Some of us who attended (I know that Jay, Eugene, Angel, Amy Ohta, Chuck
Bazerman and Jim Martin among others on this list) may have picked up
particular papers at AAAL. Schegloff's plenary is only a transcript to my
understanding, though. I have several of the papers in Shirley Brice Heath's
session, which focused on youth discourse, and can forward the email
addresses of folks who were part of that plenary to ask for papers (some
asked not to be distributed).
And yes, the issues of intersubjectivity and individual communicative
competence are related, though I think part of Eugene's point in his paper
(and elsewhere in his and Barbara Rogoff's writings) is that the whole idea
of "mutual influence" is problematic, because it presumes these two entities
(individual and socius/world) have a prior, independent existence from one
another, and that the task of research is to establish how knowledge/skill
gets transferred across this boundary.
The concepts of solo and joint activity, though, are orthogonal to the
differences between a "participation" perspective, which examines development
as a transformation of participation in sociocultural activity, and a
"transfer" perspective, which still looks for reciprocal, and often one-way
influences in development. People do participate in both solo and joint
activity, but it's important to note that even in solo activity, individuals
typically act using mediational means (a point Jim Wertsch would make) and do
so within activities that are culturally valued or which have forms similar
to other activities that other participants in a culture have participated
in. So valuing joint activity to me doesn't mean one would have to buy
Solomon's argument there that individual competence is still the unit of
analysis....
Bill Penuel
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