Summary by Rolfe Windward
In an overview of the later chapters in this book, the author observes that
the socially constructed nature of human self-understanding has proved
difficult to reconcile with the objectivist philosophical premises upon which
the physical, biological, and to a marked degree, psychological sciences are
built. One of the attractions of Vygotsky's theoretical perspective could be
said to be it's provision for a repertoire of two-sided constructs, such as
the zone of proximal development, designed to bridge and even nullify the
analytic gap between individual psychology and ecosocial context(s). Each of
the authors in their respective chapters attempt to extend the "neo
-Vygotskian" interface along continua of interest to them, demonstrating in
their diversity both the fertility and unresolved dilemmas of the
sociocultural approach.
I.(A) The author addresses the problem of embeddedness by asking, "what is
embedded in what?" The position perhaps least in potential conflict with an
objectivist position would be to posit the individual as embedded in an
(ecocultural) niche. However, citing Bronfenbrenner's formulation, the author
points out that the interactive nature of the ecocultural embeddedness of
human development may be better captured by positing the child as a member of
a system with the basic unit of analysis becoming the dyad (microsystem of
mother-child for e.g.); this facilitates the assumption of isomorphism
between scalar system levels but also theoretically ignores the individual, a
very counterintuitive notion for most psychologists.
A conception of niche defined as activity and constructed as an activity
setting in which individuals, dyads, and social groups are embedded
(operationalized by Gallimore & Goldenberg along the dimensions of personal
present, cultural values, task demands, scripts, and purposes or motives of
actors) could handle this difficulty and provides the necessary double-sided
frame: "facing inward, 'children's activity settings are the architecture of
their daily life;' facing outward, they are 'a perceptible instantiation of
the social system.'." However, it may be difficult to attribute individual
responsibility for separate elements in such a model especially if cognition
is considered as a socially distributed phenomenon.
Clearly the concept of embeddedness has multiple variants. The metaphor of
the niche suggests a basic image of location and timing to which Nicolopoulu
and Cole add a definition of structure-of-participation in which clients or
officers of a "host institution" play roles in the activity. Participation
also appears in perspectives on children's socialization and authors such as
Jean Lave add another dimension of embeddedness, regulation. The rules
governing legitimate peripheral participation may be experienced by the agent
as constricting but are, in the double-sided analysis: a source of structured
guidance when facing inward to the individual; constitutive when facing
outward to society. The constitutive rules are eventually internalized (or
perhaps embodied) and, when violated, raise another embedding dimension, that
of accountability although this could be considered as subsumed under the
concept of regulation.
Another measure of embeddedness discussed by Wertch, Tulviste, and Hagstrom,
and variously termed membership or ownership, establishes the development
of "cognitive authority" which simultaneously establishes group membership
and individual confidence and competence to act autonomously. Here perhaps
the two-sided perspective is more subjective, the sense of simultaneously
belonging or being in control and that of being owned or more deeply
embedded.
I.(B) All these dimensions of embeddedness raise the question of fit; that
is, "given that the context in which a psychological process is embedded has
its own sociocultural properties," how well do the two fit? For example, the
Fifth Dimension play-world described by Nicolopoulu and Cole can be inserted
in a number of host settings but the two ecocultural niches (activity
settings) into which it was embedded provided rather dissonant results in the
larger research context; e.g., the library was more supportive of the
learning outcomes of interest to the researchers but the host organization
viewed the library as an inappropriate venue for the game. The "real world"
outcome (sociocultural decision making) of the planned intervention did not
seem to fit well with theoretical concerns. The author cites another example
of this apparent paradox in which African American parents resisted the
introduction of Black English vernacular forms into an elementary school
curriculum. The nominal recipients of this innovation, the parents, rather
clearly judged it to be a strategy to "keep their children back" since
Standard English was a key survival skill in the competitive market for jobs.
The author offers some interpretations for the apparent lack of fit between
psychological process and sociocultural context: 1) differences in time
frame over which the adequacy of the fit is judged; 2) conflict among vested
interests that systematically distort the judgments of observers; or 3)
different configurations of essentially the same set of variables. For
example, in reference to the first issue, giving pupils the kind of cognitive
authority suggested by reciprocal teaching might challenge the existing
institutional order. However, Tharp (this volume) notes that institutional
timeframes are distinctly slower than individual time frames. The second
possibility, that estimates are biased by vested interests intrinsic to the
central purpose of the project, could articulate itself in a number of ways:
teachers might view it as an additional burden or threat to employability;
parents might view certain reforms as intrusion into domestic privacy;
researchers or administrators might advocate innovation to promote their own
careers.
The third possibility raises more theoretically challenging questions.
Divergent estimates may be based on different configurations of dimensions
equally and immediately relevant to the project in question. For example, to
the librarian in the Fifth Dimension project, it was likely an instance of
the category "opportunities for learning to read" but to the researcher it
may be an instance of the category "sites for collaborative learning." As the
author points out, the relationship between these views is theoretically
complex and requires an analysis "not only of the dynamics of cognitive
development but also of the ecocultural patterning of literacy events."
Further, collaborative reading may not represent the literacy practices of
all groups and, when combined with psychological considerations of learning
transfer, would significantly affect decisions as to how the library setting
might best be configured.
II.(A) When considering the interactional complexities among structural
levels, the author comments that the double-sided nature of much of the neo
-Vygotskian terminology can lead to exaggeration of analogies. Using Tharp's
account as an example, he notes that treating administrative practices as
isomorphic "qua" activity settings with the activity setting of the classroom
does not bear up well to close scrutiny. For example, the accountability of a
school system to a legislature "is an institutional relationship quite
different from the negotiated, interpersonal accountability some
schoolteachers feel toward the parents of their pupils." In turn, Wertch,
Tulviste, and Hagstrom's repeated assertion that the form of intramental
cognitive processes is structured by their intermental, social precursors
does not clarify what in the interactional aspect of discourse makes this
work; why does the interactional form allow some to appropriate the tools and
not others?
The author posits that "the processes of change in sociocultural arrangements
are controlled by a different set of variables from those that impinge
directly on psychological change in the context of instruction or ontogenetic
development" (p.365) and further that the differentiation of language
varieties within a speech community has social and political dynamics
distinct from an individuals bilingual repertoire. "What children internalize
is not a fixed set of context-bound behavioral routines but, rather, a
differentiated set of semantic resources whose connotations are defined by
their location within the web of associations. We can think of these
resources as tools but they are constantly being deployed in new ways."
II.(B) The author acknowledges that understanding the behavior of a
schoolchild requires that analytic priority be given to definition of
activity but that "task demands and scripts are only seldom fully determined
in advance of the activity itself" (p366). The motives and purposes of actors
appear most salient to him, at least initially, and largely account for the
behaviors that occur. These in turn create the web of meaning that informs
(not determines) the interpretations of each participant and, as interaction
proceeds, the task demands and script become defined by negotiation. The open
-ended creativity of individual behavior within a set of constitutive rules
assures cultural change and the mutual interdependence of individual mind and
sociocultural system pose two complementary paradoxes of cognitive
development:
"1. As the individual's mind develops, it becomes increasingly powerful by
virtue of a growing stock of cognitive resources. Yet ipso facto it also
becomes increasingly committed to that particular way of thinking which is
shared among members of the sociocultural group from which those resources
were learned.
2. As the child develops toward adulthood, the sociocultural group that takes
responsibility for her socialization and enculturation strengthens its claims
on her as a member through an increasingly internalized awareness of her
obligations to conform with social and cultural norms. Yet this shift of
emphasis toward internal self-control is precisely what enables the
individual to legitimate her nonconformity." (p.366)
The author's resolution of these paradoxes is centered first upon the
assertion that society values its innovative members most highly and
therefore psychological empowerment through cultural commitment is possible.
As well, the need for society to tolerate nonconformity in the young arises
from the fact that assigning the young responsibility for participation is
also the most effective device for recruiting them.
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Comment:
Robert Serpell raises I number of points, some of which I am not competent to
address, but he seems generally pleased with the symmetry breaking
possibilities inherent in the sociocultural approach. He also expresses a
number of reservations, some of which seem to be: a) the degree to which
views of the "two-sides" of the interface may simply be incommensurate; b)
the degree to which embeddedness in its multiple incarnations may connote
degree of coupling and, by extension, the degree to which sociocultural
systems could be said to be deterministic (or perhaps lacking in an
explanation of individual variance); c) the rather shaky basis for the
assumption of isomorphism across organizational levels.
Rolfe Windward
UCLA GSE&IS
ibalwin who-is-at mvs.oac.ucla.edu (research acct.)
rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu (personal acct.)