tom Maloney, who’d also graduated from Miller Place High School, had apparently thought of Aaron White as a friend. Alex Delgado, who drove Dano Cicciaro to Aaron’s house on August 9th, had been there before as a guest. In John White’s testimony, Delgado was described as Hispanic. Joanne Cicciaro, who by name and appearance and accent might be assumed to have come from one of the many Italian-American families that moved to Suffolk County in recent decades from the boroughs, is actually Puerto Rican—a fact brought up to reporters by the Cicciaros in countering any implications of racism in Dano’s upbringing. (“Our family is multicultural.”) Even without those complications, the case for race memory would be harder to make to white people than to black people. White people are likely to say that times have changed: these days, after all, a real-estate agent who tried to steer John White away from buying a house in an overwhelmingly white Long Island neighborhood would be risking her license.
If times have changed, black people might ask in response, how come Long Island is still so segregated? In his summation, the prosecutor asked a series of questions as a way to illustrate how White’s behavior had deviated from the behavior of a reasonable person. Two of the huge black men who had been part of Aaron White’s escort were sitting in the courtroom at the time, and when the D.A. asked whether a reasonable person would really be guided partly by the memory of a Ku Klux Klan attack that happened years before he was born, they both began to nod their heads.
In that closing statement, James Chalifoux said that it wasn’t until the trial began that John White started talking about a lynch mob. (It’s true that in a newspaper interview in September of 2006 White seemed to downplay race, but it’s also true that in his grand-jury testimony, less than a month after the shooting, he spoke about a “lynch mob.”) Race, Chalifoux said, was being used to distract the jurors from the simple fact that by walking down the driveway with a loaded pistol John White, a man intimately familiar with firearms, had engaged in conduct that had recklessly caused the death of Dano Cicciaro. Matching up testimony with cell-phone logs, Chalifoux argued that the Whites had more time before the arrival of the cars than their story of a panicky few minutes implied. Chalifoux acknowledged that Dano and his friends were wrong to go to the Whites’ that night, that Dano was wrong to use a racial epithet when he phoned Aaron White, and that John White had found himself “in a very bad situation that night and a situation that was not his fault.” But how White responded to that situation, Chalifoux said, was his fault.
Chalifoux’s summation followed that of Frederick K. Brewington, a black attorney, active in black causes on Long Island, who was Paul Gianelli’s co-counsel. “Race has so much to do with this case, ladies and gentlemen, that it’s painful,” Brewington told the jury: Dano Cicciaro and his friends thought they had a right to go to John White’s house and “terrorize his family with impunity and arrogance” because of “the false racial privilege they felt empowered by.” In Brewington’s argument, John White thought, “ ‘Once they see I have a gun they’ll back off’ . . . but they did not take ‘the skinny old nigger’ seriously.” While Chalifoux presented Joseph Serrano’s slur on the 911 tape as, however deplorable, an indication that the argument at the foot of the driveway didn’t include the barrage of insults that the Whites had testified to—if it had, he said, “you would have heard racial epithet after racial epithet after racial epithet”—Brewington saw it as a mirror of the boys’ true feelings. “What we do under cover of darkness sometimes comes to light,” he said.
Shortly after the beginning of deliberations, ten jurors, including the sole African-American, were prepared to convict John White of having recklessly caused Dano Cicciaro’s death. Two jurors resisted that verdict for four days. Then they capitulated. They later told reporters that they felt bullied and pressured by jurors who were impatient to be liberated as Christmas approached. In a courtroom crowded with court officers, the jury reported that it had found John White guilty of manslaughter and a weapons charge. The Cicciaros and their supporters were ecstatic. Dano’s parents seemed to take John White’s conviction principally as proof that the accusations of racism against their son had been shown to be false. “My son is finally vindicated,” a tearful Joanne Cicciaro said, outside the courtroom. Daniel Cicciaro, Sr., said, “Maybe now they’ll stop slinging my son’s name and accusing him of all this racism.” Outside the courthouse, friends of Dano, Jr., honked their horns and revved their engines and chanted, “Dan-o, Dan-o, Dan-o.” The next day, Sunday, the celebration continued with a sort of open house at Dano’s Auto Clinic, which bore a sign saying “Thank You Jurors. Thank God. Dano Jr. Rest in Peace.” In Miller Place, John White briefly spoke to the reporters who were waiting in front of his house. “I’m not inhuman,” he said. “I have very deep feelings for this young man.” But before that he went to the Faith Baptist Church, in Coram, and sang in the choir.
hn White is a hero,” Frederick Brewington said two weeks later, addressing a crowd of several hundred people, almost all of them black, who had gathered on a cold Saturday afternoon in front of the criminal-court building in Riverhead. He repeated, “John White is a hero.” The guilty verdict had made White the sort of hero all too familiar in the race memory of African-Americans—someone held up as an example of the unjustly treated black man. On the podium were black officeholders, speakers from the spectrum of black organizations on Long Island, and two people who had come from Manhattan—Kevin Muhammad, of Muhammad Mosque No. 7, and Al Sharpton. A lot of N.A.A.C.P. people were in the audience, and so were a lot of people from Faith Baptist Church. Various speakers demanded a retrial, or called for the resignation of the district attorney, or pointed out the difference in how white homeowners in similar situations have been treated, or called for the young white men involved to be indicted. (“We will raise this to a level of national attention until these young men are brought to justice,” Sharpton said.) There were chants like “No Justice—No Peace” and, loudest of all, “Free John White.”
That chant was not meant literally. For the time being, John White is free—he addressed the rally briefly, mainly to thank his supporters—and his attorneys hope that, while an appeal is pending, he will be allowed to remain free after his sentencing, scheduled for March 19th. (“I think he should get as much time as possible,” a Post reporter was told by Jennifer Martin, whose response to Aaron White’s arrival at her house set the events of August 9th in motion. “I really do.”) Until the sentencing, White is back to rising at three-thirty every morning to go into the city and patch utility holes. Everything he was quoted as saying in the aftermath of the shooting that night turned out to be true. The fatalism reflected in his statement to Officer Murray as he held out his hands to be cuffed was well founded. Aaron White accepted the fact that those friends of his had indeed turned on him. In his testimony, he said, “They have no respect for me or my family or my mother or my father. . . . They have no respect for life whatsoever. They’re scum.” And, of course, John White had understood the situation well when he told his wife that they had lost their dream house—a comment that, as it turned out, particularly incensed Joanne Cicciaro. (His sorrow, she said to reporters after testimony had ended, “was all for themselves—sorrow about losing their house, about their life changing. He never said, ‘Oh, my God! What did I do to that boy? Oh, my God. This kid is bleeding on the driveway. What did I do to him?’ He had no sympathy, no sorrow for shooting a child.”) Even before the trial, 40 Independence Way was listed with a real-estate broker. Its description began, “Stately 2 year young post-modern colonial in prestigious neighborhood.” ♦
Hmm… do you suppose W’s affection for Condi is a nostalgic throwback to his family’s slaveholding past just like the war in Iraq is a nostalgic throwback to Poppy’s failure to croak Saddam?
February 20, 2008 by commandrine
