a reading of Yrjo's paper

Judy Diamondstone (diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu)
Sat, 28 Sep 1996 12:48:05 -0400

Thanks to Renzo Gobbin, Yrjo's paper has been available in word
format for several days now, so I will take the opportunity of
a rainy Saturday to post my interpretation of the paper, although
it won't make much sense to those who haven't read the thing itself.

I'm interested both in how my reading of the paper fits with
others' and in more exploration of the implications for a
theory of development. Here's my 2 bits:

Hoeg's novel, which Yrjo used to illustrate & organize his
argument, is part of what I found remarkable about the paper.
In Hoeg's novel, the three "outsider" students are bereft of
language ("one had no language of one's own when one came to
Crusty House"); reading their story mirrors the search for
meaning. Because of the imprisoning environment, because time
& space are so rigidly controlled, because questions come
without warning, make no sense, and not-knowing has consequence,
one simply endures. Until, that is, one asks a question back --
until one begins the search. And then the symbolic is fragmentary,
stumbled into, syntax missing. Language comes by disrupting the
environment, to see what holds it together. The students conduct
experiments with time. One is deliberately late. When another is
praised for spending time on a drawing, that's interpreted as
confirmation that the ultimate meaning, the plan that explains
these students' placement in this school with "normal" children,
has to do with time, and that what counts is whatever fits with
the plan [the move towards normalcy?]. The search for meaning
leads eventually to one student's suicide, the placement of the
other two in separate institutions, and the dissolution of the plan.

That this is made the centerpiece of an "expanded" theory of
learning & development is both disruptive of traditional theories
and recuperative of much of what the cultural system signifies.
Development is described by the _outsiders'_ trajectory toward
self awareness, which is destructive. The environment of the
school is not improved as a result. But there were qualitative
changes in the relations of the "outsider" students to one another
and to the environment.

As I see it, a strategic intervention (the school's experiment in
integration) is designed to free several targeted individuals from
their past so that they can better engage with real, here and now
others. The model of development presupposed here is much
like that which underlies the "shadow work" Phil Agre described
in a recent posting (different means, same ends). But in the
Engestrom/Hoeg case, the school's experiment is undone by the
outsider students, who were the target of it. THEY design
the experiment that carries the narrative forward - a destructive
narrative that results FROM the outsiders' insistence on an
answer to their questions and that results IN the demise of the
school's initiative. This is what Engestrom invites us to see
as development.

One aspect of this model that seems strikingly at odds with
traditional models of development is the genesis of
mediational means: they aren't "given" by the culture,
sedimented, but invented on the spot, and _not by more
capable members of the culture_ but by the incapable, the
inexperienced, the vulnerable.

The problem for me is that, while motivation for the school
experiment is undone, the order of the school endures without
structural change. So what develops? I want to answer that
development is entailed by the unrealized possibility for
structural change (but I'm not sure that this is what
Engestrom had in mind) -

The inter-intra movement has the potential to become another moment
of development:
inter [between the outsider students] -> intra [within the heads
of outsider students]
could become
-> inter-system movement
[between the outsider collective & that of the school & wider culture]

The intra-mental--inter-mental homology (as "a medium of
historical memory") serves in this case more to promote
deviance and the infection of the culture by its others than
to reproduce the culture.

[This looks also different from the Leont'ev model of breakdown
that Timothy Koschman described in his recent posting, since
the practiced chain of operations (the functioning of the school)
is not dissembled into consituent actions that then shape conscious
purpose ... Pentti's reference to motive/goal discrepancy
may be relevant, but I'm out over my head.]

One last piece that I liked about the paper is that
theorizing activity on top of the Hoeg story places
meaning-making (by the outsiders) at the center of social change.
We're back at where we were in the genre discussion,
articulating the relations between language & activity.

Judy


Judy Diamondstone
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Graduate School of Education
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903