This conversation is moving too fast for me! Every time I feel ready to
contribute, somebody throws in another variable! What a great debate, and
very valuable for me. So here is an ill-formed contribution from a bear of
little brain.
There are four points that I feel I have something to say about.
1. The semantic point about the meaning of 'motive'. It seems to me that
there are three meanings floating around this debate:
(a) there is the meaning relating to an individual's reason for taking some
action, which seems to be always related to the individual's acting on the
environment in order to satisfy a fundamental need;
(b) there is the meaning - perhaps technical in nature - relating to how we
might define the collective object of an AS;
(c) there is a meaning - a misuse in my view - which actually describes the
actions which the motive engenders (e.g. 'working for wages' is not, in my
view, a description of a motive. It is a description of action taken in
response to the imperatives of a more fundamental motive.) This seems to me
to commit the error of mistaking the symptom for the condition.
2. Earlier on in this debate I began to be concerned about the metaphors
being offered to describe AS's meeting one another. 'Bumping into one
another', 'laminated', and so on. All of them left me dissatisfied because
they involved conceptualising the systems as interacting, maybe becoming
integrated, but still retaining separate identity. But how can such
metaphors satisfy the mingling that occurs? The intermediation? the
remediation? and the resulting reframing of the whole AND the parts? So my
metaphors are to do with the confluence of rivers, the slow mingling of
waters and the possible subsequent division into channels further
downstream.
3. It also seemed to me that some contributions too readily took at face
value a 'difference' between systems, which was no difference at all at the
level of fundamental motivation, but rather a manifestation of the Babel
like characteristic of intersubjectivity - people describing the same thing
from different perspectives. For example in the 5D at the Solana Beach Boys'
and Girls' club the children arrive to 'play', while the UCSD sponsors of
the project have created an environment for 'learning' which is tacit rather
than explicit. Why do the researchers have to indulge in this benign deceit?
Both 'playing' and 'learning' have the biological function of creating
Nate's "increased potential for acting in the world". The distinction is a
cultural-historical construct, and so requires a reframe in a 5D site. So
the ACTIVITY is framed in different ways by different voices, but the
ACTIONS are seen as legitimate regardless of the frame. But this difference
does not represent different systems.
Which creates all sorts of nice paradoxes. Things which we call 'playing'
are not acceptable in the institutional AS we call 'school'. So actions
which look like playing must be eliminated or disguised, regardless of
whether or not they might be useful for the culturally defined object
'learning'.
4. For me to make sense of this debate I need to think about the complex
inter-relationships between individual and collective motivation. Once again
looking inside 5D for an example. From my advance reading prior to my visits
to sites, participating children, undergraduate WA's, and university
postgraduate researchers, were being co-opted to a collective activity in
which each group of stakeholders had the same motive (to learn something)
but with different symptomatic objects (to publish research;, to gain a
course credit; to get to Level 9 on the software programme). The genius of
the design was, I understood, the way in which a single activity integrated
the different objects of the participants within a single set of collective
actions.
But when I visited sites I saw meta-level things going on which I had not
been able to understand from the advance reading. There were many
undergraduate WA's for whom the reason for being there had transcended the
initital professor defined object which had brought them there in the first
place. They were genuinely engaged with activity of working with the
children for reasons of personal satisfaction and reward which had nothing
to do with getting a course credit. They had moved from an inner directed
motive (increased potential for acting on the world as measured by success
in higher education) to an inward/outward directed motive (increased
engagement with the world as defined by the increased feeling of well being
and self worth obtained by being instrumental for the children in the ZPD).
So it appeared to me that there is a kind of ZPD of motives which I might
define as follows: In an AS the collective motive is a motive of greater
worth than the sum of the individual motives of the members of the system.
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 01 2001 - 01:01:09 PST