AT as tool of challenge

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 05 2000 - 14:02:35 PST


I thought I would change the subject line of this thread as I become
more used to using the web page to recapture threaded discussions that
(sometimes) go awry because of headers and leontiev on internalization/
externalization didn't seem all that helpful.

To respond to the question in hopes that others will do the same.

What counts as evidence? I imagine the answer will vary from
one person to another on the list.

It is a dominant belief in my community that Latino children
are incapable learners. My colleague Olga Vasquez, using her
own supply of good sense and experience and the ideas of CHAT,
has built, collaboratively with community members, an institution
called La Classa Magica, where kids routinely succeed, where
indifferent parents (often participate).

It is a dominant belief in my community that community college
students are incapable of four college work. Using principles
of CHAT my colleagues and I at local Community Colleges have
constructed activity systems where the students do work that
must be considered good college work by the standards of my
my ultra ultra institution.

It is a dominant belief in many communities that the mental
deteriorization of the elderly, even in good health, is an
irreversible force of nature. The work of David Middleton
and others on creating activities where remembering and identity
maintenance are routine practices puts the lie to that common
belief.

It is a dominant belief of our educational establishment that the
use of African American English is antithetical to academic
literary analysis. The practices created by Carol Lee at the
U of Illinois in Chicago demonstrate that this is false and that
the use of AAE can be instrumental to literay criticism by
college student for whom AAE is their native language that exceeds
the quality of work routinely encountered at my ultra ultra
institution.

Is this what you have in mind? To me the answers open up more
questions than they answer, but that is probably a good thing.
Echoes on the earlier comments on whether the at in chat is
an abstraction with instrumentality only in academic chatter (!)
or with instrumentality in confronting the problems of our
local communities.
mike



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