START UP-SCAFFOLDING
My eyes have been glued to Netflix too much these past few weeks. It's such a guilty pleasure to binge-watch a newly popular Korean drama and neglect the weekly readings I'm supposed to read. Despite all that, I learn many things from the series, which I'm going to explain in this paper.
The title of the series is Start-Up. Start-up means a “company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable economic model” (Wikipedia, 2020). The series tells the story of a girl named Dal-Mi competing with her sister to grow a Start-up successfully. Even though they were siblings, they didn't grow up in the same household. Their parents got divorced when they were young. Dal-Mi lived with her father. In-Jae, the older sister, chose to live with her mother, who eventually remarried a wealthy businessman.
In one of the scenes, Dal-Mi and her father were playing in the playground. Dal-Mi was playing on a swing, and she fell. Her father almost would not let her play on the swing anymore to keep her safe from the accident. But Dal-Mi asked if his father would cover the ground underneath the swings with sand. The father did it. With the sand-covered ground, Dal-Mi could confidently swing without having to be afraid she would fall. If she fell, the sand would protect her from getting hurt.
Looking at the scene with the child development lens, I can see how playing with swings brings many benefits for Dal-Mi. Swinging helps Dal-Mi to strengthen her core muscles and practice her balance. When she is gripping the swing's ropes, she practices her grip strength, which is essential for her writing skills in the future. However, Dal-Mi seems to be lacking the power to play on the swings independently. She always falls, especially when she swings too high.
Covering the ground with sand is an act of scaffolding through physical adaptation. Scaffolding is a process where adults support the child for him/her to achieve something beyond what the child can do independently. What a child can do alone is not enough for him/her to grow. But certain things outside of his/her capabilities will be too hard for him/her. The area in between, where the child could do with adults' support, is called ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development). The concept was developed by Soviet psychologist and social constructivist Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934). Vygotsky, among other educational professionals, believes education's role is to provide children with experiences in their ZPD, thereby encouraging and advancing their learning. (Berk, L & Winsler, A. (1995)
If Dal-Mi's father forbade her to play on swings because of that one accident, she might not strengthen her muscles, which is crucial for her development. Because of her father's scaffolding, she can now swing independently, resulting in better physical development.
In the later part of the movie, Dal-Mi grows up to be a resilient young girl who leads a start-up company. One of the reasons she has grown up that way is that she learned problem-solving at an early age, and her father supported this.
