Re: Freire and monologism

pprior who-is-at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Sat, 6 Apr 1996 08:13:42 -0600

Robin and others,

I think that joint activity (and related notions, like Bakhtin's dialogic)
do describe *all* activity or interaction. So they don't identify
effective learning situations or for that matter even humane, ethical ones
(oppression is also a form of joint activity and also is dialogic). The
questions that you ask then (how do you distinguish forms of joint activity
that are useful from ones that aren't remain very difficult to
address--though hopefully a little less difficult than if you
conceptualized learning and communication in individualistic terms of
cognitive transmission). Part of the difficulty is that "better" entails
"better for something", that is, it involves values.

As Lave & Wenger stress, this notion of joint activity also means that all
of our experiences are learning experiences (though not all equal). In
their terms, learning is the historical production of persons.

Dewey had some interesting things to say related to these issues. He
noted (in _Experience and Education_) that all education is experience, and
that progressive educators therefore need a theory of experience to guide
their teaching (as well as a recognition that most learning happens outside
of schools). As I understand his perspective, he judged the quality of
learning experiences by criteria like continuity, effects on the quality of
future experience, and connections to the person's life now and in the
future. He also emphasized that learning/experience is about what the
person becomes (not just what she knows) and about what society becomes.
(Perhaps people better acquainted with his work could jump in?)

Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign