[Xmca-l] Fwd: Text

[mike cole]

Hi Jon --

Nice to see your voice!

I only have Urie's 2005 collection, *Making Human Beings Human, *to hand. I
checked it out
to see if the terms activity and context appeared there. Only sort of!
Activity is in the index, but context is not (!). I attach two pages from
the book for those interested (and able to read my amateur
photos). Here it seems that activity and context coincide at the micro
level, but perhaps only there?

Concerning embedded circles and context. It turns out that the person who
induced Sheila and me to write a textbook on human development was U.
Bronfenbrenner. And this same U.B. discussed with us how to represent his
perspective circa 1985, pretty early in the task of writing the first
edition. His use of matroshki (embedded dolls) as a metaphor and his
rhetoric at the time (and in 2005 as well) invites
a concentric circles representation. We discussed other ways of trying to
represent the idea and he
said that our representation came as close as he could figure out.

In the 2005 book he refers to my work as combining a Vygotskian notion of
context with an anthropological one (p. 126), and uses the term "ecological
context." I assume that most of my Russian colleagues would argue that LSV
used the concept of "social situation of development," not context. I have
no idea how he would respond to Yrjo's declaration that the activity is the
context, but it does not seem too far off from what is written on the pages
attached.

Perhaps someone on xmca who is skilled at searching texts in cyrillic could
search for his use of the term, context. I have always been curious about
what such a search would turn up, but lack the skill
to carry out the query.

And perhaps you have written something about the mistake of interpreting
U.B.'s notion of contexts using embedded circles we could learn from??
Certainly the passages on p. 46 remind me of the work of Hedegaard and
Fleer, who also draw upon U.B.

mike
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