news from ISCRAT

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 09:38:15 PDT


I don't recall who asked for info from those who attended ISCRAT (Judy? Jay?)
but I would really like to hear from people about sessions they attended,
issues they thought important or stimulating, papers they think we ought to
be reading.

I allowed myself to get caught in too many threads of that context, having
participated in both iscrat and the sociocultural meetings and needing the
opportunity to meet face to face with collaborators from different parts of
the world. So I often had to be two places at once, which I flubbed pretty
badly. For example, I missed the business meeting because of a poster session
that was packed with people it was a rare opportunity to talk to and do not
know who the exec committee is or what was deciced. I screwed up a symposium
I organized because it ran over into another symposium I was supposed to be
commentator for on the (mistaken) assumption that it would be ok because
three people would not turn up. Two of them DID turn up, so I ended up
hurrying people who did not deserve to be hurried. Plenty of mea culpas to
go around.

But even if I had not been so screwed up, I would have had to miss a LOT
of symposia I really wanted to hear but did not. I assume the same is true
of lots of us who attended. So, below I begin to atone for my sins by
posting a summary of one of the symposia I did attend. It would be great
if others would do the same so that we can, collectively, get an idea of
what people found worth remembering. Overall, my impression that this was
an outstandingly high quality conference and I was very glad to be there
even if I was often in the wrong there!

Et Vous, xmcaographers?
-------
Investigating Practice in School Settingss: Making Sense of
School Leadership and Classroom Teaching.

1. Paul Cobb presented a paper on the various institutional settings
making the point that the settings in which teachers work co-
constitute their teaching practices. He looked not only at teachers
in classrooms, but leadership groups in schools and districts, drawing
upon notions of community of practice and boundary object. In line
with a comment made in a different symposium by Yrjo Engestrom, he
thought that he could better account for the dynamics of the formation
of communities of practice by invoking the notion of context as weaving
together, rather than as concentric circles. To get at the connections
between different communities of practice involved in math ed in the
community, he also found LStar's notion of boundary object useful.

In what seemed like a perpetual confusion on my part of where I was
supposed to be (often, it appeared in two places at once!) I came
late to this symposium right as Paul was finishing his talk, even
though I was the official discussant. Triple blush.

2. Lisa Boullian presented a paper for a group including Louis Gomez
and Laura Kwako on "Taking the reflective turn: find the sense in
local versions of an innovation. This paper I actually got to hear
and I found it fascinating on several grounds. First, as in our work
the authors insisted on the need to build in local control and adaptation
of reform efforts, in this case, the reform they call "Reality-based
Learning which create horizontal partnerships with institutions
beyond the schools and encourage the partnerships to come up with ways
to instantiate reality-based-learning that works for THEM. Each of
the cases presented involved very different mixes of solutions to
this challenge, and each seemed very impressive to me. I was
especially taken by the introduction of a concept referred to as
the "trust infrastructure" which, it was argued, was essential to the
success of the reform effort. Partly I focused on this because in
her dissertation research here at UCSD, Honorine Nocon has shown
how important trust building and maintaining activities are to any
interinstitutional collaboration and partly because the combination
of the terms trust and infrastructure in this way instantiates the
kind of ideal/material fusion that I believe so important to undersanding
joint, mediated, human activity. It caught me totally by surprise in
the pleasantest of ways.

3. Megan Franke from UCLA presented for colleagues Ihham Kazemi and D.
Battey on "Changing teachers' professional work in mathematics: the
evolution of leadership. She reported on a long term intervention
at an elementary school where her group developed a practice of
teachers coming together to talk about student mathematical work.
What was fascinating here is that the joint object of the activity
was actual student work, copies of which were distributed to the
group which then discussed what the students appeared to be doing
and how to develop strategies to overcome difficulties. I was
really impressed that they chose as the oject of attention the
content of student work and that this practice appeared so productive
that it spread, changing the practice of the school principle and
spreading and, most important, continuing for years after the
innovation was introduced. Like, wow! A sustainable, effective,
reform.

4. James Spillane gave an interesting talk in which (in contrast
with the previous two papers) leadership was institutionally defined/
assigned, which brought up questions of positioning of participants
in activities where leaders had preassigned roles and were positioned
as authorities. He argued that an AT approach allowed him to study
how the institutional structure was mediated by the actual situation
of interaction, allowing analysis of mutual transformations between
agency and control and linkages between macro and micro processes.

I don't know why Paul asked me to be a commentator on this session
but I was really glad to be there. In every case, the work was of a
scale and involved the integral use of concepts from a chat/socio-
cultural perspective that I had never encountered in such profusion
before.

Incidently, in all of the papers issues of power were present
and addressed in what I thought was a very useful way: the designers
of the activity were alive to the issues of power and constructed
their designed activities in such a way as to either problematize
it, or even more impressively, to use their awareness of its
corrosive effects on collaboration by designing activities which
distributed it.



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