Jan Lave
Teaching, as Learning, in Practice
Why pursue a social rather than a more familiar psychological theory
of learning? To the extent that being human is a relational matter,
generated in social living, historically, in social formations whose
participants engage with each other as a condition and precondition
for their existence, theories that conceive of learning as a special
universal mental process impoverish and misrecognize it. My
colleagues and I have been trying to convey our understanding of this
claim for some years (e.g., Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and I will
try to develop the argument a little further here. There is another sort
of reason for pursuing a theoretical perspective on the social nature of
learning. Theories that reduce learning to individual mental
capacity/activity in the last instance blame marginalized people for
being marginal. Common theories of learning begin and end with
individuals (though these days they often nod at Òthe socialÓ or Òthe
environmentÓ in between). Such theories are deeply concerned with
individual differences, with notions of better and worse, more and less
learning, and with comparison of these things across groups-of-
individuals. Psychological theories of learning prescribe ideals and
paths to excellence and identify the kinds of individuals (by no means
all) who should arrive; the absence of movement away from some
putatively common starting point becomes grounds for labeling others
sub-normal. The logic that makes success exceptional but nonetheless
characterizes lack of success as not normal wonÕt do. It reflects and
contributes to a politics by which disinherited and disenfranchised
individuals, whether taken one at a time or in masses, are identified as
the dis-abled, and thereby made responsible for their ÒplightÓ (e.g.,
McDermott, 1993).1 It seems imperative to explore ways of
understanding learning that do not naturalize and underwrite
divisions of social inequality in our society. A reconsideration of
learning as a social, collective, rather than individual, psychological
phenomenon offers the only way beyond the current state of affairs
that I can envision at the present time.
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Ann Shea Bayer
Orchestrating a Text Mediational View of Vygotsky
Instruction can create zones of proximal development. OneÕs
interpretation of VygotskyÕs ideas, however, would drive qualitatively
different instructional strategies. A text mediational view (Wertsch &
Bivens, 1992) supports the classroom as a place where the teacher
orchestrates joint activities which promote dialogic texts, allowing
students to use language as thinking devices to make connections
between what they already know and new concepts. This study
describes the authorÕs role in setting up such joint activities during
the first few weeks of a year-long education class. An analysis of this
video-taped course revealed two patterns in which the dialogic texts
took place. The first pattern called Òshared knowledge scaffoldingÓ
involved individual student writing and small group discussion about
what students already knew about the topic. Sharing similarities and
differences in a whole class discussion, the students and teacher
developed publically shared composite theories regarding the topic.
These early theories served as initial reference points as students
looked for connections to new information generated during ongoing
class activities. This pattern eventually disappeared as the semsester
progressed, but the resultant expanded knowledge base became ÒoldÓ or
ÒanchoredÓ knowledge, which students could now use as mental hooks
as they engaged in increasingly sophisticated activities involving
application of course concepts in new contexts. The author argues that
these two patterns, which underlie the joint activities, provided
students with the means to achieve enhanced levels of
intersubjectivity, thereby enabling students to increasingly assume
responsibility for their learning.
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Toomas Timpka
Cecelia Sjoberg
The Voides of Design: Discourse in Participatory Information
System Development
There is a lack of knowledge about how participation in information
system design is built in practice and, particularly, about the
interaction taking place within multi-disciplinary design groups. One
way to structure participatory design processes has been by the
introduction of rules for a Òdemocratic dialogue.Ó The purpose of this
study was to explore the dynamics of small-group design meetings in
which a set of rules aimed at leveling the possibility for access and
display of information were used. Starting from a grounded theory
method, a descriptive model was composed by the demarcation of three
voices. The voices of participatory design, practice, and engineering
were found to express the workplace context, the intentions and actions
of the participants, and the influences from the institutions involved,
which together constituted the design process. To be able to identify
links between small-group discourse and organizational change, a
framework for analysis is necessary which makes it possible to follow
social structures from the interaction in design groups. This study
provides the preliminaries for such a model.
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Gary Shank
If O-Ring Booster Seals Were Alive
The following article is actually a five piece work built around an essay
submitted to the Internet the week prior to the tenth anniversary of
the Challenger disaster. The article discusses the juxtaposition of
schooling and the Challenger disaster, and incorporates a collective
response of Internet scholars to the basic theme. In a brief
conclusion, the article is held up as a model for future sorts of
collective Internet and print scholarly joint ventures.