Just back from a sabbatical semester in South Korea, I am resubscribing
to resume my sociocultural education. My 1997 edited book (with Tony Whitson)
_Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic, and Psychological Perspectives_
(Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, ISBN: 0-8058-2038-8)
started out as an AERA symposium with Jean Lave and Valerie Walkerdine,
and argues the need for a broadened theoretical base to rival the richness
of description of individualist psychology, but in non-dualist terms.
We argue that current formulations of situated cognition theory have
focussed too strongly on the individual within a unitary community of
practice, without adequate means to address the interstices of our multiple
identities. Influences in this work include Peircean semiotics and
neurological connectionism.
During my sabbatical in Korea I've had the opportunity to observe
and videotape elementary school mathematics classes, working with Korean
colleagues to understand cultural differences between typical (teacher
centered) and reform (student centered) classes in that country
as compared to in the U.S. In our work, we're using Paul Cobb's
"emergent approach" to coordinate psychological and social analyses of
classroom learning. This approach is informed, in part, by symbolic
interactionism, so recent influences include some of the American
pragmatists (Dewey, Mead).
A more general interest now is problems of educational reform
conceived as a tension between teachers importing new _practices_
into the classroom as compared to new _understandings_ of student
learning. As I am formulating the problem, learning theories tend
to start off with a relatively sharp insight into phenomena of
quite limited scope. As theorists try to achieve a more comprehensive
formulation, the theory tends to lose its clarity and to become quite
technical for non-specialists, including many teachers. (This is my
reading of Kuhn's work on paradigm evolution.) Perhaps,
then, an educational approach for teachers that focusses on
multiple clear theories is preferable to a focus on any one
comprehensive theory. The subtext is that _as educators_ we should
leave it up to teachers to resolve the contradictions and inconsistencies
between the varied insights offered by behavioral, constructivist, and
sociocultural theories, rather than trying to provide a comprehensive
resolution. (Of course, _as theorists_ we may still pursue more
comprehensive theoretical formulations.)
Finally, I am still continuing my earlier work in the psychology of
algebra learning; though my explanatory frameworks have shifted from
the Chomskyan grammatical model (featured in my dissertation) to a
connectionist understanding of pattern matching.