[Xmca-l] Teacher Distancing and "Social Distancing"

[David Kellogg]

Michael, Anthony, Elizabeth--and (of course) Annalisa:

I apologize for changing the threadline title AGAIN. I feel like the
five-year-old who is always unscrewing the back of the TV set to see the
little people inside; I was very dissatisfied withe the abstract theory on
the other line, according to which everything is everything and mediation
and unmediation are equally both and I wanted a way of finding the people
inside it. I thought the term "meatspace", which Annalisa has heard before,
captured that feeling pretty well (and there are also some echoes of a
corruscating book review I once read in MCA titled something like "Yer
askin' me to believe in sentient MEAT????")

Let's use Michael's categories of "teacher presence" and "social presence"
instead, so long as we keep in mind the point that Michael made at the end,
that is, the teacher is always present even when the teacher is not present
(as when the child is doing homework alone) and the additional point that
teacher presence is one kind of social presence. But because presence and
absence are (like mediated and unmediated) equally both ungradeable
categories, I would prefer to talk about teacher distancing and social
distancing. Michael Osterholm has objected to the term social distancing
for the same reasons I raised earlier--it's a physical, mechanical
distancing that actually creates a higher form of solidarity (and that is
why the elements of society which oppose higher forms of solidarity oppose
it). So I put "social distancing" in scare quotes. But the teacher
distancing is real enough.

Real but not by itself of developmental significance. What worries me is
the possibility that we are adding to the kinds of inequalitiees that
Annalisa, Henry and Tom are talking about on the other thread. It seems to
me that teacher distancing differentially hurts some populations. I
disagree that Koreans are more homogeneous than other cultures (in class
terms significantly  less so) and I also think that if you were to sit
through a lecture in the Korean language without understanding Korean you
would not agree that language is the least important aspect of teacher
presence. But (to bring these two together) I think that students who are
able to focus on language, and on particular kinds of language, are
disproportionately enabled in conditions of teacher distancing. This is the
issue that dare not speak its name, for when Bernstein tried to raise it he
was, as Halliday noted, "driven out of the field".  One of the reasons I
wrote the article linked below is that Ruqaiya Hasan was not.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238/167607__;!!Mih3wA!VO48fELJW7sniTLYfb-jdmrQdoIXI216JGBeW6N8-Zce9P2I5M_FZBJKElhGyP20UejX0w$ 

New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
Works* *Volume
One: Foundations of Pedology*"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VO48fELJW7sniTLYfb-jdmrQdoIXI216JGBeW6N8-Zce9P2I5M_FZBJKElhGyP026P9-1A$ 
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