As indicated by their titles, common to the feature articles in the current issue of MCA is a concern with the problem of learning. But the approaches taken to learning by the current authors are distinctly not those that one would find in the pages of leading journals in educational or developmental psychology. Rather, each can be seen as an effort to articulate approaches to learning as an aspect of participation in culturally mediated joint activity, considered in relation to its institutional and societal context.
Gordon Wells seeks to increase students'opportunities for learning by seeking to create what he calls "classroom communities of inquiry." A major challenge in evaluating attempts to create alternative classroom practices is to come up with analytic schemes that make it possible to compare practices across classrooms with respect to their interactional dynamics. Wells proposes an approach that combines concepts of activity theory (as promulgated by A. N. Leontiev and Y. Engeström) and the systemic functional theory of language developed by Halliday.
Deborah Hicks draws upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose ideas have increasingly been brought together with those of cultural-historical activity theorists. After providing a succinct summary of several Bakhtinian principles, Hicks uses them to make several interesting arguments, including: 1) cognition is best considered a form of dialogic inner speech in which thought and feeling are co-present; 2) every action is carried out by a unique "I" who performs it and thus, action is central to the creation of individual identity. Hicks then applies her reading of Bakhtin to the analysis of a storytelling event as a way of reinterpreting the issues involved in acquiring the ability to read and the impediments that result when working-class children encounter the literacy practices of the middle class school.
Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell are also concerned with learning in schools, but the "learning" in their title is focused on the difficulties that researchers face when they seek forms of pedagogy to combat sexism deeply embedded in social practices involving new information technologies. Suspicious of current accounts of gender inequalities that see technologies as already (masculine) gendered, Bryson and de Castell seek a way to conduct research that disrupts deeply held beliefs about gender, technology, and learning. They apply this tactic, as well, to the manner in which they approach their topic, offering readers an "anticipatory" stance that invites us to engage with them in seeking research strategies that can effectively re-mediate current inequitable theories and practices. To this end, the editors invite readers to join in a discussion of the issues they raise by subscribing to the electronic mail discussion group, xmca. To join, send a message to xmca-request@weber.ucsd.edu Leave the subject line blank with the single word "subscribe" as the body of the message.
In addition to our regular book review section, we are pleased to present a poem by Charles Underwood on the experience of fieldwork in our continuing efforts to push the envelope of representational genres for the study of mind, culture, and activity.
Teaching and learning are largely conducted through talk, yet the relationship between the talk and the activity goals it is intended to achieve israrely problematized or treated as a matter for conscious choice. In this paper, I describe a tool for the analysis of classroom talk, developed in the context of teacher-researcher collaboration, which draws upon activity theory and systemic linguistics. Three main units of analysis are proposed: episodes of talk, which are the chief interactional means by which actions are operationalized; the sequences from which such episodes are constructed; and, minimally, the moves through which each sequence is negotiated. The concept of mini-genre is then used to distinguish different patterns of sequential organization. In the second part of the paper, I contrast episodes from two different activities, showing how different choices of follow-up moves create significantly different kinds of opportunity for student engagement and learning. In conclusion, I suggest that, by recording and analyzing episodes of talk from their classrooms, teachers can become conscious of the options they select; then, if they see fit, they can, by changing the discursive operations deployed, bring about a change in the activities themselves and so change the nature of the classroom community
The role of discourse as a social semiotic mediator of knowledge construction has in recent years become an important topic in the fields of psychology and education. Along with the writings of L. S.Vygotsky on relations between thinking and speech, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin has become critical to current theorizing about the mediational role of social discourses. Bakhtinıs writings on the discourse of the novel have become particularly important, in that they provide a framework for understanding how social discourses are constitutive of individual consciousness. In this paper, although I acknowledge the importance of Bakhtinıs writings on novelistic discourse for studies of social semiotic knowledge construction, I suggest that Bakhtinıs work has even wider implications for studies of learning. Drawing in particular from Bakhtinıs early writings on the conscious self, I argue that "dotted lines" drawn from his writings to contemporary studies of learning would entail a theoretical focus on acting/thinking/feeling persons in relationship, engaged in prosaic acts reflective of distinctions of value. I suggest that it is through considering Bakhtinıs work in its breadth that educators and psychologists can gain the unique view of human consciousness entailed by his theories of discourse and the self. My theoretical arguments are illustrated through reference to my current research on relations between childrenıs classroom learning and their development as biographical persons.
Taking a lead from Textor et alıs (1985) innovative project of "anticipatory anthropology," this article describes a project on gender, equity and new information technologies that is in its infancy. The authors offer a preliminary, "anticipatory" analysis of this project's prospects and pitfalls. In search of a "community of research practice" having an explicit commitment to what we resort to calling "radical practice" in education/educational research, we invite others, using e-mail as a medium for a discourse community so focused, into an ongoing conversation concerned with marginalization, alterity, gender and identity as "tool-user," radical pedagogies and socio-culturally situated research practice/s. It is envisaged here that the formation of a larger "community of alterity in practice" could substantially enlarge opportunities for critique, support and dialogue while there is yet some material difference which might be made to the work by these means. This anticipatory account of the Gentech Project is, accordingly, one conceptual space from which such a conversation might begin.
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