>Hi, Mike. Your message led me to recall the exchange in which
>I invoked someone more of a CHAT expert than me. I did that
>when bowing out of a leadership role in putting
>together the _MCA_ issue you suggested on morality & CHAT.
>So I am revisiting my reasons for bowing out, while
>rethinking my notions about expertise.
>
>I really do hope the morality theme is pursued, so if the flame ever
>fizzled, the following message can be taken as kindling.
>Has anyone else expressed interest in organizing the effort?
>I'd like to help in whatever way I can.
>
>-- Mike initially suggested an _MCA_ issue on "racism, morality" from
>a CHAT perspective, following in the wake of related threads on
>institutional racism; the militias. And he invited an international
>treatment, calling on Ana, Arne, Eugene, etc. Ana responded to the
>invitation with several quite powerful messages on the effects of &
>responses to the war in Yugoslavia... My first reaction was, this
>is more than my memory & imagination -- It's a question of scale.
>Poverty I know; a war zone I don't... I tried to imagine an issue
>that juxtaposed questions of "fairness in institutional practices"
>to those of genocide, and couldn't, & not because I don't see the relation.
>
>Ana's idea, to study "the formation of extreme value systems" from a
>CHAT perspective, with some attention to resolutions & interventions,
>could be realized through several foci, no doubt. But would any one of
>them be given its due? I thought, someone who has more international
>experience than I, someone who has participated in international
>conferences, who has had the opportunity to think through CHAT on issues
>as they're played out in different cultures, would be more suited than
>I to pull this one together, conceptually.
>
>From my perspective, CHAT is proving extremely useful to me as an
>educator, in rethinking virtually all classroom-based concerns. But the
>profoundly interesting and compelling questions about morality that
>insist on our attention so much of the time on this list seem problematic
>for CHAT. Leont'ev's notion of the IDEAL is somewhere at the crux of
>the problem, but I'm still unfamiliar with his discussion; I just
>xeroxed all of _Activity, Cons'ness, & Personality_ which I had to
>return to the library. I haven't read it yet.
>
>I appreciate Mike's dictum, that everyone on the list is invited to
>form concepts and to contribute material to the formation of other
>people's concepts; it is behind much of what is wonderful about this
>list. But I can't agree that no one is an expert. We are all more or
>less expert on any number of different dimensions. The question is
>how we use our expertise - to wield power or to engage in dialog;
>to be "in the know" or to get better at learning how others see;
>to insist on our own expertise or to recognize various kinds of
>expertise and to trade....
>
>CHAT may be an impulse, but I'll know more about where that
>impulse takes me & where I and other CHATTERs have yet to go by
>learning about where CHAT has been, right?
>
>I don't think my concerns mitigate the dictum behind what's
>wonderful about xmca - we all are invited to participate, we all are
>encouraged to respond. It works because we know about different things,
>and because CHAT is not a definitive theory - it is we who CHAT! but it
>also works because we are working through traditions, which some are
>more familiar with than others. Oldtimers need newcomers and vice versa.
>
>I'm looking forward to hearing how Mike & others respond....
>
>Judy
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>At 05:43 PM 7/11/96 -0700, you wrote:
>>Continued thoughts sparked by Barbara's seconding of Betty's suggestion
>>for explaining acronyms. They are thoughts that arose in a much early
>>note by one of Judy's messages that seemed to imply that there was
>>some sort of orthodox, known "CHAT perspective" that was to be learned
>>about in this discussion.
>>
>>I hope it is clear to everyone reading this list that there is no
>>one orthodoxy about something called Cultural Historical Activity
>>Theory. It is an impulse, not an orthodoxy.
>>
>>I participate and benefit from these discussions because they are
>>medium in which I can encounter all sorts of interesting provocations
>>for me to think more deeply about my never-adequately-examined
>>presuppositions, half-beliefs, and values. I was not formally
>>educated in the form of inquiry that I now engage in; it is a way
>>of doing scholarship that has opened me up to all sorts of possibilities
>>and complexities in trying to understand human development.
>>
>>My concern is this: If people who hear about xmca and join presuppose
>>there is an orthodoxy, that there are experts who KNOW, they are
>>likely to think that when these experts us an acronym, they might be
>>doing it to distance other participants. But if they presuppose that
>>there are no experts, just people who have been in the conversation
>>longer, and in all long conversations, people create new meanings which
>>they create convetional symbols to index, then they might interpret
>>an acronym like CHAT to be what all unfamiliear lexical items are,
>>invitations to form concepts. And in forming those concepts, and
>>in communicating the concepts they form, they will educate the community
>>about itself and the world it mediates.
>>
>>I have yet to meet an expert on xmca and I am all the time encountering
>>invitations to form concepts, and in this I believe I am in good company
>>here.
>>:-)
>>mike cole
>>
>>
>>
>
....................
Judy Diamondstone diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Graduate School of Education Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place New Brunswick, NJ 08903
Wise men [sic] see outlines, therefore they draw them - Wm. Blake