Personal examples, narrative schemes, crepe paper streamers, mathematical symbols - what is the common denominator here? All these are cultural mediators of human activity and cognition. Each one of them is a central focus of one of the articles in this issue.
The exhortation to "begin where the student is" has been a central tenet of activity-based approaches to education for the better part of this century. However, as Stanton Wortham points out in his examination of "Paiedea" or "Great Books" discussion methods, the use of personal examples as a tool for helping students to discover the meaning of texts runs the risk of sidetracking discussion into the particulars of the case rather than creating a link between the universal and the particular. Especially salient in Wortham's analysis is the tendency of participants to enact the events recruited by the personal example, undermining the analytic strategy that invocation of personal experience is supposed to facilitate.
How is the human experience of time mediated by language? Jens Brockmeier argues that we should move beyond debates and reformulations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism at the level of grammar. From the viewpoint of language in use, narrative is the key mediating device for constructing the experience of time. Brockmeier suggests that our everyday discourse is saturated with the use of narrative schemes which tacitly support and mold our conceptions of time. He calls the study of such forms of discourse cultural pragmatics of time.
Smokejumping is an activity that requires coordination between a number of human actors, technological artifacts, and natural forces under time pressure. Rick Jonasse uses the framework of distributed cognition, developed by Ed Hutchins, to analyze how such coordination is achieved in practice. Here the crepe paper streamers are used as primary mediators, and narrative interpretations as secondary mediators of collaborative cognitive and practical actions. Together they make possible a robust, yet flexibly self-adjusting process of coordination.
Guida de Abreu addresses recent decades of research on mathematics in school and community settings. She seeks to enrich past discussions by examining the values associated with different forms of mathematical representation to the narrowly cognitive aspects of mediation through mathematical symbol systems. Consistent with current emphasis on the ways in which mastery of cultural knowledge systems is intimately connected to the forms of participation in group activity, de Abreu uses the concept of social identity as key to understand the ways in which home and school mathematical practices organize children's mathematical problem solving. Her results highlight both the diversity among children's mathematical activities across settings and the disrupting effect of the high status of school mathematical practices on for children from low status families.
Together these four articles point toward the conclusion, formulated by Jonasse, that "any distinction between language, other shared artifacts, and activity needs to be drawn very carefully, for (...) all are tools for providing the common meanings necessary to make the concerted action possible." At the same time, Wortham and de Abreu's analyses remind us that mediational artifacts and the narratives of which they are a part participate in many different activities. This implies that whenever they are introduced into ongoing interactions, their polysemic nature gives rise to multiple possibilities for joint construction of next moments of the activity. Consequently, one cannot be confident that the semiotic potential that practitioners introduce into the activity may or may not have the desired consequences, depending on the mediational system brought to play in the interaction. In short, mediators have a tendency to run amok, distorting the ends toward which action is oriented.
Both of the books under review, Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave's Understanding Practice and Patricia Greenfield and Rodney Cocking's Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, address issues of central concern to this journal. Chaiklin and Lave's book reports on an important symposium held in the mid- 1980s which brought together many different traditions of work on context, activity, and practice to begin the task of seeking points of synthesis and conceptual growth. Greenfield and Cocking's book brings together an equally diverse and interesting group of scholars to address questions of culture and development among the various minority group peoples that live in the United States. Our reviewing strategy for the Greenfield and Cocking book was to call it a "review symposium" and invite several reviewers to comment. In retrospect, we should have done the same with the Chaiklin and Lave book, but we are still learning the trade.
Because both books deserve additional commentary, we invite readers who would like to contribute to the discussion to send along their comments for publication, including, of course, the editors of the two volumes and any and all of the participants. We will open a "continuing discussion" section as materials appear our doorstep.
Should American education focus on "the Great Books?" Neither side in the "canon dispute" looks closely at the relational side of great books teaching. To provide more information to use in judging great books curricula, this article presents a study of relational processes in great books classes. The results show that great books have both strengths and risks. The research focuses on how teachers involve students with the great books by connecting their experiences with the insights presented in the text. Among other devices, teachers use examples to establish these connections: the class explores some aspect of the text by discussing an analogous case from students' experience. This article describes how such examples carry a certain risk. These examples can lead students to experience the text so fully that they act it out. Instead of dispassionately discussing the text, students and teachers enact the roles described in the text and the example, thus creating an analogous interactional event in the classroom. This article describes and illustrates this interactional pattern, drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and analyses of transcripts taken from a three year study of high school English and history classes. In light of the findings, the article reassesses the pedagogical strengths and weaknesses of great books teaching and examples as pedagogical devices. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to:
This paper examines a segment of the activity of smoke jumping--the aerial deployment of forest firefighters--for clues as to how cognition is distributed among the participants. Unlike the cartesian paradigm in which actors are portrayed as individuals who send and receive messages, the collective nature of developing a shared vision of the environment is emphasized. A shared vision of the environment is vital to the success of the smoke jumping activity. It is achieved here through both the use of common reference points in the environment and through historically constituted artifacts designed for the sharing of visions. Thus, human activity can be seen as a collective, historical process. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to:
rjonasse@weber.ucsd.edu
This paper examines "time" as a category of the mind. I argue that to talk about time and temporality is to talk about the way a semiotic fabric web is constructed. In particular, I shall deal with the linguistic construction of our ideas and concepts of time. Two levels of analysis will be outlined. On the level of the general relation between time and language, I will deal with the issue of how different languages construct different perspectives of time. On the level of the personal construction of time, I will discuss aspects of the individual's time-synthesis. On both levels the suggested linguistic approach to time has less to do with the grammatical aspects of language than with language seen as a system of action and of interaction. In the wake of Wittgenstein and Vygotsky, this is a view of language as a cultural system of discursive practices. Among these practices, I shall focus on what has been described as the "form of narrative." Drawing on the analysis of an example of failed intercultural understanding, I will show that narrative works as a model of time; it constitutes a linguistic, psychological and philosophical framework for our attempts to order the diachronic dimension of our activities. To explain this view in greater detail, I will point out some techniques of the narrative "fusion" of different times, demonstrating that the form of narrative is not only the most adequate form for our most complex constructions of time (such as simultaneous scenarios of diverse times), it is the only form in which they can be expressed. As an outcome, language, and through language our concepts of time, appear as instruments that exist only in the uses to which individuals put them in this or that concrete context. Thus, the kind of study of time sketched in this article must be seen as part of a wider "cultural pragmatics" of time, a study which cannot be reducible to linguistic analyses; rather, the basic problem is that of cultural interpretation.
This paper examines how children experience the relationship between their home and school mathematics. First, it is argued that the current theory of culture and cognition provides a limited explanation of that relationship. In particular, it is argued that it fails to take into account (a) diversity at the individual level and (b) the valorization attached to forms of knowledge of particular social groups. Secondly, it is suggested that current social representations and social identity theory can offer a basis to reconceptualize that relationship. Finally, a study with school-children growing up in a farming community in rural Brazil, where home mathematics differs markedly from school mathematics, is described to support the above argument. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to:
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