Structural Analysis and the Internal Mechanisms of Play Activity of Preschoolers

Abstract

For research purposes, we single out from the fluid, continuous flux of a child's living activity specific segments that have a certain determinateness and uniformity of content and form and that we shall nominally refer to as play processes, work processes, or other processes. Of course, behavioral segments isolated in this way still remain living processes within a child's activity, under the particular conditions of his environment, and continuous sequences of discrete behavioral acts. Diverse factors contribute to the investment in this activity in one form or another. The differences among the forms of a child's behavior are determined largely by the nature of the bond that serves as the unifying, cementing factor for its discrete, outwardly disjunctive manifestations, and the nature of that bond is determined, in turn, by distinctive features of the interrelations of the organism and the environment. Hence, the first pages of any investigation aspiring to determine the nature and essence of some typical form of a child's behavior must concentrate on study of this bond through which discrete elements of behavior are transformed into integral, organically cohering processes of life activity. However, to study how discrete parts of an organic whole are bonded together and to discover the mechanisms underlying the interdependence of the elements of a whole require determining its "blueprint," its structure. Study of discrete forms of a child's behavior should begin with a structural analysis as well, just as we began our study of children's games, reported on for the first time at the Second All-Russian Congress of Pedology, Experimental Pedagogy, and Psychoneurology, with a structural analysis.