> In Cultural Psychology I offer up one empirical approach, a
> "mesogenetic" methodology focused on microgenesis, ontogenesis,
> and cultural-historical genesis of a particular activity system.
> Discussion of the book on xmca never got that far, so I am not
> certain of how people responded to that effort.
>
> I would be very interested in hearing from members of XMCA about
> research they are engaged in, or which they know about, which
> brings community and individual analyses together.
Mike, this fall semester I am doing research of teacher inquiry
where I'm using 'Cultural Pyschology' as a broad lens and Engestrom's
expanded mediational triangle as a narrower lens to inform my own
practice.
Just as 'rules, tools and labour' interact recursively through
subject, object and community, so have I found that the microgenesis,
ontogenesis and cultural-historical genesis interact recursively. In
fact, your figure 7.1 on page 185 providing a graphic representation of
prolepsis is a good example of the recursive nature
micro/onto/cultural-historical recursion, and has also been highly helpful
for me in understanding my research of my teaching.
I'm teaching a master's level class for an initial teacher
education program called 'Teacher as inquirer'. Like the mother in your
figure I had to look back to my past (knowledge and experience of teacher
as inquirer), imagine where I hoped the students of the class would be in
the future as a result of the class, and then my subsequent behavior. In
this case, one thing I decided to do was model in the class teacher as
inquirer, as a researched my own question (How do university students
acquire and construct an understanding of teacher as inquirer?).
In your figure 7.1 within the ellipse you have designated the
event of the child's birth. For my work, the ellipse represents the event
of the class. Within the class are multiple lives (ontogeny), multiple
histories of microgenesis - the 21 students and myself - and the meso
genetic (which isn't noted in figure 7.1), which are the activity systems
within the classroom, the other activity systems of the university, the
partnership schools in which the students are teacher candidates, and the
activity systems of the students' individual lives. All of these multiple
systems interact systemically, unpredictably, within particular
constraints so that patterns do over time emerge, is how I have come to
understand activity theory so far.
(By the way, all of my understanding of the recursive nature of
systems is based on reading Gregory Bateson's writings, and
Harries-Jones' writings on Bateson, and my own feelings of verification
when studying the figure on prolepsis and the mediational triangle of
Yrgo's and reading his paper on "Borderlands".)
A narration on a piece of the research -
Early on in the class I decided I wanted the students to write a
literacy profile - a history of how they acquired, used and identified
with the activities of reading and writing. As an example I handed out my
literacy profile and some class discussion was devoted to examining the
structure and themes.
A few weeks later, the literacy profiles were handed in. After I
had read all of the profiles, I did a taxonomic analysis (Spradley, 1980)
of all of the profiles. A week after I had handed back with profiles
(with, by the way, a single page typed response of mine for each student
about the profile - and I add this, because I had earlier discovered as
my own research progressed that the students highly valued lengthy written
responses from me about their work, which they identified as a change in
the 'rules' of university classroom discourse between students and
instructors, and has gone a long way for building 'situated learning' in
'legitimate peripheral participation' and has caused me to pay greater
attention to the 'rules' of activity theory than labour or tool.) the
class and I studied my taxonomic analysis.
This small narration demonstrates (I hope so, anyway) how
ontogenesis (the development of the student's lives) works with
microgenesis (the literacy profile / the individual origins of literacy),
interacts within a mesosystem - the teacher / student exchange in literacy
development.
The taxonomic analysis allowed the class and me to see both the
individual level of cultural-historical development, as well as the
community level of cultural-historical development. The was an activity
that also demonstrated an example of prolepsis - the teacher's attempt to
look at what s/he know from her past experiences of teaching literacy,
where s/he hoped to get them, and the student's individual experience
within those constraints - constraints also found within the classroom,
school building, neighboring community, etc. Further examples of
prolepsis were also found in the individual's life histories as they
participated - and in fact for the majority, resisted the educational
system.
So, while individual life histories of literacy seemed to have
their own idiosyncratic pattern, when looking at the histories of the
community of the class, larger patterns evolved, patterns that were
supported in some individual histories and patterns that were negated in
other individual histories.
The most interesting pattern revealed was that none of the
students in this community / classroom experienced their individual voices
being heard and/or validated within the educational system. It gave us
much to think about.
phillip