[Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: Text

[mike cole]

Thanks for all the background and additional references, Jon. Is there
a particular article/chapter among those that you would recommend we
read to get clearer about thinking about context and activity in
Bronfenbrenner's
final model?  It seems from your summary below that at the micro-level, the
activity
is the context a la Yrjo, and above that level there is a better way to
think about it
than Bronfenbrenner offers.
"proximal processes" were the centerpiece of his
Process-Person-Context-Time (PPCT)
model.  These are essentially the everyday activities in which developing
people engage, and they always and only occur in microsystems.

Do I have that right? Psychological analysis takes as its units of analysis
children engaged in joint activities with other members of their community?

One problem for me in thinking about this issue is that context is a
relational term, con-text. There is an instructive discussion of this
problem by Ray McDermott in the same volume where Yrjo wrote that the
activity is the context. I attach the paper. The whole paper may be of
interest, but the core idea he puts
forth is on pp. 275-277, and particularly, the two figures on p. 276. This
exercise seems to help get at the relationality of "the context."

A second problem I have when thinking about my research participating in an
after school program is the way that the matroyshki metaphor seems
particularly well suited for. I habitually have described
The Fifth Dimension program as an activity that goes on insider of a boys
and girls club. The club is
one of many organizations and institutions in the suburban town I live in.
That town is north of san diego in the southern california region.  Of
course you need to combine this with the time scales appropriate to each
level of scale (using the concentric circles as proxies for scale and
remembering that at each scale people of different ages, all developing).

And, of course, I also find it necessary to think about the "weaving
together" metaphor of context, which, when combined with the
matrochki/circles metaphor suits my intuitions about developmental
processes well.

These thoughts provoked my mention of the cover of the second edition of
Luis' work. Only the concentric circles remained, the triangle had been
airbrushed from history.

Anyway, thanks for the provocation to think about these matters. Always
food for thought.
mike

On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 7:24 AM, Jonathan Tudge <jrtudge@uncg.edu> wrote:

> Hi, Mike,
>
> There are a couple of problems with the 2005 book.  One is that the papers
> are drawn from UB's writings from the 1970s to the early part of this
> century.  As is true of Vygotsky's writings (and probably any theorist who
> wrote over a significant span of time) it's really important to know the
> date of publication.  The other problem is that at least one of the
> chapters is incomplete, and there are errors in at least one other.
>
> As for the concentric circles or the matrioshka--they're both excellent
> examples of how powerful metaphors can go powerfully wrong!  Both are
> utterly misleading, in that they really focus attention on the different
> layers of context (and even then don't make sense--the mesosystem consists
> of overlapping circles, as in a Venn diagram).  Nonetheless, you're
> right--UB continued to use the metaphor in his final publications.
>
> However, his theory really developed a lot from the 1970s onwards (see Rosa
> and Tudge, 2013; Tudge, 2013), and from the early 1990s onwards "proximal
> processes" were the centerpiece of his Process-Person-Context-Time (PPCT)
> model.  These are essentially the everyday activities in which developing
> people engage, and they always and only occur in microsystems.  However,
> what goes on in microsystems is always influenced by (a) the person
> characteristics of the developing individuals of interest and those of the
> others with whom they interact, (b) the characteristics of the context,
> both proximal (as in the nature of the microsystem in which those
> activities are occurring) and distal (the macrosystem, which for him was
> culture, whether considered at the level of society or within-society
> cultural groups), and (c) time, which includes both the need to study over
> time (longitudinally) and in time (the prevailing social, economic, and
> political climate).    A graphic representation that better reflects his
> developed position than the concentric circles can be found in Tudge
> (2008), on page 69.
>
> I actually think that he rather dropped the ball on culture,
> unfortunately.  I really like his writings on this in his 1979 book and in
> his 1989 (or 1992) chapter on ecological systems theory.  Reading his 1998
> (or 2006) handbook chapters you'll find virtually no mention of the impact
> of culture (or macrosystem) despite drawing on Steinberg et al.'s research
> on adolescents from different racial/ethnic groups.
>
> Don't feel bad, though, if you have always just thought of Bronfenbrenner's
> theory as one of concentric circles of context--you're no different in that
> regard from just about everyone who has published an undergrad textbook on
> human development, not to mention a majority of scholars who have said that
> they've used UB's theory as foundational for their research (see Tudge et
> al., 2009, 2016).
>
> If anyone would like a copy of any of these papers, just send me a private
> message to jrtudge@uncg.edu
>
>    - Tudge, J. R. H. (2008). *The everyday lives of young children:
>    Culture, class, and child rearing in diverse societies.* New York:
>    Cambridge University Press.
>    - Tudge, J. R. H., Mokrova, I., Hatfield, B., & Karnik, R. B. (2009).
>    Uses and misuses of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory of human
>    development. *Journal of Family Theory and Review, 1*(4), 198-210.
>    - Rosa, E. M., & Tudge, J. R. H. (2013). Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theory of
>    human development: Its evolution from ecology to bioecology. *Journal of
>    Family Theory and Review, 5*(6), 243–258. DOI:10.1111/jftr.12022
>    - Tudge, J. R. H. (2013). Urie Bronfenbrenner. In Heather Montgomery
>    (Ed.), *Oxford bibliographies on line: Childhood studies*. New York:
>    Oxford University Press.
>    - Tudge, J. R. H., Payir, A., Merçon-Vargas, E. A., Cao, H., Liang, Y.,
>    Li, J., & O’Brien, L. T. (2016). Still misused after all these years? A
>    re-evaluation of the uses of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory of
> human
>    development. *Journal of Family Theory and Review*, *8,* 427–445. doi:
>    10.1111/jftr.12165.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jon
>
>
>
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> Jonathan Tudge
>
> Professor
> Office: 155 Stone
>
> Our work on gratitude: http://morethanthanks.wp.uncg.edu/
>
> A new book just published: Tudge, J. & Freitas, L. (Eds.) Developing
> gratitude in children and adolescents
> <https://www.uncg.edu/hdf/faculty/tudge/books/dev-
> gratitude-in-children-and-adolescents-flyer.pdf>,
> Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
>
> My web site:http://www.uncg.edu/hdf/faculty/tudge
>
> Mailing address:
> 248 Stone Building
> Department of Human Development and Family Studies
> PO Box 26170
> The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
> Greensboro, NC 27402-6170
> USA
>
> phone (336) 223-6181
> fax   (336) 334-5076
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 6:20 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>
> > 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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