Phillip,
I agree with what you said about the classroom and how the terms don't
necessarily get at what is occurring in the students or teachers head.
One example, I was recently in a classroom (Kindergarten) where children
were doing journal writing. The logic of this practice was children would
explicitly examine various patterns of oral language in their writing. We
of course have fancy terms for this like emergent literacy, "non-standard"
spelling etc. One of the main aspects of this sort of activity is you don't
emphasize "standardized spelling" because what you want to do is have
students come to terms with the relationship between oral and written
language.
Well, one child was writing letters in a sporadic fashion, so I was curious
of what patterns he was transcribing. He then said something - oh I'm just
making up letters. For this particular child journal writing was a time when
you just randomely selected letters from the alphabet for about 15 minutes.
We can, and we often do make sense of such writing through theories of
literacy stages etc. For me an emphasis on activity and appropriation offers
a different lens in which to view what is ocurring. We have certain beliefs
about how children learn and organize the instructional environment
accordingly and students as well as teachers appropriate this activity.
For the teacher this child may still be in a literacy stage where the child
has not come to any sort of phonetic awareness of letters and sounds, but
for this child he sees the activity he was engaging in as that literacy
stage.
So, I think your right about needing to be in tune with what the student
teaches us, but that again is very much mediated by our beliefs as teachers.
For me appropriate - as in activity - gets at what is ocurring in both the
teacher's and student's head in the above example. In many ways it reminds
me of my son coming home from his Kindergarten screening and saying, "boy,
they really have stupid teachers at that school, they don't even know their
letters". The point being I guess is appropriation for me gets more at the
actual process that is ocurring in these examples than say internalization,
construction or various other terms. For me it keeps activity in clear focus
which usually does not occur when we approach children's unique ways of
learning from an inner-outer individualistic framework.
My sense is that while activity is not in ones head -something I go out and
construct- and in that sense predertimed, objective etc, students are also
not seperated from activity. I see it as getting away from the american
notion of the social, cultural etc taking on a form of superstructure.
Activity includes and incorporates the dialectic of the object-subject
relation. To use your example of teaching reading the experiences of
hundreds of students might influence (determine) the type of activity your
future students may receive. That may be good or bad - we don't have time to
reinvent the wheel with every child, but then there are also teachers whose
experience with teacher education and students from the 60's still determine
the type of activity current students engage in.
Nate
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