Re: What's new in classroom configurations

From: Paul Prior (pprior@uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 07 2005 - 13:45:30 PST


Picking up on Jay's comments on chronotopes and choice, I'd add in some
research we've been doing on college and beyond writers and how they
select and structure environments to support their activities. Part of
the message I take from this work is that people learn how to make and
weave together chronotopes to shape their own and others activities and
that histories of learning, inquiry, and action really don't live
inside institutional walls and roles.

See Prior and Shipka's chapter at:
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/

Paul Prior
Associate Professor, Department of English
Associate Director, Center for Writing Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
homepage: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/pprior/Prior/home.html

On Mar 2, 2005, at 9:38 PM, Jay Lemke wrote in part:

>
> Look a bit at how citizens of this age group and generation CHOOSE to
> learn when not in school. E.g. how they share tasks of learning to
> become expert players of computer and video-games (and for other
> activities within their own culture-realm, ignored by the curriculum
> and most parents). By and large they do want to play together, which
> is not seen as distinct from learning together. The learn/play
> distinction is itself fundamentally dysfunctional, as we have known
> theoretically at least since LSV and Dewey. While there are purely
> online collaborative groups, there are also usually face to face ones.
> There is the same kind of total integration of practice and learning
> that Lave describes for traditional apprenticeships, and which makes
> sense in age-heterogeneous (and competence-heterogeneous) communities
> -- but not in imitations of these principles in age-homogeneous
> classrooms.
>

>
> One could take, in a sense, two approaches to this. You could look at
> the chronotopes (space-time-place-pace typical dynamic patterns) of
> non-learning in failing institutions, to see how not to do it, and to
> watch the counter-chronotopes of resistance, appropriation, etc. Or
> you could look at the rarer examples of spontaneous
> learning/playing/doing communities (some of which might even occur in
> schools) and see what their chronotopic patterns are like, and how
> they come up against obstacles and barriers, and which ones they find
> ways around and how.



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