Ha! Thought I might take Sunday off and give this (and you) a rest? A
day without work is a day without food.
There are some aspects of bringing these institutions together that have
been driving me nuts, leaving me to draw triangles on top of triangles,
changing the triangles to irregular hexagons and trying to overlap them as
I think about interpenetrating activity systems and become sorely tempted
to cry "Am I mad?" with Wittgensteinen intensity. So this is where it gets
up close and personal as I draw the boundaries of the 'grand system' around
myself.
While my interest is in the development of adults, as in other workplaces,
I have seen relatively little attention paid to this in schools -- except
with the division and concentration of labor that larger districts can
offer. Rather, the focus is on the development of the children. this
basic observation has been the key to shaping the project in synergy with
the work ecology of the schools. McLaughlin, in Little's "Teachers Work"
(1993) writes "students are the workplace 'context' of greatest
consequence" for teachers. Mmmm... what I think I have learned is to keep
the children's education the central object of our partnership, and so
Object has become something to expend energy on co-shaping and sharing,
and can be considered the shared vertex of the triangles, and around which
the triangles "pivot".
But they really don't pivot, you see, because we also share artifacts, and
divide the labor among ourselves in unstable ways. So the triangles start
to become six-sided creatures that don't align well unless they are warped
into more dimensions than are possible on paper. Trying to do so has not
brought any insights. Putting Object at the pivot point has been very
useful, however, because it reflects my realization of how the project fits
into the work ecology of the schools -- Lesley college generally does not
share the object of child development, but as a teachers college, concerns
itself with educating the workforce of the schools. Lesley college as an
institution does not participate in the same way that the schools do, that
among themselves participate in similar ways. Lesley primarily
participates through one faculty member and the project as a whole has far
less effect on the college system than it does on the children and adults
in the schools. but partially that is in the Object -- the children and
their development -- that is usually removed from the routines of the
college institution except as how I have been able to appropriate it
personally.
Tensions -- I hesitate to call them contradictions -- occur when there is a
misalignment of the systems' elements as they interpenetrate. I kept
banging my head against this when I was running a teacher-networking
project at bbn 5-7 years ago, and the goal of the project was teacher
development through the sharing across the internet of modeling tools and
practices. This was just too far removed from teachers day to day concerns
in relation to the object of student development in the schools.
Similarly, although the metco (inner-city bussing program) shares a similar
object in general form as the schools, but with a different emphasis -- on
desegregation, and subsequently differences in rules for interaction. One
of the districts in this present project expressed interest in making
changes due to differences in performance on the state testing -- what was
proposed conflicted with the metco rules of interaction that reflect the
differences in Object (i.e. how equality is conceptualized) between metco
and the district. I am finding this to be a tough area for my thinking
with the theory, and this is as half-baked as it gets. And I do not
understand many of the the differences in object between the district and
metco -- partially this is due to my developmental history as a white male
I suppose.
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 11 2000 - 14:04:08 PST