[Xmca-l] Re: keeping eyes open

[White, Phillip]

Francine - i found your posting to be very encouraging, particularly the call for a closer focus on Vygotsky & Activity Theory.

and by that time i finished reading your posting i was reminded of the soviet label of cosmopolitanism - particularly where you imputed a "stifling" of Vygotsky's ideas.  for me that seems far-fetched.

i find it fair to believe that Vygotsky's determination to move away from behaviorism - a bane not just on soviet russian education but on american education as well - and it's prescriptive linear, stage based, black box based assumptions of learning to instead a learning theory based within a social relationship, a community historically grounded and with signs both physical and mental embedded within the situated cultural present, proleptically focused.

this is why i found and still find Vygotsky so pertinent to my life's activity - parent, spouse, grandparent, friend, neighbor, confident, patron - all of the myriad of social relations within a wide range of legitimate peripheral participation - in which xmca is but one.(d)
and this for me of course also involves (d)ecrying colonialism, racism, sexism".  and while for you this "... doesn't address the oppression of free thinking people by members of their own culture, race, and sex", i see it as a start - and not a mere expression of "political grievances".

as for Vygotsky, of course he is going to be a man of his time - and as such blind to certain oppressions endemic to the Soviet Russian socio-political-educational structure at the time.  just as we all are now.

and frankly, i don't think that state of social relations is going to be able to support "free thinking" - that for us, as it was for Vygotsky and, say, Spinosa - an idea which will always rest of the razor's edge of - to use James Wertsch's description - an irreducible tension.

and always xmca is going to be operating with a degrees of irreducible tension.

and i shall consider your question - what do we want to know, explore, contribute.

well, this is my contribution:  many thanks, Francine, for yours.

as Eugene would suggest - half-baked ideas here - what do you think?

phillip
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