Vygotsky conference abstracts
SMAGOR who-is-at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu
Fri, 29 Mar 1996 06:58:37 -0600 (CST)
REPORT OF THE VYGOTSKY CENTENNIAL
The Assembly for Research of the National Council of Teachers
of English held its annual midwinter conference at the Bismarck
Hotel in Chicago February 23-25, 1996. The theme for this year's
program was "A Vygotsky Centennial: Vygotskian Perspectives on
Literacy Research." The conference registered nearly 300 people
from around the world, including teachers and researchers from
Russia, Estonia, Brazil, Finland, and Mexico, plus a core of
registrants from the U.S. and Canada.
Following are abstracts of some of the papers.
Vera John-Steiner opened the conference with her Friday
evening talk on "Creativity and Collaboration in Knowledge
Construction." In her talk, Vera focused on the ways in which
interpersonal and intergenerationsl dynamics of knowledge
transmission and transformation are central to Vygotskian theory.
Vera said that while Vygotsky's theory and his own modes of work
exemplify complementarity, intellectual interdependence, and the
varied forms of synthesis, sociocultural theory has nonetheless
been criticized for being restricted to internalization and the
transmission model of knowledge construction. That is, even though
Vygotsky's conception of human development emphasizes the manner in
which people transform tools and their use through the process of
appropriation, some have found cultural theories to be
deterministic due to the replication of historic uses for tools
across generations. Vera identified an as-yet unresolved paradox
for sociocultural researchers to explore: If learning is achieved
through the internalization of concepts through the mediation of
cultural tools--thus limiting what we know to the frameworks for
thinking provided by our culture's historical modes of cognition--
how then do we create new ways of thinking?
In her talk, Vera discussed the lengthy and complex
transformations of joint experiences into novel constructions. She
used Einstein's relationship with mathematics as one example of the
productive role of complementarity in knowledge construction and in
modes of thinking. Through this example and others, Vera argued
that the mutual appropriation of domain specific knowledge and
modes of thought among collaborators is critical to creative
endeavors in science and in the arts. Vera challenged the idea
that relationships between learners and teachers (including "more
expert" peers) are necessarily hierarchical and downward flowing,
arguing instead that teaching-learning relationships instead
potentially involve mutual growth. To make this point, she
discussed patterns of collaboration in constructive processes--
including those that are distributed, complementary, family, and
integrative--and their relevance to sociocultural theory.
Anne Haas Dyson spoke on "Linking Writing and Community
Development through the Children's Forum." Anne discussed the ways
in which Vygotskian visions of child literacy have articulated the
ways in which children learn to write by interacting with more
expert others in culturally valued literacy activities. Linking
Vygotskian concepts with principals drawn from Bakhtin, Anne sought
to extend their visions by articulating the process through which
child writing is shaped, not only by interaction in adult-guided
worlds but also by the social and ideological dynamics of peer-
governed worlds. In her talk, Anne examined the social and
ideological processes that link learning to compose and learning to
be a member of a complex community of sociocultural differences
(i.e., those linked to gender, race, and class). As the basis for
her analysis, Anne drew on her ethnographic research in an urban
school that served neighborhoods differing in ethnic culture and
economic circumstance. The project focused on children's use of
popular media stories to participate in the official (teacher-
governed) school world and the unofficial peer world. Her data
collection centered on a classroom "free writing" period but also
included observations of recess time on the playground. At the end
of each classroom writing period, the children could choose peers
to act out their stories through an activity known as "Author's
Theater." To analyze the data, Anne identified (a) the social
processes that guided children's actions during composing time; (b)
the ways in which children's texts figured into those processes;
and (c) the ideological processes generated when those texts were
dramatized for, and discussed within, the classroom community as a
whole--that is, for the public forum. Case studies traced the
interplay among children's lives as peers, child writers, and
classroom community members. This interplay, and the social
ideological dynamics that undergirded it, linked learning to write
(i.e., to deliberately construct and manipulate textual worlds)
with learning to be a community member (i.e., to deliberately
participate in and respond to the social world). Anne presented
the evolution of two stories from child composing through Author's
Theater in order to illustrate the social and ideological dynamics
that linked children's more differentiated understanding of their
social worlds with their more differentiated understanding of their
textual ones.
Gordon Wells spoke on "Making Meaning with Text: A Genetic
Approach to the Mediating Roles of Writing in Activity." Gordon
looked at the role of writing as a tool in individual and cultural
development, adopting Vygotsky's four "genetic" levels of analysis.
Put very simply, he suggested, "the primary function of speech is
to mediate action whereas the primary function of writing is to
mediate recall and reflection."
From a phylogenetic perspective, writing serves primarily as
a sign, an artifact to preserve meaning for later reference. It
also brings the meanings communicated in speech to a level of
conscious attention and provides a medium in which those meanings
can be subjected to reflection, systematic analysis, and revision.
A somewhat similar perspective is taken by Vygotsky in his
consideration of ontological development. Learning to write
"forces the child to act more intellectually"; writing serves as a
psychological tool which mediates the ontogenetic development of
scientific, rational thinking. However, missing from Vygotsky's
account, Gordon argued, is any consideration of the way in which
the registers and genres of written language have themselves
developed on the cultural-historical level.
Historically, written registers and genres have developed in
relation to activity systems within particular cultures. As tools
that mediate cultural practices, they have recognizable,
functional traits, yet (1) are continually under development and
refinement, and (2) thus enable new forms of activity and ways of
representing and thinking about experience. Drawing on the work of
Halliday, Gordon provided an extensive illustration of these
principles through a historical account of the development of
scientific written English, arguing that written texts both
instantiate the genres that shape them and provide continuity in
the ways of thinking that those genres mediate. Furthermore, by
mastering the genres used in an activity system such as science,
people are able to appropriate the cultural resources--the semiotic
means that mediate the relevant mental activity, first
intermentally and then intramentally--and use them to construct
personal understandings. This appropriation is possible through
collaboratively interpreting and creating texts in relation to the
material actions that the texts construe.
To illustrate the microgenetic level, Gordon offered an
analysis of a literary text--William Golding's novel The
Inheritors--to show how writing is essentially a task of using the
register and genre toolkit to solve the content and rhetorical
problems involved in creating a convincing and aesthetically
satisfying text. Golding's novel pits two pre-historic tribes
against one another, one with greater facility than the other with
language and its capacity to enable the interpretation and planning
of events. Golding's problem as a writer was to find a way of
representing the speech and the associated way of construing
experience of the less advanced tribe; his solution was to create
a new register of English.
The novel also serves as an illustration of the
interdependence of all four genetic levels. In their efforts to
meet the challenges posed by the marauding actions of the
newcomers, the last members of the less advanced tribe begin to put
their limited speech to a new use in mediating deliberate joint
action. Gordon concluded that "In inventing a new mode of action
through a development of the mediational means, the participants
themselves are changed; and as they perform the new action on
subsequent occasions with other participants, and they with still
others, the new mode of action enters into, and transforms the
cultural repertoire as a whole, so that what is learned by new
members incorporates the developments that took place in previous
generations."
Following his analysis of The Inheritors, Gordon offered four
general requirements that apply to all occasions of making meaning
with text, if the activity of writing is to be developmental on at
least the microgenetic and ontogenetic levels: "First, there must
be an activity system and associated community within which the
writing plays a significant role. For the writing to engage the
commitment of the writer, the resulting text must be functional
with respect to the joint activity in which the writer is involved
with at least some other members. Second, it must concern a topic
in which the writer is interested and about which he or she
believes there is more to discover. And third, the writer must
care sufficiently about the aesthetic quality of the textual
artifact that he or she is creating to engage with, and find
solutions to, the problems that arise in the process of its
creation. Finally, the writer must be able to count on the
community to give help in accessing textual and other relevant
resources and in providing support and guidance as this is felt to
be necessary."
James Wertsch gave the closing talk of the conference,
"Vygotsky's Two Minds on the Nature of Meaning." Jim's reading of
Vygotsky has revealed that within Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky
draws on two different, and seemingly oppositional, theoretical
traditions to provide different accounts of the concept of meaning.
In Chapters 5 and 6, Vygotsky draws on the "designative" tradition,
one in which language functions primarily to represent an
independent reality. Jim located this tradition in the
Enlightenment, with Augustine, Hobbes, and Locke among its most
influential proponents. In this view, language and meaning are
concerned with referential relationships between signs and objects,
with a key process being one's ability to create abstract
representation for categories of objects. Through the use of
systems of decontextualized word meanings, people become abstract,
rational thinkers; meaning is thus a function of the relationship
between semiotic signs (e.g., words and word networks) and the
objects they represent. The semiotic potential of
decontextualization enables abstraction, and thus the capacity to
categorize, reflect on, and control the world. Jim associated this
view with the Enlightenment belief in human progress toward a
universal mode of rationality.
The second theoretical tradition affecting Vygotsky's
understanding of meaning is the "expressivist" perspective
articulated in Chapter 7. Jim grounded this view in Romanticism
and its emphasis on the process of speech production through which
"sense"--the implicit, condensed, private, psychological
associations made with a concept--becomes public and social. In
this conceptualization of meaning, the focus is on the activity of
speaking and its potential for enabling changes in consciousness.
In essence, the expressivist tradition focuses on psychological
processes and their role in human development. For the
expressivist, speech is thus mediational; for the designativist,
speech is representational. For the expressivist, speech is a
tool; for the designativist, speech is a sign.
In trying to resolve Vygotsky's seemingly contradictory
accounts of meaning, Jim described Vygotsky as caught between the
tensions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism that provided the
intellectual context for his (and our) time, and that therefore
provided the mediational means through which he developed his
psychology. Vygotsky was, said Jim, "a child of multiple,
competing philosophical heritages."
Jim's point in elucidating this conflict was to identify the
intellectual compromises Vygotsky needed to make in order to
account for human consciousness, given the cultural tool kit
provided by Western thought, and to argue that we all are both
constrained and empowered by the traditions of thought that our
cultures have developed to provide the context for our own
thinking.
Judith Green, LeAnn Putney, and Richard Duran spoke on "What
Counts as Literate Actions in a Bilingual Classroom: Exploring
Individual-Collective Development." The research, which took place
in a bilingual elementary school classroom, was conducted by two
groups: the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, a
collaborative that includes teacher-ethnographers, student-
ethnographers, and university-based ethnographers working with
linguistically diverse students; and a group coordinated by Richard
Duran that includes teachers, researchers, and community members
working with bilingual children. The goal of the research was to
explore how the integration of cultural-historical, interactional
ethnographic, and interactional sociolinguistic perspectives can
provide a direction for reformulating educational practices. The
researchers attempted to identify the norms and expectations, roles
and relationships, and rights and obligations of classroom members
by posing the question, "Who can do or say what, to or with whom,
under what conditions, for what purpose, when and where, with what
outcome?" To answer this question, the researchers studied the
language of the classroom, the cycles of activity within it, and
the intertextuality recognized and participated in by the classroom
members.
LeAnn presented data from the classroom that focused on
methods of data collection by students, teachers, and researchers.
Richard then used the research to speak more broadly about the
educational change movement in terms of a cultural historical and
constructionist perspective. He looked at definitions of
achievement, discussing how children's acquisition of inquiry
skills build progressively on the negotiation of what inquiry means
and children's ability to project or animate and compare
alternative points of view on what counts as knowledge creating
inquiry. Richard then discussed the ZPD as a socially realized and
maintained space for interpreting and guiding performances as both
acts and expectations, with activity systems created through the
ZPD serving as tools for creating cultural practices in the
classroom. Richard further discussed the manner in which teachers
identify evidence that children are achieving. In the research
presented, the children acquired the ability to write narratives
through historically-developed genres, thus illustrating a
constructionist view that human functioning is a creative semiotic
process of "coming-to-be" as sense making in socially embedded
fields of action. The teacher and students' use of Spanish and
English for the same communicative purpose illustrated both the
development of social agency of individuals, and the transformation
of the group. Richard concluded by posing the question, What will
it mean for children in schools to be exposed to new tools for
inquiry and social construction of communities based on access to
increasing contact and involvement through developing technologies?