An issue from ISCRAT - A common language of discourse?

From: Phillip Capper (phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 14:32:32 PDT


Mike's invitation to post issues from ISCRAT stimulates me to raise one that
I came home worrying about. The first stimulus for this concern is echoed in
Mike's own initial post, where he writes:

" 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."

I, too, have found Leigh Starr's 'boundary object' concept useful. But in
our work before ISCRAT, and especially at it, I have found that in common
useage the term now bears multiple meanings that are not those that Leigh
Starr originally intended (or, to be more precise, are not those of my
interpretation of the meaning of the source document).

It transpires that when some people use the term 'boundary object' they are
thinking of objects like a fence. Others think of objects like a bridge, and
others think of objects like a river. Still others seem to assume that
Starr's use of the word 'object' is in the sense that Engestrom uses it in
the triangles, which is nowhere near what I understand it to mean when used
by Starr.

Coming to that last one brought me up sharp in another related direction at
ISCRAT. In presenting one of our papers in a symposium chaired by Yrjo I
realised that my use of the term 'object' in respect of activity systems was
not the sense generally intended by Yrjo himself. What is more Ritva
Engestrom's paper in the same symposium did not seem to me to use the term
'object' in the way that Yrjo had used it just five minutes earlier - but I
wasn't sure about that.

With the foregoing 'boundary experiences' embedded in me I quickly came to
perceive ISCRAT as a Tower of Babel. I noted dialogue after dialogue that
seemed to me to actually be semi-confrontational discussions (I change from
'dialogue' to 'discussion' deliberately) about terminology.

When I shared my observations with others I found that I was far from alone
in perceiving this. I tentatively understand this as the contextual
contradictions of:

(1) a community of many first languages built on source texts that were
originally written in Russian, then translated into many languages, and now
being variously translated again for use in a community whose working
language is English:

(2) an increasingly multidisciplinary community, many of whose disciplinary
technical languages have precise specific meanings for many CHAT terms that
are not the same as they are in CHAT or psychology:

(3) a community that has an increasing number of people in it who are
familiar with recent or English language sources such as Cole, Engestrom and
so on, but who only know Vygotsky, Leont'ev, Bakhtin, and so on through
secondary sources - not even the definitive translations into their own
first languages:

These contradictions are likely to become magnified at Sevillia in 2005 as
the newly merged organisation begins to integrate more with a large number
of people who have worked primarily in Spanish.

I have a suggestion for the CHAT community, or the ISCAR one at least,
coming out of all this. But first I make this post to see if others see an
issue here, or whether it is just me tilting at windmills (to draw together
cultural historical analogies from the geographical locations of the last
ISCRAT and the next ISCAR)

Phillip Capper,
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business Ltd. (WEB Research),
Level 13
114 The Terrace
(PO Box 2855)
WELLINGTON
New Zealand

Ph: +64 4 499 8140
Fx: +64 4 499 8395
Mb: +64 021 519 741

http://www.webresearch.co.nz



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