Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal

Volume 1, Number 4, Fall 1994


Contents:

Introduction

The Primacy of Mediated Action in Sociocultural Studies:
James V. Wertsch

Developing Understanding of the Idea of Communities of Learners:
Barbara Rogoff

Immigration Without Adaptation: The Psychological World of Russian Immigrants in Israel
Alex Kozulin, Alexander Venger

Book Review:
Henrik Artman: Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations
Susanne Bodker: The Computer as Medium

Introduction

Editors

It is one of the benefits of publishing The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition for 15 years before undertaking Mind, Culture, and Activity that articles become recognizable as part of a long conversation in the lives of the authors. Jim Wertsch's early applications of Vygotskian ideas to questions of metacognitive development first appeared here in January, 1978. In April, 1978, Barbara Rogoff published an early account of her use of spot observation techniques to study questions of culture and cognitive development. The intervening years have been rich in interactions they have generously contributed to, and rich in historical changes in the contexts of those interactions. It is a special privilege to be able to publish recent expressions of the trajectory of their thinking in this issue.

Jim Wertsch's article on mediated action, like Arne Raeithel's article (Mind, Culture, and Activity, issue 1-2, 1994) on symbolic creation of society, is, properly speaking, not really altogether recent, having been written for a conference two years ago. It is all the more interesting that the future course of events has confirmed Wertsch's insistence that the enterprise of achieving a more powerful sociocultural theory of human nature will require a broad interdisciplinary effort.

Wertsch's choice of "Sociocultural studies" as a title for the enterprise invites extended discussion which we would be glad to see in the coming issues of MCA. The names one chooses to use do a lot of symbolic gesturing, and it is not always clear what is at stake. It is important to explore the common ground among related approaches, along with their differences.

Since Wertsch offers the work of Barbara Rogoff as a fellow advocate of sociocultural studies, it is especially fortunate that her article on communities of learners appears at the same time. A characteristic of theories that focus on mediated action as a unit of analysis is a tendency to present distinctions and linkages between actions and the activity systems (to use Leont'ev's term) which constitute them as a relatively faint or insignificant outline. The notion of a community of practice broadens the perspective. Yet, the theoretical content and dimensions of the concepts of community and practice are still largely unspecified. In particular, the idea of object- relatedness of activity, so crucial to Leont'ev and activity theory, presents a conceptual challenge to theorizing on communities of practice.

As Kozulin and Venger note, their study of the enculturation of Russian Jews into Israel is best considered a pilot study. Given the necessary element of arbitrariness in dividing consciousness into separate spheres, the emphasis of institutional consciousness among emigrees speaks volumes to the way in which the state apparatus mediated their everyday activities. The authors' analysis suggests homologies between processes of change that occur not only on the microgenetic and ontogenetic levels, but also on the level of entire national sociocultural systems.

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The Primacy of Mediated Action in Sociocultural Studies

James V. Wertsch

Clark University

After a brief overview of the reasons for using "sociocultural," as opposed to "cultural- historical," "sociohistorical," or some other term, it is argued that an adequate account of the agenda for sociocultural research must be ground in the notion of "mediated action." Drawing on the writing of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and other it is argued that mediated action must be unerstood as involving an irreducible tension between the mediational means provided by the sociocultural settings, on the one hand, and the unique, contextualized use of these means in carrying out particular concrete actions, on the other. In this view, any attempts to reduce the basic unit of analysis of mediated action to the mediational means or to the individual in isolation is misguided. It is suggested that by using mediated action as a unit of analysis the human sciences will be in a better position to address some of today's most pressing social issues.

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to:
James V. Wertsch, Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610-1477
jwertsch@clarku.bitnet

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Developing Understanding of the Idea of Communities of Learners

Barbara Rogoff

University of California, Santa Cruz

The idea of a community of learners is based on the premise that learning occurs as pwople participating in shared endeavors with others, with all playing active but often asymmetrical roles in sociocultural activity. This contrasts with models of learning that are based on one-sided notions of learning-either that it occurs through transmission of knowledge from experts or acquisition of knowledge by novices, with the learner or the others (respectively) in a passive role. In this paper, I develop the distinction between the community of learners and one-sided approaches from the perspective of a theory of learning as participation, and use two lines of research to illustrate the transitions in perspective necessary to understand the idea of communities of learners. One line of research examines differing models of teaching and learning employed by caregivers and toddlers from Guatemalan Mayan and middle-class European-American families; the other line of research involves a study of how middle- class parents make a transition from their own schooling background to participate in instruction in a public US elementary school.

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to:
Barbara Rogoff, Kerr Hall, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
brogoff@cats.ucsc.edu

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Immigration Without Adaptation: The Psychological World of Russian Immigrants in Israel

Alex Kozulin

Alexander Venger

International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Petential, Israel

This study examines new immigrants from the former USSR, their attitudes, expectations, and the awareness of change in themselves and in their fellow immigrants. Participants demonstrated attitudes toward the new society which differed dramatically depending on the sphere of life being examined: cultural, institutional, or quotidian. Participants displayed a tendency toward integration in the institutional and quotidian spheres, but not in the cultural. An attitude toward integration did not automatically lead to an awareness of change in the new immigrants themselves. Participants consistently reported higher degrees of change in fellow immigrants in comparison to themselves. The issue of preservation of self-identity through socio- cultural conservation is discussed, as well as the relevance of these findings for Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory and Feuerstein's theory of mediated learning.

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to:
Alex Kozulin or Alexander Venger, International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential, P.O. Box 7755, Jerusalem 91077, Israel, Tel: 972-2-391979

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BOOK REVIEWS

Henrik Artman:

Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations
edited by Gavriel Salomon

Susanne Bodker:

The Computer as Medium
edited by Peter Bogh Andersen, Berit Holmqvist, & Jens F. Jensen


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