Dr. Natalia Gajdamaschko

Dr. Natalia Gajdamaschko, limited term lecturer at the Faculty of Education Simon Fraser University, is a Vygotskian psychologist, trained in Moscow, Russia. In North America, she has served as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Vinson Institute of Government and the Torrance Centre for Creative Studies at the University of Georgia (USA). As the recipient in 1993 of an Advanced Scholars Award by the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX), she spent an academic year at the University of Connecticut's School of Education and National Centre for Gifted and Talented conducting research on gifted education and educational psychology. Dr. Gajdamaschko has presented papers at numerous European, North American and World congresses in the fields of educational theory, gifted education, educational psychology and organizational psychology.

Among her publications, Dr. Gajdamaschko is the author of "The Totalitarian Mask" in A. Baldwin and W. Vially (Eds), The Many Faces of Giftedness: Lifting the Mask (1999), "Lev Vygotsky on Creativity" in M. Runco and W. Pretzker (Eds), Encyclopedia of Creativity (1999), and (with Kieran Egan), "Some cognitive tools of literacy" in A. Kozulin and others (Eds), "Vygotsky's Educational Theory in Cultural Context" (2003).

Abstract:
Vygotsky on development of imagination

Lev Vygotsky was an educational theorist and psychologist of extraordinarily wide knowledge whose major writings deal with entire learning-teaching-development enterprise.   But there is a gap in the list of "Vygotskiana" topics in North America: Vygotsky's writings the imagination and its development only recently became the topic of the discussion.

Despite wide-ranging interests towards Vygotskia theory, the issue of imagination remains outside of the main line of the general inquiries. My presentation will attempt to fill the gap.

In particular, I will to explore a popular view that Vygotsky and Piaget have a lot in common. This view underscores the differences between Vygotskian and Piagetian ideas of the nature of development in general and development of imagination in particular. As a result this view reinforces presupposition of an imaginative abilities and realistic thinking as opposite and even antagonistic characteristics of consciousness.

However, role of language and unsconcious thought was the main point of Vygotsky's criticizm of   Piaget. In my presentation I will discuss the theoretical differences between Vygotsky and Piaget regarding a nature of imagination and its relation to the child development in general. I suggest that these theoretical differences are not merely trivial technicalities. These differences go directly to the core of our philosophical beliefs about education and do have implications not only for the understanding of the nature of imagination, but also for our pedagogical practices.

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