Re: [xmca] Luria's romantic psychology

From: Peter Smagorinsky (smago@uga.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 28 2006 - 08:11:58 PST


The context: We have read two books so far: the MCA seminal papers from
LCHC (Cole, Engestrom, Vasquez, eds) and Cultural Psychology. This has
established a theoretical framework for reading a set of journal articles
from two journals, Reading Research Quarterly and Research in the Teaching
of English, where the authors have used a sociocultural framework for
studying literacy issues. My effort has been to read a certain amount of
theory and then turn to journal articles for applications. The students are
early-program doctoral students, and I want to provide them with an
understanding of how a variety of people have interpreted some version of a
cultural psychology and the methods that follow from this framwork.

So, it's not a course that centers on theory/philosophy/etc. but one
designed to move into a fairly explicit analysis of how journal articles
are constructed in relation to their motivating theory.

Hope this helps to clarify,Peter

At 06:55 AM 3/28/2006 -0800, you wrote:
>Interesting, Peter. It would help a lot if your class would read the last
>chapter of Luria's autobiography where there
>is a fuller discussion of how romantic is being used. Have they done that?
>The answer takes us back to Goethe
>and Faust and the idiographic-nomothetic division in the humane sciences,
>the effor to over which, was one of Luria's life
>long goals.
>
>Happy to answer the best I can when I know a little more of the context, but
>Geothe and the idea of German Romanticism is
>certainly in the mix. The issue opens up into the entire logic of
>groupsXtrials random assignment experiments as tools for
>understanding human psychological processes.
>mike
>
>On 3/28/06, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
> >
> > This is really a question for Mike, but I thought others might be
> > interested in the response. My doctoral seminar is reading Cultural
> > Psychology (Cole, 1996). On p. 343, Mike describes Luria's romantic
> > psychology, in contrast with "classical" psychology with its laboratory,
> > cognition-in-the-head approach. But using "romantic" to describe Luria's
> > psychology seemed peculiar to us--with our humanities backgrounds, we
> > associate romanticism with individualism and a rejection of culture as an
> > influence that corrupts (see, e.g., Rousseau's Emile). So we wonder, is
> > there a different meaning for "romantic" that you are employing here? Is
> > this one of those infamous translation problems that we've often discussed
> > on xmca?
> >
> > thanks for any help or clarification, Peter
> >
> > Peter Smagorinsky
> > The University of Georgia
> > Department of Language and Literacy Education
> > 125 Aderhold Hall
> > Athens, GA 30602-7123
> > smago@uga.edu /fax:706-542-4509/phone:706-542-4507/
> > http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/smagorinsky/index.html
> >
> >
> >
> >
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