In 1987, I was an undergraduate in Communication at UC San Diego, maybe a junior
in college...I was experiencing college as something of a long shot--I had come
from an inner city high school and was one of two children of a young widow who
was struggling to keep her family together. My mother was an employee of UCSD
medical center,
a medical transcriptionist who was working her way up in the organization from
having taken home dictation tapes as piece work to actually working in the
records department and getting on the bottom rung of the middle management
track.. I also worked, and had a combination of financial aid and student
loans. UCSD was the only college I applied to--it was local and my mother
worked for the "company" so to speak. When I was a girl, we drove up to the
campus on the weekends and walked around and my mom said that I was a smart
person and that people would pay me to go to school if I did well--I could go
to school here one day. When I made it to UCSD, I did not find many other
students I could relate to--they all seemed to take being in college for granted
and did what seemed to me to be outrageous and daring things--with video, art,
taking classes that could not possibly be safe and lead to jobs...I declared a
Communication major because there was a lot of reading and it seemed to take me
everywhere--it was a true liberal arts and humanities feast. It was a long
time, though, before I felt like I was doing anything but escaping from my
background with all of those delicious books.
I managed to take a few courses with faculty members who were in one way or
another interested in work--images of work, labor history, changes in technology
in work places, and I was hooked. This semed a way to connect being in college
with where I had come from--a family where working and not working, labor
conditions, gender, and valued and non-valued skills, events and non-events
that mark development were topics of daily conversation. The approach I was
exposed to in this unusual Communication department was about transformations in
workplaces and looking at adult development through the lens of experiences that
showed the connection between the workplace and the lifeworld.
Yrjo Engestrom joined the faculty very shortly after,(in my memories of this
time) and I took a course with him that provided an introduction to
developmental work research. I read his and Ritva's piece on studying the work
of cleaning people and I knew that I would love to be a researcher of this kind.
I did a little work with Yrjo and he led me to Mike Cole and exposed me to
LCHC's projects, right around the time of Glasnost, and to the group of amazing
people that have been in and around the lab developing CHAT in all of its
avatars, and I have been in that orbit ever since, doing this and that. My
Ph.d thesis on the collision between communities of practice using
manual/film-based/analog photography practices and the advent of digital imaging
in the arts was nurtured in that unique place, by those good people. I have not
explanation for the phenomenon that happened to me the first time I read
Learning by Expanding. It simply made clear sense to me, it had a lot of
explanatory power and potential as a tool. I have never run out of questions
about the ideas proposed in the book but it made quite an impression on me and I
never out grew it in the way that I found myself falling in and out of love with
various fashionable or trendy theories. It had a lot of deep resonance or
sticking power. Does anyone know what I mean?
Katherine Brown.
Stetsenko, Anna wrote:
> In 1987 I was working at Moscow State Lomonosov University. This was clearly
> a transitional time - from the years when Leotjev's activity theory was a
> dominant framework (at that particular institution) to the times of a
> theoretical diversity which actually often turned into a vacuum. I was
> working on the topic of language development from CHAT perspective and
> thought that the whole world already knew what Vygotsky and Leontjev's
> theories were all about. (after all, their works were translated already!!
> so I thought). That is why, I believed that there wasn't much point in
> repeating anything they had said (or in interpreting it) and that one
> should, instead, just move ahead and develop the theory further. Well, with
> time I learned that the broader context matters and that things are done one
> step at a time and that the horse cannot run in front of a carriage (is this
> the right expression in your exotic - for me - English language, Diane?).
> That in order to move ahead and to be able to communicate what this is
> about, one needs to each time start from scratch and reconstruct the whole
> foundations from which one intends to move on...
>
> This was an exciting time of perestrojka and glasnost (who now remebers
> these words?), the time when old ideological controls were almost gone but
> the new - monetary ones - were not yet there. (perhaps the only time of
> almost complete freedom I ever knew). Hence, the first opportunity TO SEE
> THE WORLD - Hungary, wow! Budapest, wow! Looked like a wild West to me. An
> international conference on history of Psychology took place in 1987 in
> Budapest (CHEIRON), with couple of nice talks by some nice people interested
> in Vygotsky (van der Veer, Ratner, Nagy). I was shocked to find out how
> different the worldviews of people can be just because they live in another
> part of the world. Different on everything - on past and present, on
> politics and history, psychology, and of course, on Vygotsky. Well, this
> shouldn't be a long story so I should stop now.
> Anna
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Cole [mailto:mcole@weber.ucsd.edu]
> Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 3:31 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: early cultural psychology
>
> Douglass Price Williams was one of the first people i know to start using
> the term and there was an article by Toulmin on this topic. Perhaps
> Douglass's book, which consisted of several articles, was what Dianne
> was htinking of.
> mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 01 2001 - 01:01:20 PDT