Re: basic points of agreement

smagor who-is-at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu
Sun, 28 Apr 96 15:40:46 -0500

Mike, do you have a title yet for this one? I suspect a few of us will want
to read it.

Peter

At 11:17 AM 4/28/96 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Paul-- I dug up the following list of features that I abstracted from a
>discussion of different flavors of cultural psychology. It will appear
>in Chapter 4 of the book that Harvard is publishing this fall and is
>followed by seven chapters in which I develop a view that is a lot like
>Bruner's. What I have listed here, I see, is caste in a somewhat different
>way. As I said in my earlier note, I am sympathetic to Bruner's list. But,
>to take just one example, the notion of internalization is eschewed by
>many who believe themselves to be socio-cultural-historical-etc
>psychologists.
>
>The common features common to the folks whose work I review is:
>- Its emphasis on mediated action in a context
>- Its insistence on the importance of the "genetic method"
>understood broadly to include historical, ontogenetic and
>microgenetic levels of analysis
>- It seeks to ground its analysis in everyday life events
>- It assumes that mind emerges in the joint mediated activity of
>people. Mind, then, is in an important sense, "co-constructed"
>and distributed.
>- It assumes that individuals are active agents in their own
>development, but they do not act in settings entirely of their
>own choosing.
>-It rejects cause-effect, stimulus-response, explanatory
>science in favor of a science that emphasizes the emergent nature
>of mind in activity and that acknowledges a central role for
>interpretation in its explanatory framework.
>(Both of these points are ways of talking about constraints)
>- It draws upon methodologies from the humanities as well as the
>biological and social sciences.
>mike
>
>
Peter Smagorinsky
University of Oklahoma
College of Education
Department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum
820 Van Vleet Oval
Norman, OK 73019-0260
(405)325-3533
fax: (405)325-4061
smagor who-is-at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu
psmagorinsky who-is-at uoknor.edu