Re: Vygotsky as individualist

From: Peter Smagorinsky (smago@coe.uga.edu)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 03:00:56 PDT


I write as someone who has likely engaged in the conflation of Engestrom,
Wertsch, Cole, Vygotsky, Rogoff, Lave, et al. in the last few years. My
current reading in relation to new work has suggested the error of this
approach. Engeström & Miettinen explicitly mark some of these distinctions
in the introduction to Perspectives on Activity Theory: "In the current
wave of contextual and culturally situated theories of mind and practice,
two approaches are particularly close to activity theory. These are the
sociocultural theory of mediated action (Wertsch, del Rio, & Alvarez,
1995b) and the theory of situated learning, or legitimate peripheral
participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). " He goes on to distinguish these
related-but-different applications of Vygotsky in some detail, which I
haven't time to outline this morning. Worth reading if you're interested
in this thread, however, especially if you have lumped all
Vygotsky-inspired theorists together, as I have tended to do.
Also, the following from the same chapter speaks well to Gordon's points:
Activity system as a unit of analysis calls for complementarity of the
system view and the subject’s view. The analyst constructs the activity
system as if looking at it from above. At the same time, the analyst must
select the subject, a member (or better yet, multiple different members) of
the local activity, through whose eyes and interpretations the activity is
constructed. This dialectic between the systemic and subjective-partisan
views brings the researcher into a dialogical relationship with the local
activity under investigation. The study of an activity system becomes a
collective, multivoiced construction of its past, present, and future zones
of proximal development (Engeström, 1987).
Activity theory recognizes two basic processes operating continuously at
every level of human activity: internalization and
externalization. Internalization is related to the reproduction of
culture; externalization as creation of new artifacts makes possible its
transformation. These two processes are inseparably intertwined. . . .
         In the past, activity theorists concentrated mainly on
internalization of cultural means. Today externalization, the
transformative construction of new instruments and forms of activity at
collective and individual levels, has become an equally central theme of
research. (Engeström & Miettinen, 1999, pp. 10-11)

At 10:17 PM 5/1/02 -0700, you wrote:
>I have been following the discussion of the 'separability/inseparabilty'
>of the individual and the community(ies) in which s/he paerticipates with
>considerable interest. I had never imagined that one could subsume the
>individual within the social. Any visit to a classroom provides convincing
>evidence of the unique contributions that individuals make to joint activities.
>
>There are, it seems to me, a whole number of reasons for rejecting the
>inseparibility hypothesis:
>1) We are each conscious of ourselves as having continuity across
>different activities/communities of practice. That is to say, although we
>adjust to the demands and expectation of the particular activity system in
>which we are currently engaged, we are conscious of a continuing identity
>that is able to contribute in varying ways to different actiivity systems
>as a result of our previous experience.
>2) In any joint activity, it is quite evident that different individuals
>are able to contribute differentially, as a result of different life
>trajectories. If this were not the case, the common experience of a group
>being able to achieve more than any individual member would not be possible.
>3) Unless talk of 'individual agency' is empty, it is clear that the way
>in which individuals exercise agency is related to their unique
>trajectories of previous experience and the identities that each has
>constructed in the process.
>4) There can be no question of the separability of the different
>biological organisms who make up an activity system/community of practice,
>and it is these separate organisms who participate in the shared
>practices, including their idiosyncratic use of of various kinds of
>artifacts, both material and symbolic, that are collectively used in
>mediating the achievement of shared goals . While it is quite reasonable
>to talk of collective memory as a situated achievement, it seems clear
>that it arises from a joint construction based on the contributions of
>individual participants, whose memory is based on their individual
>experiences of particular events as well as of their interpretations of
>shared events in the light of their previous experiences.
>
> As far as I can see, none of the above emphases on individual life
> trajectories contradicts the fundamental tenet that individual
> development depends on the appropiation of values, knowledge and skills
> that are first encountered in joint activities, and appropriated and
> transformed from action and interaction with other members of the
> culture. But to give precedence to the social doesn't to my mind require
> one to reject the importance of individual modes of participation that
> can only be understood in terms of individual life trajectories.
>
>
>--
>Gordon Wells
>UC Santa Cruz.
>gwells@cats.ucsc.edu http://people.ucsc.edu/~gwells/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 27 2002 - 08:02:49 PDT