Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal

Volume 3, Number 3, Summer 1996

Contents:

Introduction

Editors

The articles presented in the current issue of MCA confront the reader with an extraordinarily diverse range of topics. Despite this diversity, a variety of themes appear in different guises in every contribution.

We lead off with Jean Lave's account of her efforts to formulate an approach to learning that radically criticizes theories of learning as a process of individual change, replacing it with a view of learning as an aspect of changing participation in social practices. Readers familiar with Lave's earlier work criticizing the distinction between formal and informal schooling and her efforts to create a social theory of learning will find here a fine summary of the trajectory of her thinking, offered initially as a lecture to the American Educational Research Association on the occasion of receiving the Sylvia Scribner Award for her contributions to educational theory. Among many provocative ideas, Lave challenges educational researchers to re-examine and challenge the given hierarchical social relations that structure student teacher relationships.

This challenge is taken up by Ann Shea Bayer in her work as the instructor of a teacher education course. Bayer begins by discussing Vygotsky's idea of a zone of proximal development and the notion that change in the process of teaching/learning can be fruitfully viewed as a process of orchestrating a shifting responsibility in joint activity in which different student perspectives are validated as the legitimate starting point for the process of change. She demonstrates that in the classroom she taught such a shift in social relations did take place, producing a form of education she terms ³collaborative apprenticeship learning."

On the surface, at least, Toomas Timpka and Cecilia Sjöberg take as their object a very different kind of learning situation‹the process by which multi-disciplinary design groups engage in what they refer to as ³participatory information system design." Despite the widespread belief that conditions of modern work require new forms of participatory design, such efforts have met with only limited success. The challenge in this case is to understand the barriers to success as a precondition for overcoming then. Invoking the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin they identify three distinctive ³voices"‹ those of participatory design, engineering, and practice‹that must be coordinated if the design process is to be successful. Again, as in the case of Lave and Bayer, an important theme is the restructuring of social relations among traditionally dichotomized participants, where in place of teacher and student it is designer and user who must be brought into a new, dialogical, relationship with each other.

The themes of dialogue, learning, education, and the practical world of work are picked up in Gary Shank's presentation of a portion of an exchange he initiated on XMCA, the internet-based discussion group that is part of our effort to expand the potential of traditional scholarly publications by deliberately mixing print media with computer-based telecommunications. The occasion for Shank's intervention was the tenth anniversary of the explosion of the Challenger space module during its launch, which killed its entire crew including a teacher. Echoing critiques of education that treat children as passive elements in the process of schooling, Shank asks us to rethink the issue of school failure in terms of the possibility of ³living o-rings" (the system elements which broke under the conditions of lift-off, thereby providing the proximal ³cause" of the disaster. He then provides a summary of some of the ensuing discussion, which takes up his invitation to rethink the both the process of education and the way in which research conceive of it, illustrating the potential of forums such as XMCA for leading inquirers beyond the considerations that he introduced in his initial essay.

Susan de Castell takes these same themes yet another step by creating a multi-voiced review of David Barton's text on literacy in which she includes not only students in her course on ³Literacy/Education/Culture" but Barton as well.

The editors take great pleasure in the new genre of multilogue that appears to be emerging through these pages.

Teaching, as Learning, in Practice

Jean Lave

Why pursue a social rather than a more familiar psychological theory of learning? To the extent that being human is a relational matter, generated in social living, historically, in social formations whose participants engage with each other as a condition and precondition for their existence, theories that conceive of learning as a special universal mental process impoverish and misrecognize it. My colleagues and I have been trying to convey our understanding of this claim for some years (e.g., Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and I will try to develop the argument a little further here. There is another sort of reason for pursuing a theoretical perspective on the social nature of learning. Theories that reduce learning to individual mental capacity/activity in the last instance blame marginalized people for being marginal. Common theories of learning begin and end with individuals (though these days they often nod at ³the social" or ³the environment" in between). Such theories are deeply concerned with individual differences, with notions of better and worse, more and less learning, and with comparison of these things across groups-of- individuals. Psychological theories of learning prescribe ideals and paths to excellence and identify the kinds of individuals (by no means all) who should arrive; the absence of movement away from some putatively common starting point becomes grounds for labeling others sub-normal. The logic that makes success exceptional but nonetheless characterizes lack of success as not normal won't do. It reflects and contributes to a politics by which disinherited and disenfranchised individuals, whether taken one at a time or in masses, are identified as the dis-abled, and thereby made responsible for their ³plight" (e.g., McDermott, 1993).1 It seems imperative to explore ways of understanding learning that do not naturalize and underwrite divisions of social inequality in our society. A reconsideration of learning as a social, collective, rather than individual, psychological phenomenon offers the only way beyond the current state of affairs that I can envision at the present time.

Orchestrating a Text Mediational View of Vygotsky

Ann Shea Bayer

Instruction can create zones of proximal development. One's interpretation of Vygotsky's ideas, however, would drive qualitatively different instructional strategies. A text mediational view (Wertsch & Bivens, 1992) supports the classroom as a place where the teacher orchestrates joint activities which promote dialogic texts, allowing students to use language as thinking devices to make connections between what they already know and new concepts. This study describes the author's role in setting up such joint activities during the first few weeks of a year-long education class. An analysis of this video-taped course revealed two patterns in which the dialogic texts took place. The first pattern called ³shared knowledge scaffolding" involved individual student writing and small group discussion about what students already knew about the topic. Sharing similarities and differences in a whole class discussion, the students and teacher developed publically shared composite theories regarding the topic. These early theories served as initial reference points as students looked for connections to new information generated during ongoing class activities. This pattern eventually disappeared as the semsester progressed, but the resultant expanded knowledge base became ³old" or ³anchored" knowledge, which students could now use as mental hooks as they engaged in increasingly sophisticated activities involving application of course concepts in new contexts. The author argues that these two patterns, which underlie the joint activities, provided students with the means to achieve enhanced levels of intersubjectivity, thereby enabling students to increasingly assume responsibility for their learning.

The Voices of Design: Discourse in Participatory Information System Development

Toomas Timpka
Cecelia Sjoberg

There is a lack of knowledge about how participation in information system design is built in practice and, particularly, about the interaction taking place within multi-disciplinary design groups. One way to structure participatory design processes has been by the introduction of rules for a ³democratic dialogue." The purpose of this study was to explore the dynamics of small-group design meetings in which a set of rules aimed at leveling the possibility for access and display of information were used. Starting from a grounded theory method, a descriptive model was composed by the demarcation of three voices. The voices of participatory design, practice, and engineering were found to express the workplace context, the intentions and actions of the participants, and the influences from the institutions involved, which together constituted the design process. To be able to identify links between small-group discourse and organizational change, a framework for analysis is necessary which makes it possible to follow social structures from the interaction in design groups. This study provides the preliminaries for such a model.

If O-Ring Booster Seals Were Alive

Gary Shank

The following article is actually a five piece work built around an essay submitted to the Internet the week prior to the tenth anniversary of the Challenger disaster. The article discusses the juxtaposition of schooling and the Challenger disaster, and incorporates a collective response of Internet scholars to the basic theme. In a brief conclusion, the article is held up as a model for future sorts of collective Internet and print scholarly joint ventures.