Not bumping but perhaps transducing

From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@lesley.edu)
Date: Mon Feb 05 2001 - 16:49:18 PST


Not so flippant tonight. Sometimes the nature of this particular theoretical/practical problem seems sisyphusal. Crawling out from under my rock and brushing off the dust. ahem...

The issue of how a collective people's actions bounded by a particular configuration of space, time, instrumentation, sociocognitive structures, goals, and so on, can influence that of another is something that has piqued my interest for some time, to back when I was involved in nsf projects that attempted interventions with schools. We had one project that involved teachers getting access to full internet connections with the idea that the richer (what i now understand as boundary objects) things that people could exchange would improve the formation of a system over one that did not offer such things rich things. The funny thing is that since it was a struggle getting the full internet connections going, one day I visited 5 schools and covered a couple hundred miles, with the purpose of visiting and seeing how people were doing, and helping them out. The teachers commandeered me, however, to carry software and other stuff to each other. Unfortunately, there was no preparation at that time to be a "boundary-guy".

What's useful about the triangular model is that one can think about how these categories of subject, artifact, etc. are involved in the formation of a system, and in the 'interaction' between and among systems (like between and among nsf-bbn-schools), the genetic stuff of one system being (sometimes physically) carried to another, and provisionally being taken up, being transformed and transforming to varied degrees in the process. The whole process begs some conceptual development of what influences this transduction, how it occurs, what conditions contribute -- something that really goes to the ecological bulls-eye of a matter that the concerns-based adoption model, focused on individual traits per se, misses by a M-I-L-E. Boundary objects are perhaps one piece of the puzzle. Looking at what can materially be exchanged between systems, people are another, but the processes of transformation must be necessarily different, given that people are different from things. Following is an anecdote that comes from a paper by Grossman, Smagorinsky, and Valencia, "Appropriating tools for teaching english". The paper addresses how the practices of progressive teacher education programs fail to diffuse into k-12 schools.

"The question of cultural history and its enduring relationships and practices needs some modification when considering the time-limited boundaries of some settings. For instance, during student teaching, two participants from one university program carpooled with a third student teacher to and form the school, a trip of over 30 minutes each way. This carpool had a well-defined duration and served a significant purpose within their teaching lives, but it had no life beyond the last day of school. We consider the carpool to be a key setting for these three women, who used the drive as a way to discuss many different aspects of their student teaching experience. In Sarasons terms, the carpool would serve as a created setting in which the participants needed to develop their own practices and artifacts to develop and sustain their relationships. The setting was not entirely discrete however, in that it evolved out of their prior experiences in the university program and, thus, inherited the conceptual vocabulary they had learned for teaching as a way to mediate their discussions about student teaching. They also generated new goals and mediational means to achieve them, some related to their personal lives outside of teaching. "

A vivid description of this setting might reveal the finer grain of the student teacher interactions and may indicate what of the university practices were attempted in the school, and how they were transformed in doing so, the school being a different ensemble of instrumentation, and not affording all the same actions as the university. What things are possible in the "intersection" of university and school, as materially enacted by the student teacher? How is this different (perhaps radically so) than thinking of mastery on the part of the student teacher as an individual? How is it also that the school, more systemically than the one classroom, does not take up the innovative practices of the student teacher, or even in the long term, of generation after generation of one student teacher after another? Why this asymmetry in influence?

-- 
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley University
29 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."]



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