Reducing activity theory to politics
Mike Busch (Michael.Busch who-is-at utoronto.ca)
Mon, 2 Feb 1998 02:38:39 -0500
I'm not quite sure if Robert is introducing himself to XMCA or just
making a political statement. Nonetheless, his statement is timely and
raises an issue that recently came up in one of my classes "Language
Planning and Policy." Robert's message also relates to last week's comments
from Martin Packer about school bashing on XMCA.
In my class on language planning and policy (LPP), several of the
readings refer to ideology as a motive for LPP. Explanations usually center
on the premise that all LPP comes down to certain political groups using
ideology to bring about change in language use. As I sit through the class,
I can think of a wide variety of participants, beyond political
institutions, operating in an activity system of LPP with an equally wide
variety of both tools and objects/objectives/goals. LPP is not just a
top-down system of activity and neither is education. Unfortunately for
those who work in LPP, they focus almost exclusively on political
institutions at the expense of not seeing (and understanding) other
participants at work.
An example is a case study we read for class dealing with the
gender form of words. That people in Western society have made a personal
choice to use "Ms." or "policewoman" was not a decree of a political
institution, but a grassroots effort on the part of many participants,
mainly individuals, to change the way society portrayed women in language.
Another example is the re-emergence of Hebrew in the 20th century as a
language used in everyday life. One could describe the oppression of the
Jews in Europe as a background for the Hebrew revival, but again the
language policy was not initiated by a political institution, but rather a
handful of people living in Palestine whose object was to create ethnic
identity and cohesiveness.
Similar to the articles that link LPP to ideology, what I find
difficult to accept about the school bashing on XMCA is the interpretation
of the object of schools and education in general solely in terms of power
relations. It is limiting and ignores the richness of social interaction.
In activity theory there are multiple participants with multiple objects.
Are the tools and objects of all participants ultimately power? This sounds
like a Darwinian theory of competition for survival. You either have power
or you're oppressed.
I don't believe that activity theory is ultimately about
identifying and casting off the dominant ideology found in human
behavior/development. Ideology is only one of many tools and objects.
Robert's statement that "all education is political" is reductionist,
reducing education to politics.
Another thing I find bothersome about those who profess the
power/ideology line is the use of all-or-nothing rhetoric about the state
of schools today. (To quote Robert: "whereas some are critically aware of
the politics, others operate as "intellectual dupes...") I'm reminded of
the 1960s slogan "You're either part of the problem or part of the
solution." While this kind of either/or ultimatum sounds good in the
movies, the real world has a lot of gray which is extremely hard to sort
out.
Mike Busch
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
>I am a firm believer that all education is political and, whereas some are
>critically aware of the politics, others operate as "intellectual dupes" to
>quote Crichton, implementing the invisible politics of others. As the
>saying goes, the last thing a fish would discover is the water in which it
>swims. A similar notion by Kinneman is that "Perhaps the greatest obstacle
>to school reform is the fact that we all went to school." I anchor my
>discipline in critical pedagogy and constructivism, which problematize the
>politics of education, the ideological issues and a shift in focus from
>teaching to learning. I agree with Giroux's call (1988) for teachers as
>intellectuals rather than as technicists and support Paulo Freire's notion
>of teachers as cultural workers. I also feel that reductionist approaches
>to teaching and learning are unnatural and ineffective and therefor would
>argue for integrated learning experiences anchored in the contextual
>realities of learners. Through my own research and scholarship I have come
>to the realization that the politics of education is most evident in the
>mechanisms used to reproduce the status quo which have produced a
>one-size-fits-all educational system as the dominant paradigm responsible
>for the academic assasination of far too many children almost by zip code!
>As Chomsky has asserted "class" is still a four letter word in the
>vocabulary of those who benefit from the way things are. I am an advocate
>of bilingual education because I have found learning a second language is
>an excellent way for people to discover the water in which they swim. I
>find political meaning in the acceptance of the paramount failure to teach
>foreign languages in America.