> Judy's comments about the
>math curriculum being under-specified is thought provoking - is it because
>one intended purpose is to be inquiry driven?
Yes, I suppose so. I don't really know anything specific about
the curriculum, though. I do know that whatever
the researchers learned in the pilot about activities and
sequences, they had to reformulate in terms of professional
development for teachers. The point I tried to make was that
the actors in schools, their agendas & needs, are not
"built into" the in vitro curriculum design. But you know that.
>As I design curricula I am
>always iterating around how much should be specified in an inquiry setting -
>pilot testing indicates a lot of variability in classrooms. Judy, would you
>mind unpacking further "the distinction between motives and goals provides an
>important tool for formative evaluations of a new endeavor, as long as the
>researcher accounts for the object of joint activity from the perspective of
>different participants..." Are you saying that an ethnographic analysis is
>necessary? Inquiry leaves open the opportunity for emerging motive in joint
>activity, which is nearly impossible to predict, but for which one can
>account in retrospect after a lot of testing, in a lot of representative
>sites.
I don't know how idiosyncratic my useage of AT terms might be.
By "motive" I mean something like the identity-conferring reason
for a participant to be doing what he/she does in an activity -
the sociocultural motivation for being there & doing that. So
for the curriculum developers, the object of the intervention
is presumably mathematics (or science or whatever) reasoning by
the students; for the teacher, the object might be the same or it
might be a leadership position in the school; for the students
it might be learning how to do mathematics or it might be
getting out of reading class or getting by -- and presumably
as you say the motivations can shift. But the key to the
"joint-ness" of activity is in how participants formulate
the goals of their actions. So from the curriculum developer's
perspective, it doesn't matter if the student is involved in
a math activity because he/she is avoiding a reading activity;
what matters is what the student does - if the student's actions
can be brought into line with the goals of the activity.
Presumably, if a goofing-off student takes up the goals of the
activity, the goofing-off motivation will shift into doing
mathematics.
So again, from the standpoint of the developer, who designs
a system of activities with a particular object in mind, the
crucial information for whether or not the system works is
found through an examination of what participants are doing
and the goals they have in sight. If their goals don't
line up with the design goals for particular activities,
and there are no corrective loops built into the system,
then a re-design is in order.
Thus the mathematics intervention had to go through a redesign
along the requirements of teachers' education, so that teachers
could respond with appropriate scaffolds to signs that students'
goals were off the mark.
Is an ethnographic analysis necessary? My guess is that some
ethnographic probes - observations, questions, or whatever
yields info about how participants are construing things -
are behind all good teaching & good inquiry.
I'm not sure I'm answering your concern about emerging motives,
(have I understood the purpose of your query?)
and I'm rambling, so I'll stop for some formative eval.
Judith
>
>Then there is the issue of teachers adapting curricula to their own
>classrooms.... AT provides insights, but seemingly no design principles...
>
>Bill
>--------------------------------------
>Date: 8/2/97 5:31 PM
>To: Bill Barowy
>From: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
>Bill-- I liked Judy's answer concerning AT as a guide to practice of creating
>new forms of activity designed for particular socio-ecological-cultural
>niches. What has most impressed me about the results over the past 6 years
>(the account in CP ends about 1993) is the incredible VARIETY of
>re-inventions
>of the activities. In the past year the number and variety of such efforts
>has increased several fold and I am still reeling from the job of trying
>to describe/understand what has been happpening.
> This work exists only in report forms, with lots of detail that most
>people would not be interested in. But the general methodological issues may
>be of general interest.
> I didn't know that Jan Hawkins was editing the book on design experiments
>with Allan, of if I knew I forgot. Twenty years ago she was a member of lchc.
>And of course, so was Denis, who also worked with Allan. Amazing to watch
>the actor networks over time!
>mike
>
>
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Judith Diamondstone (908) 932-7496 Ext. 352
MAILING ADDRESS:
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903