Dear friends, lurkers, and newcomers --
It's nice to be missed! Not so nice to be too busy with too many mundane
chores to make the time to join in more often.
This and my last posting here both came while recovering from bouts of flu.
Enforced leisure?
My chores come from juggling the human and institutional complexities of
creating something new. Is it true that institutions have developmental
trajectories, growing more resistant to structural change as they age?
seems to be so, and may raise some interesting questions about how to
conceptualize both institutions and development.
Of course I have also been saying yes too often and writing too much, and
will be soon again back on the conference circuit. All enjoyable parts of
performing my identity, and maybe contributing to others and to worthy
projects.
I've just skimmed about 2MB of xmca messages, by people and by topics, from
the last month and a half. I kept three:
1. The Bergson quotes on time -- a growing interest of mine, backburnered
since grad school, to find alternative conceptualizations to universal
clock-calibration notions of time and which are useful for what, now
stimulated again by reading Michel Serres (in his autobiographical
interviews with Latour, best book I've found of late, though Haraway's
Modest Witness is also very useful).
2. Mike's recommendations of people who can talk about human behavior and
genetics without curdling my lunch.
3. And this posting (below) from Julian Williams that addresses a growing
concern of mine about heterogeneity and research method/setting. Before I
wander around in thoughts it raises for me, I want to thank Julian and ask
him to tell us (or me) more.
Mike replied to Julian and noted with modest indirection the similarity to
his longstanding concern with what I will call 'mixed settings' as well as
the Scribner line of research descent, and Yrjo's and what I think of as
the Scandinavian CHAT and work traditions. To me all these very fruitful
lines of work have two important concerns in common (the origins of the
commonality are traceable of course).
First is the intersection of activities or institutions in ways that
potentially create new institutions or reveal interesting things about the
A's and I's brought into intersection. Someone (I skimmed fast, sorry)
recently wrote about trying to use Yrjo's triangles to analyze relations
among institutions/activities. Far back somewhere also, and recurrently,
have been what I think of as Bazerman's (not uniquely) conundrums about
genre-clusters, and a link (jump with me) to Leigh's boundary objects. How,
fundamentally, do we discuss and analyze relationships between
institutions? between different activities that we take to belong to the
same institution? activities that link across institutions? rels between an
activity in one institution and another in a different institution that
somehow are relevant to the larger-scale interdependence between the
institutions? If you want to think of institutions as just congeries of
activities, perhaps with some sedimented structures to function like body
and memory, fine. Mike has a concern with sustainability of new
institutions, but I think he'd agree that new institutions that are at all
tenable are emergent organizational phenomena arising from the affordances
of prior institutions and activities, once they become linked in a certain
way. Bazerman (and I long ago, but not developed much) asked how genres,
viewed as activity schemas or the products of generic or typical activity,
that were very different formally from one another, were yet functionally
articulated with one another because of their roles in larger
institutions/activities. A large body of work and school, or life and
school, research, such as in the Lave model (or even Shirley Heath),
including Yrjo and much of that lineage, tries to articulate the gaps
between activities with similar functions in different institutional
contexts or different functions in the same one. Gaps and bridges,
contradictions and linkages. Just what Julian is interested in.
Second, none of this makes any sense without a fundamental focus on
heterogeneity. From AFC Wallace (at least) we have available to us the much
more useful view of communities or cultures as systems that articulate
across differences, rather than what I think of as the rightist view that
communities cohere because of shared values and practices. (That's the
least of it; we stick together because we need each other. We need each
other not just to multiply similar efforts, but because of what we can
build out of our collection of distinctive talents and experiences,
individual-wise and category- or group-wise.) What makes the 5thdimension
really unusual, for me, is that it has evolved sustainable (more or less)
ways of bringing undergrads, grad students, researchers, and school kids
after school together in coherent activity, across the heterogeneity of
their respective (developing and changing) projects, articulating (with
difficulty) among the interests of different institutions unexpectedly
joined in new ways. Genuine emergence of new social organization, with
built-in ways of studying and describing (some of ) what's happening. (Mike
shouldn't read this parenthesis, but it's a really brilliant fusion of
object/medium and method.) It's an emergence of articulated activities
whose participants are heterogeneous in ways that run contrary to the
normal disjunctions of the larger social system (cross-age, cross-class at
least), and who are also having to reconcile role-participation in 5D and
their other institutional activities (e.g. as students). Even where the
emergence fails to occur stably, we can look at why, and compare to similar
cases which succeeded more. (Latour's Aramis is a detective story on much
the same themes, but from an externalist viewpoint, while 5D affords an
internalist one.)
Chuck B. looks at how social articulation across heterogeneity of
participants and activities happened historically. I think the genre
clusters idea came in his work on Edison or the related work on patents.
And all the work on home and school, school and work, even (when done fully
reflexively) on university-research/ers and any/all of the above -- all see
both the gaps and disjunctions, the reasons why activities and roles and
participants very heterogeneous (and I don't even include Latour's nonhuman
participants yet) do and don't manage to get articulated into emergent
dynamical social organizational systems/networks.
Long ago there was a simple paradigm in my corner of physics: interact A
with B and you will learn: when and how they do or don't make AB, but also
a great deal about A (or A as it behaves around B) and B (as it behaves
around A). For a long time now progressive social science has largely
eschewed this 'experimental' paradigm; we have done finer and finer
description of naturally occuring patterns of activity. It's not enough.
Not enough to understand how anything changes. Not enough on which to base
a dynamical theory of development, change, emergence, evolution. Once a
dynamical system has become sedimented, stable or meta-stable, found its
attractors, then the dimensionality of the space of possible behaviors
collapses from high to low. Without information on those other dimensions,
those alternatives, those might-have-beens and might-not-have-beens, our
observations of what-is will never be enough to understand what could be next.
Julian notes that his group has found itself in a 'rare situation' where
'students' (and everybody else, too!) can 'live out' the contradictions
(disjunctions, heterogeneities, articulations) of school-math and
workplace-math (and researcher math practices and meta-practices). There
was some talk here lately about 'authenticity' (in the writing context, I
find this a euphemism in place of naming what's really going on in the
'inauthentic' situations) -- but how do we produce authenticity? something
can be authentic only within some context, some set of practices that
distinguish the inauthentic, some institutional framing (ignoring for the
moment phenomenological notions of spontaneous and unique authenticity; I'm
just going for the typical here) ... the 'rare situation' becomes authentic
for (some) participants to the extent that there is a new emergent, a new
kind of meaningful activity that comes to take place for them. 5D succeeds
quite often at this level, it seems; it articulates kinds of activity
involving wizards, helpers, kids, etc. that don't take place without it
(and so also partly constitute it) as an institution. Not every way of
bringing together people who don't normally come together, to do kinds of
things they can't or wouldn't do without each other, emerges into new
typical activity-hood, much less a sustainable institution. Julian's rare
situation may be ephemeral; even so it may spawn some new kinds of activity
for a time. If it falls apart, the autopsy will be as interesting as a
record of its success, provided it got somewhere close enough for someone
to imagine what might have been that wasn't.
I am arguing, I hope it's clear, for more of this kind of bridging across
social disjunctions as a new research method in the human/ecosocial
'sciences'. It seems to me that it really is a new method, not a simple
transposition of prior research traditions (of course it has antecedents,
everything meaningful must). The trick of it is to imagine a situation in
which certain kinds of people, doing certain kinds of things, who do not
normally interact in these ways, need one another's differences (by
category if it's to become typical; I neglect uniquenesses) for an emergent
project. Probably one can't foresee the later shape of the new
activity/institution; it will emerge, develop, perhaps shift radically a
few times along the way. But to envision the kind of social-meaning space
where it could create a niche for itself. Across bigger differences in age,
class, ethnic and global cultures, disciplines, social divisions of labor,
genders and whatever else. NOT replicating the usual ways in which we
interact across these differences just to maintain our separateness and the
naturalized ideologies of the categorization/classification principles (as
Leigh richly expounds), but making our differences mean for us in new ways
... which will lead to changes under the old principles (hybridizations)
and changes in the principles that matter to us (at least their
activity-specific, maybe institution-specific saliences).
Finally, Julian asks about inferences from the new mixed setting back to
transitions between the old, fixed settings. Not how I would frame the
potential value here. The most specific value would be in seeing how school
could be different in terms of its activities and institutions, how work
could be, what people could make in the world and what conduces/affords
these possibilities and what mitigates against them, on different scales,
from face-to-face interactions of individuals to social structural
constraints on sustainability of changes or newly emergent modes. No one
likes the way our societies currently organize schooling or workplaces.
Both of these are likely to change radically in another generation or two.
There are broad new labilities in the intersections of technology and
economics that will affect these institutions radically. It is not a
question of optimism; it is a question of understanding enough about what's
happening and what could happen to frame viable new ideals (yes, with
antecedents) and negotiate pathways towards (not to, and they'll change as
we go) the best we can see from any point along the way. There is not much
point in detailed study of institutions for their own sake, or for the sake
of minor reforms to them, when the institutions themselves are unlikely to
last in relevant ways. What makes a great deal more sense is to try to see
'around them' to our possible futures. And I think a very good way to do
that is to look for, help create, participate in, describe and analyze new
articulations across existing heterogeneities.
Good on you, Julian, for mucking about in the research of the future! JAY.
At 04:48 PM 2/3/2000 +0000, you wrote:
>Hello xmca, from another lurker
>
>We too are researching the contradictions in school and
>workplace knowledge: in our case mathematics. We do this by setting
>up visits by College students to workplaces to observe/ meet and
>discuss the workplace practices previously recognised (by us) as
>'mathematical'.
>We are looking for:
>
>a) contradictions between the two activity systems
>'mathematics', as expressed in obstacles to mutual understanding
>between student and worker
>
>b) mediating tools/discourse which bridge the gap.
>
>We have come up with some ideas about how College mathematics has
>evolved historically into forms which make is inflexible to
>'transfer', and as you would expect aspects of workplaces which
>protect workers from failing mathematically... mostly useful.
>
>The problem which is worrying me is that we have set up a rare
>situation (I would not say 'system' or 'CoP') where researcher,
>student and worker share and discuss mathematics. We conceived of
>this as a semiosic research method in which the student might 'live
>out' the contradictions between systems by struggling to understand
>the workplace with their College knowledge, so a kind of
>problem-solving in which signs have to reconnect with new meanings
>might be voiced.
>
>How much can we justifiably deduce/conclude from this rare event
>about transitions between College and work?
>
>Any ideas?
>
>Julian
>
>
>
>Julian Williams
>Centre for Mathematics Education
>University of Manchester
>Oxford Rd
>Manchester, M13 9PL
>-161-275-3409 (fax 3484)
>You can visit my web page and see some recent papers on:
>http://www.man.ac.uk/CME/williamsj.htm
>
>
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------
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