edited by Michael Cole, Yrjo Engestrom, and Olga Vasquez
Cambridge University Press
1997
ISBN 0-52155-823-9
paperback $21.95
hardcover $59.95
http://communication.ucsd.edu/LCHC/
Table of Contents
Michael Cole, Yrjo Engestrom, and Olga Vasquez
Introduction
Frederick Erickson and Jeffrey Schultz
When is a Context?
Some Issues and Methods in the Analysis of Social Competence
Charles O. Frake
Plying Frames Can be Dangerous:
Some Reflections on Methodology in Cognitive Anthropology
EXPERIMENTS AS CONTEXTS
Michael Cole, Lois Hood, and Raymond P. McDermott
Concepts of Ecological Validity:
Their Differing Implications for Comparative Cognitive Research
Jean Lave
What's Special about Experiments as Contexts for Thinking
Anderson F. Franklin
Sociolinguistic Structure of Word Lists
and Ethnic-Group Differences in Categorized Recall
Judy S. DeLoache and Ann L. Brown
Looking for Big Bird: Studies of Memory in Very Young Children
Yutaka Sayeki
'Body Analogy' and the Cognition of Rotated Figures
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
Paradigms and Prejudice
EXPLORING CULTURAL HISTORICAL THEORIES
Norris Minick
The Early History of the Vygotskian School:
The Relationship between Mind and Activity
Erik Axel
One Developmental Line in European Activity Theories
David Bakhurst
Activity, Consciousness and Communication
Ernest E. Boesch
The Sound of the Violin
Alfred Lang
Non-Cartesian Artefacts in Dwelling Activities:
Steps Toward a Semiotic Ecology
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
Ageliki Nicolopoulou
The Invention of Writing and the Development of Numerical Concepts in
Sumeria: Some Implications for Developmental Psychology
James Wertsch
Collective Memory: Issues from a Sociohistorical Perspective
CLASSROOM SETTINGS
Hugh Mehan
Students' Interactional Competence in the Classroom
Ronald Gallimore and Kathryn Hu-Pei Au
The Competence/Incompetence Paradox
in the Education of Minority Culture Children
Luis C. Moll, Elette Estrada, Esteban Diaz, and Lawrence M. Lopes
The Organization of Bilingual Lessons: Implications for Schooling
Giyoo Hatano, Keiko Kuhara, and Michael Akiyama
Kanji Help Readers of Japanese Infer the Meaning of Unfamiliar Words
Denis Newman
Functional Environments for Microcomputers in Education
Marilyn G. Quinsaat
"But It's Important Data!":
Making the Demands of a Cognitive Experiment Meet the Educations Imperatives
of the Classroom
Courtney B. Cazden
Performance Before Competence:
Assistance to Child Discourse in the Zone of Proximal Development
COGNITION IN THE WILD
Alonzo B. Anderson, William H. Teale, and Elette Estrada
Low-Income Children's Preschool Literacy Experiences:
Some Naturalistic Observations
Geoffrey B. Saxe
Selling Candy: A Study of Cognition in Context
Edwin Hutchins
Mediation and Automatization
Sylvia Scribner
Mind in Action: A Functional Approach to Thinking
Yrjo Engestrom, Katherine Brown, L. Carol Christopher, and Judith Gregory
Coordination, Cooperation and Communication in the Courts:
Expansive Transitions in Legal Work
POWER AND DISCOURSE
Michael Holquist
The Politics of Representation
R.P. McDermott
Wisdom From the Periphery: Talk, Thought and Politics in the
Ethnographic Theater of John Milington Synge
Carol Padden and Harry Markowicz
Learning to be Deaf: Conflicts Between Hearing and Deaf Cultures
Esther Goody
Why Must Might be Right?
Observations on Sexual Herrschaft
Bonnie E. Litowitz
Just Say No: Responsibility and Resistance
Introduction
Michael Cole, Yrjo Engestrom, and Olga Vasquez
The LCHC Newsletter articles that are contained in this volume are
important benchmarks in the history of a discussion of context, culture,
and development. The central theme of this discussion can be posed as
a question: How shall we develop a psychology that takes as its starting
point the actions of people participating in routine cultural contexts?
This question engenders a second: What kind of methodology does the study
of human behavior in context entail?
In retrospect it is possible to identify the late 1970's and
early 1980's as a time when several students of human development began
to express the need for a new unit of psychological analysis, one which
attributed to that elusive concept, context, a central role in the
constitution of human nature. Several publications at the time gave voice
to this convergence.
In her article on cognitive development in the 1978 Annual Review
of Psychology, Rochel Gelman, reviewed the emerging evidence that changes
in the way Piagetian concepts were investigated -- changes in context
-- produced apparently dramatic changes in the cognitive competence
preschoolers display. Uri Brofenbrenner's classic monograph, The Ecology
of Human Development appeared the following year, providing a workable
heuristic for contextually-oriented developmental psychologists. Up to
that time, the research group associated with LCHC had concentrated its
efforts in the area of cross-cultural research, arguing for what we called
a "cultural-contexts" approach to development. As Gelman noted, our
demonstrations of a critical role of experimental procedures in children's
expression of cognitive competence had implications for cross-age,
within-society research. New approaches to research and theorizing about
human development were called for. Answering that call seemed no easy
matter.
Especially important to work presented in this volume was
the appearance, in 1978 of Vygotsky's Mind in Society. Although not
explicitly contextualist in its world view, Mind in Society provided a
way to link American ideas about context and the heterogeneity of mind
across settings with Russian ideas about the historical nature and
social origins of higher psychological function and a deep appreciation
for the centrality of cultural mediation in the constitution of human
psychological processes. At present, as a result of intense interaction
among psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and mixes
of scholars from other disciplines, new "interdisciplines" are popping
up and in some cases becoming institutionalized. Cognitive Science
and Communication are two such hybrids. Cultural Psychology is a third.
Although the idea of Cultural Psychology is older than the
discipline of Psychology itself (Cole, 1990), the idea reemerged in the
late 1970's as one expression of context as a central constituent of
human mind. Douglas Price-Williams, who gained prominence for his cross-
cultural research, defined Cultural Psychology as "that branch of inquiry
that delves into the contextual behavior of psychological processes"
(Price-Williams, Gordon, & Ramirez, 1979, p. 14). Suggestions were made
by a number of psychologists, some emphasizing the intimate relation
between context and meaning, others the equally intimate relations between
context and emotion, and all concerned with the study of development.
[See Bruner, 1991 Shweder, 1984 and Valsiner 1995 for summaries].
Whatever one's entry point into the study of culture and
development a commitment to a unit of analysis that includes individuals
and their sociocultural milieu immediately entails a series of major
methodological problems to anyone who would seek to embody the resulting
theoretical notions in empirical practice. To begin with, such an
enterprise cannot proceed entirely on the basis of experimental methods
nor can it draw theoretically only on psychology. It must be multi-method
and interdisciplinary.
Interdisciplinarity is a fashionable buzzword that evokes warm
feelings in right thinking scholars, but it is a whole lot easier said
than done. Disciplines are paradigms, ways of seeing and interpreting the
world. To mix disciplines is to insure that the way data are collected
and interpreted is certain to offend as many members of a research
group as there are disciplines represented. What an inter-discipline
such as cultural psychology calls for is its own methodology, its own
"disciplined" way of linking theory and evidence.
Despite their diversity, the author of the articles contained in
this volume are distinguished by the ways in which their work combines
insights from the cultural historical psychological tradition of Vygotsky,
Luria, and Leont'ev, the American Pragmatist tradition as exemplified
by scholars such as Dewey and Mead, and the work of sociocultural
anthropologists and sociologists. The resulting discussion, therefore,
is a blend of American cultural anthropological approaches and Russian
historical approaches infused with ideas from other disciplines and other
national traditions including a number of participants from European
countries and Japan.
Evidence for the contemporary relevance of these articles comes
from examining the questions that arise when we juxtapose the ideas of
James Wertsch, Barbara Rogoff, Jean Lave and A. N. Leont'ev, all of whom
are important to the development of Cultural Psychology.
Jim Wertsch and his colleagues carry forward the tradition of
Vygotsky by starting with the idea of mediation of behavior through
signs and other cultural artifacts. This starting point is enhanced
and enriched with Bakhtin's notions of social language, speech genre,
and voice (Wertsch, 1991, 1994, 1995, Wertsch, del Rio and Alvarez, 1995).
Wertsch and his colleagues choose mediated action as the proper unit of
psychological analysis. Starting in this manner requires them to find a
way to go beyond mediated action to specify the "something" ("the context"
) with respect to which that mediated action becomes meaningful. Wertsch
(1995, pp. 71-72) turns to Burke's (1962) pentad of literary analysis
(act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose).
Another important example of cultural-contextual theorizing is
the situated learning (or legitimate peripheral participation) approach
promoted by Jean Lave and her colleagues (Lave, 1988; Lave and Wenger,
1991). The central concepts and unit of analysis in this line of inquiry
are practice, community practice, and participation. While acknowledging
the importance of mediational means, this unit is decidedly broader
than individual action. Moreover, practical object-oriented work is
investigated on par with interaction and sign-mediated communication.
Barbara Rogoff's current thinking complements the perspectives
of Wertsch and Lave. She echoes the theme of individual and context as
interlocking aspects of a single phenomenon, bringing them together in the
concept of practice. She argues that "The concept of practice recognizes
that the acquisition of knowledge or skill is part of the construction
of an identity or a person." For Rogoff, development is participation in
sociocultural activity. Activities are made up of the active and dynamic
contributions of individuals, their social partners, historical traditions
and materials, and their (mutual) transformations. Any activity, according
to Rogoff, must include the analysis of three forms of change: Change in
the child's participation (personal plane), changes in the relationships
between participants (interpersonal plane), and historical changes
in technologies and institutions (community plane). Even a cursory
consideration of Rogoff's ideas makes clear the methodological challenge
of her position, and by implication, all of the varieties of cultural-
contextual approaches of which hers is one prominent variant. Experimental
psychology, discourse analysis, ethnography, and micro sociology (to name
a few) are all involved.
A fourth direction in recent cultural-psychological research
represented in this volume is the theory of activity, initiated by
Leont'ev (1979, 1981). Activity is here seen as a collective, systemic
formation that has a complex mediational structure. Activities are not
short-lived events or actions that have a temporally clear-cut beginning
and end. They are systems that produce events and actions and evolve over
lengthy periods of socio-historical time. The subject and the object are
mediated by artifacts, including symbols and representations of various
kinds. The activity system incessantly reconstructs itself through actions
and discourse. As a consequence, activity theory calls for historical
analysis of the collective activity system, a point also made by Rogoff.
Recent work in activity theory (Engestrom, 1987) emphasize
systems contain a variety of different viewpoints or "voices," as well
as layers of historically accumulated artifacts, rules, and patterns of
division of labor. This multi-voiced and multi-layered nature of activity
systems is both a resource for collective achievement and a source of
compartmentalization and conflict. Contradictions are the engine of change
and development in an activity system as well as a source of conflict and
stress.
Although each of these perspectives extends the new understanding
of culture, context, and cognitive development that began to emerge
in the late 1970's, each of them also poses acute questions of how to
convert methodological and theoretical programs into doable projects.
For example, while a variety of scholars such as Wertsch are drawing
upon Burke and his use of the dramatic metaphor, there is as yet no
generally agreed upon way to embody Burke's ideas in a way that cognitive
psychologists would find acceptable as a source of empirical data.
Psychologists who wish to build upon Lave's work face similar
methodological problems. The theory of legitimate peripheral participation
investigates learning and development primarily as movement from the
periphery occupied by novices to the center inhabited by experienced
masters of the given practice. But it is position in the group, not
properties of individuals qua individuals that are of concern. Are
psychologists to give up on the analysis of individuals altogether
and abandon psychology's traditional mission? On the other hand, if
researchers want to attribute aspects of action to individuals as well as
supra-individual units, how can they do so given the intimate dialectical
constitution of action which situated action theorists take as primary?
How does one mix historical analysis with experimental analysis or
discourse analysis? What role does experimentation play in the tool kit
of methods? What should ethnography or discourse analysis play when
experiments are also used.
These, and many allied questions are taken up in the articles
presented below. While there are no definitive answers to the many
questions entailed by allegiance to a cultural psychology, there is a good
deal of accumulated experience, detailed maps of blind alleys, and perhaps
some wisdom that can be appropriated to deal with the tasks at hand.
The Problem of Context
Since the Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative
Human Cognition began with the question of context, it is fitting to start
this collection of articles by addressing this seminal concept.
The work by members of the research group that evolved into LCHC
began with cross-cultural research on cognitive development in Liberia.
The basic impulse in that research was to take the doings of people in
their everyday lives (of which tests and schools are one class of doings)
as the starting point of psychological analysis. "Context" functioned
as an omnibus category that allowed the analyst to point to factors
outside of the psychological task itself" as contributors to performance.
In the logic of that early work, context could be considered a "stimulus
variable", a "proximal cultural medium, ¾ that could be related
to performance as dependent variable. Over time, however, it became
clear that it is inadequate to conceive of context merely as a preset
environment that influences behavior. The two articles included in the
section on context both represent clear and persuasive arguments for
thinking about context in more complicated ways than we did in the late
1970's , as many psychologists are wont to do today. Fred Erickson and
Jeff Schultz (1977) articulate the idea that contexts are not given,
they are mutually constituted, constantly shifting, situation definitions
that are accomplished through the interactional work of the participants.
Erickson and Schultz begin by reviewing relevant research from
sociolinguistics. They then present a five stage strategy for the study
of context through an analysis of the changing organization of face to
face interaction using videotapes of strips of interaction as their basic
source of data.
Charles Frake (1977) discusses contexts as cultural frames of
interpretation. He modifies the idea of culture as a script for the
production of social occasions, recasting cultural scripts as sets of
principles for constructing (perhaps co-constructing is a better term)
social events. He emphasizes the crucial point that culture is more than
a fixed set of interpretive frames that people acquire; rather, it is a
set of resources for creating culture and cognition. Frakes formulation
provides one promising starting point for those seeking to use the
dramatic metaphor as a heuristic for working out a contextual, activity
based psychology.
Experiments as Contexts
Given the starting point of LCHC in the experimental study of
culture, mind, and development, it should come as no surprise that a
great many of the articles published during its early years addressed the
problematic nature of experiments as instruments for reaching conclusions
about culture and cognitive development.
One of the few concepts used by psychologists to address issue
of experiments as contexts is the idea of ecological validity, normally
thought of as the extent to which the conclusions drawn from experimental
and test methods are applicable outside of the procedure itself the extent
to which they are representative of psychological functioning in everyday
life. The article by Cole and his colleagues (1971) traces out some
of the history of discussion of ecological validity, pointing out that
despite rhetorical gestures toward satisfying this criterion in cognitive
research, the problem is more difficult that psychologists have ordinarily
thought .
The difficulties of using experimental studies as if they were
context-free indices of cognitive processing are the topic of Jean Lave's
(1980) article. Lave's concern is to undo the asymmetrical analytic
power accorded to experiments as revealed by the question, "Does this
experimental result generalize to everyday life.?" In its place she
proposes a more symmetrical question: "Is there any hope we may learn
from contrasting performances in contrasting situations?" She gives an
affirmative answer to this question, drawing upon the first results of
the work she and her colleagues conducted on arithmetic practices in
supermarkets and weight watcher clubs (See Lave, 1998 or Lave and Wenger,
1990 for accounts of the later evolution of these ideas).
A major concern of researchers at LCHC has been to bring critical
analyses to bear on claims of ethnic or racial cognitive inferiority
based upon performances in cognitive psychological tasks. A. J. Franklin's
(1978) study of word recall memory is representative of one genre of
critical methods. Franklin notes the use by Arthur Jensen of category
clustering in free recall to make claims that African Americans are
deficient in higher-level, transformative remembering. Franklin draws
upon extant research to argue that the African American students are
placed at a disadvantage because of their relative lack of familiarity
with the categorical structure of word lists created on the basis of Anglo
norms. He demonstrates how manipulation of list contents can reverse the
direction of deficits, taking the deficit out of his subjects' heads and
placing it in differences in everyday language which previous researchers
had ignored.
Despite the difficulties, not only members of LCHC but many
developmental researchers began to create methods for the study of
cognitive development in a variety of settings. Judy DeLoache and Ann
Brown's ( 1979) study of young children's ability to remember the location
of objects using a delayed response will come as no surprise to anyone
who has been a parent, but it came as a distinct surprise to psychologists
who had been drawing conclusions for years about preschoolers' deficient
memories. In subsequent years, research such as this has led to a radical
re-evaluation of early cognitive development in which the crucial role of
context in performance is widely recognized (See Cole and Cole, 1993,
Chapter 9 for a recent summary)
Sayeki (1981) argues persuasively that the human body provides a
rich source of intellectual resources that can be brought to bear for the
solutions of intellectual problems. His emphasis on embodied point of view
as a fundamental aspect of thinking and ways in which it can be harnessed
to aid problem solving is an important early contribution to the
current discussion on the situated nature of culturally mediated thought
processes.
The (1983) article entitled "Paradigms and Prejudice" authored by
a group at LCHC takes up another aspect of the way that research on ethnic
group differences is practiced in the United States. The provocation for
writing this article was a request for assistance from an African-American
colleague. Her grant application for studying a feature of language
acquisition was rejected when two reviewers argued that such research
should first be conducted on middle class Anglo children to establish
the appropriate normal profile against which data from African American
children could be analyzed. Unfortunately, the difficulties to which this
article is addressed remain relevant to the present day.
Exploring Cultural Historical Theories
At the time that LCHC came into being in the early 1970's,
the focus of its efforts was largely methodological. In so far as a
theoretical position could be said to characterize the work, that theory
was derived largely from American psychological, sociological, and
anthropological sources. The first article representing Russian ideas was
by LA.. Abramyan, (1977) a student of Luria's. Its point was interpreted
in the context of questions about developing experimental methods.
In the late 1970's, as noted earlier, there were marked
changes. The articles in this section provide a snapshot account of
several different lines of theory that take cultural mediation and the
historically contingent nature of human thought as their starting points.
Norris Minnick (1986) traces changes in the ideas of Vygotsky and his
colleagues in the late 1920's and 1930's. According to Minnick, it is
possible to see a shift from a focus on social interaction as the locus
of mind to a concern for including the sociocultural context, or activity,
of which the interaction is a part as an essential constituent of mind.
Erik Aksel's (1992) narrative picks up, so to speak, where
Minnick's ends. He traces the development of the activity theory proposed
by Vygotsky's student and colleague, A. N. Leont'ev. Aksel also considers
the way in which various features of Leont'ev's approach can be improved
upon by taking into account the Critical Psychology tradition that came to
prominence in Germany and other European countries in the 1970's.
David Bakhurst (1988) explores the ideas of another, less
well known, contributor to the cultural historical, activity centered
approaches that flowered in the 1960's and 1970's the Soviet philosopher
Evald Ilyenkov. Bakhurst presents Ilyenkov's ideas as an important
resource for making the transition from anti Cartesian theories of
mind to a non dualistic, cultural-mediational, communitarian theory.
It is sometimes thought by American social scientists that commitment
to cultural-historical approaches derives exclusively from the work of
Russian scholars. In fact, however, the key notion of cultural historical
approaches that human beings engage in a species specific form of mediated
action through the appropriation of the resources bequeathed by prior
generations has adherents in many countries.
Ernst Boesch, whose (1993) work also draws upon Piagetian
ideas, presents a vivid account of cultural -historical thinking in his
discussion of the kinds of evidence that one must bring together in a
fully realized cultural mediational approach to culture and cognition.
The material and the ideal, the historical and the contemporary, the
individual and the social, are all simultaneously present in his finely
wrought thought experimental.
Alfred Lang's (1993) major inspirations for developing a cultural
mediational theory of cognition are derived largely from German and
American sources, not Russian ones. It is the elaboration and wedding
of ideas from Kurt Lewin and C. S. Peirce that motivates his discussion
of how to develop a non Cartesian, ecological approach to thinking about
culture and mind.
Historical Analysis
A basic tenet of cultural-historical approaches to cognition
is that mental functioning in the present emerges from the interplay
of different developmental domains including cultural history, ontogeny,
and microgenesis. Actual historical analysis or the use of historical
materials as an object of study has been rare among scholars interested
in culture, context, and development. The papers in this section represent
two quite different attempts to carry cognitive psychological analysis
beyond the study of individual ontogeny to make history a usable resource
for psychologists.
Ageliki Nicolopolou (1989) draws upon the work of the German
psychologist, Peter Damerow and his colleagues who analyzed a large
corpus of texts taken from ancient middle eastern city of Uruk in what
is currently called Iraq. A major goal of Damerow's work has been to see
if it is possible to determine when and if the material representation
of cognitive structure influence the process of cognitive development.
Nicolopolou concludes that the availability of new media for representing
number may enter directly into the process of epigenesis by promoting
the crystallization of arithmetic operations in a form that opens up new
developmental horizons.
James Wertsch's (1987) contribution addresses the issue of
collective memory as it is conceived within the theoretical tradition
of Vygotsky and Leont'ev. Wertsch believes that while Vygotskys analysis
of was strong in illuminating the dynamics of higher psychological
function in dyads, it needs to be supplemented by approaches that link
to the activity settings in which people function if it is to become a
comprehensive theory of mind in society. Wertsch suggests that one way
to deal concretely with questions of the cultural-historical conditioning
of mental processes is to focus on the mediational means involved, which
carry with the histories of which they were a part. As he puts it, what
is available in particular peoples tool kits depends in a central way on
their sociohistorical and cultural situation.
Focusing on language as a tool, Wertsch examines the writings
of sociologists such as Robert Bellah and his colleagues, pointing out
how certain language genres are privileged over others, entering into
the creation of communities of memory where constitutive narratives
are central into the creation of both ones social world and the ability
to communicate and think within it. Many of these ideas can be found
playing themselves out in the recent volume published by Wertsch and his
colleagues, Sociocultural Studies of Mind ( 1995).
Classroom Settings
By far the largest corpus of research on the nexus of issues
indicated by the notions of context, culture, activity, and cognitive
development has been conducted in educational settings. Given the
importance of cultural-historical theories in the development of this
research enterprise, the heavy emphasis on educational settings in the
LCHC Newsletter is no surprise, but it presents the editors with difficult
problems of selection because there is so much from which to select.
We begin this section with a contribution by Hugh Mehan (1976) whose work
on the social organization of classroom interactions had brought him into
contact psychologists interested in bridging between experimental studies
of individual and the naturally occurring interactions that assemble
knowledge acquisition in naturally occurring classroom interactions.
Mehan's contribution looks at what can be learned (by both analysts and
children) when whole group lessons are broken up and replaced by small
group working sessions, each headed by one of the students. Mehan's
analysis suggests that researchers can learn about useful pedagogical
practices from seeing how adult-led lessons are transformed (not
necessarily for the worse) when they are carried out as small group,
child led lessons.
Ron Gallimore and Kathy Au (1979) also concern themselves with
displays of competence in elementary school classrooms. In their case,
the focus is on ethnic Hawaiian children who have long been reported
to experience difficulty in early reading instruction and other basic
academic settings, although ethnographic reports of their behavior at
home suggests that they are perfectly competent in ways not in evidence
in the classroom. Their chapter provides a concise report of the KEEP
reading program which takes advantage of the ethnographic evidence to
help reorganize classroom discourse on a more effective basis.
The simultaneous existence of competent and incompetent
intellectual performances is also the focus of work by Luis Moll and his
colleagues (1980). Their work with bilingual Latino children who were
instructed in both Spanish and English at different times in the school
day led to two important findings:
1) A reductionist theory of reading produces bilingual student
failure in English-only instructional environments and
2) Student failure is supported in a number of subtle ways by
institutional arrangements.
Further opportunities arose for researchers to study mediated
learning and development when microcomputers began to come into the lives
of children, teachers and researchers in the early 1980's. This line of
work is represented here by Denis Newman (19??) who, along with Jim Levin
and Margaret Riel spearheaded the application of cultural-historical,
contextual approaches to the use of microcomputers in classroom
settings. Especially noteworthy in this work is emphasis of the potential
to reorganize classroom interactions where computers are used as
communication media.
When researchers move out of the experimental setting and into
the classroom they lose power over the contexts of observation in many
ways. At the same time, they raise issues of power for the teachers whose
classrooms they visit. Marilyn Quinsaat (1980) reports on this process
from the perspective of a teacher whose classroom has been made the
site of cognitive psychologists interested in the contexts of learning
and development. Through her concern to represent the interests of the
children while respecting those of the researchers, Quinsaat reveals
a number of important contrasts between classroom and tests as sites
of cognitive analysis. Any psychologist interested in the possibility
of seeing her work contribute to classroom practices would do well
to consider carefully the lessons of Quinsaat's experience (See Newman
Griffin and Cole, 1989, for the larger context of this article).
The final chapter in this section, by Courtney Cazden, (1991)
is an early elaboration of the implications of the idea of zone of
proximal development, proposed by Vygotsky, for the analysis of child
adult discourse and the role of the social interaction in the process of
cognitive and linguistic development. Her linking of the idea of zone of
proximal development to overcome the shortcomings of theories which demand
competence before performance has lost none of its relevance in the years
since it was published.
Cognition In the Wild
In recent years, the authors of Newsletter articles have
increasingly moved into studies of cognition and mediated action outside
of classrooms and laboratories. Their interests everyday practical
activity as a source of empirical data has led them to their in homes,
streets, and workplaces. This trend reflects the increasing confidence
in a new generation of scholars motivated by more than the need to
test the generalizability of findings obtained in constrained settings.
Above all, the move was borne of increasing opportunities to explore human
mental functioning and development in the full richness of its social
and artifactual texture. As Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 83) pointed out,
"man's mental processes indeed take place at the scholar's desk or the
football field, in the studio or lorry-driver's seat, on the platform, the
chessboard, or the judge's bench."
An early example of this move was a study conducted by Anderson,
Teale and Estrada (1980) ) of low-income children's preschool literacy
experiences at home. The authors used natural observations, self-report
diaries and controlled behavior samplings to analyze events in which the
children were involved with production and/or comprehension of print. This
early study is the direct ancestor of later work on "emergent literacy"
(Teale, & Sulzby, 1986). It also inspired research on home and community
literacy resources carried out by Moll (1992) and Vasquez (1992) among
others.
Another pathway into the realm of cognition in the wild is
represented by Geoff Saxe's (1989) study of Brazilian children who
sell candy in the streets . Saxe used ethographic observation of candy
selling, interviews involving mathematical tasks, and comparison between
sellers' and non-sellers' mathematical understanding. He found that goals
of mathematical problem solving emerged in bargaining and negotiating
between sellers and buyers. Children's construction of new understandings
and solution strategies was interwoven with their participation in the
social practices (see also Saxe, 1991, and Nunez, Carraher & Schliemann,
1993).
Cognitive anthropological approaches inspired the work of Ed
Hutchins' and C. Seifert's study on mediation and automatization (1986)
outside of "white room" conditions, exemplifying the challenge posed by
the notion of cognition in the wild. They examine the ways humans use and
internalize external checklists in skilled actions. They conclude that
what we know and what the culture knows for us are "hunks of mediating
structure." For Hutchins, thinking consists of bringing these structures,
both external and internal, into coordination with each other. This line
of work reached its fruition in Hutchins' recent book (1995).
Sylvia Scribner's (1983) studies on work activities in a
milk-processing plant opened up the world of industrial work to students
of cognitive development. Again, a combination of methods was used:
extensive ethnographic observation, modeling and simulation of key tasks
in experimental sessions, and comparisons between experienced workers and
novice outsiders. Scribner found qualitative differences and developmental
shifts in the workers' construction and use of mediating symbol systems
and solution strategies in their daily tasks. Work was recognized as
playing a formative and educative role in the lives of the workers.
Engestrom and his colleagues (1992) approached work from another
angle, focusing on the developmental significance of disturbances
in activity. The authors studied legal work in complex trials, using
observations, interviews, and analysis of discourse recorded in the
sidebar conferences devoted to the collaborative handling of disturbances.
They identified expansive transitions, qualitative shifts in the mode of
interaction, as responses to disturbances. The findings were interpreted
against a framework of historical change and emergence of a collective
zone of proximal development for work in courts.
Power and Discourse
Increasingly over time, as issues of polyphony, multivoicedness,
conflict, and contestation began appearing in the pages of the Newsletter,
American researchers in a number of disciplines were problematizing
gender, race, and other forms of "otherness" in identity politics and
theorizing. Three examples of articles treating these topics are included
in this section. In them we can see threads that are very familiar in
the current tapestry of ideas that are associated with current postmodern
theorizing on multiplicity of voices, the multiply constituted subject,
the social and historical construction of ethnicity and its role in the
distribution of power, etc.
Michael Holquist's classic (1983) paper on the politics of
representation (Chapter x) marked the advent of Mikhail Bakhtin's
dialogism in the Newsletter. Holquist's paper, which appeared concurrently
with Emerson's paper on Bakhtin and Vygotsky (1981) contrasts dialogism
with personalism and constructionism. Dialogism holds that meaning is made
as a product of polyphonic collaboration. One can appropriate meaning for
one's purposes only by ventriloquating others. Moreover, each utterance is
unavoidably a contest, a struggle.
Ray McDermott ( 1985) analyzes the ethnographic dramas of
John Millington Synge. Drawing on Bakhtin's notion of voice, McDermott
examines how Synge's plays reconstructed the tension between the core
andthe periphery of Irish society. McDermott observed that people locked
away from core culture may, by virtue of their marginalization, also have
something powerful to say about that very core.
Carol Padden and Harry Markowicz (1982) took the issue of struggle
to a concrete level, examining conflicts between hearing and deaf cultures
in America. The authors trace the experiences of a group of young deaf
adults who entered Gallaudet College, a college for deaf students, without
having socialized with other deaf people before that. None of the subjects
were prepared to find a minority with its own culture and its own
language.
Esther Goody (1987) directs the analysis of power and morality
to a macro-level analysis of the relations between men and women. Goody
examines South American Indian origin myths, the initiation rites of
Australian aborigines, and African witchcraft, She identifies in each
an ideology of legitimate power based on the premise that women are
originally or fundamentally anti-social or evil. She finds the same
thread woven into Judeo-Christian traditions. Ideological support
for containing and controlling the essentially errant woman manifests
itself dramatically in the widespread practices of domestic violence.
Goody delves into behavioral psychological theory for components
of a general model of domination that might explain the reward/punishment
system that helps maintain some women's' complicity with systems of
their own oppression. There is, she writes, a sense of guilt and
lack of confidence in many women that arises from conflicting messages
about women's worth in cultural and family norms. This factor is linked
to a second source of the experience of female inferiority: built in
contradictions in the nature of roles which women face as they define
goals. A third grim factor in this equation is this: women know from
experience and observation in their daily lives, that in most instances
of violent or potentially violent conflict with men, "might is right"
in the moment of face to face interaction, Most women will act (or act
passively) to avoid being hurt. These sources of beliefs about women's
inferiority produce and reproduce inequality in social interaction and
on an institutional level for most women at some point in their lives.
Finally Bonnie Litowitz (1990) (redirects the focus to Vygosky's
concept of the zone of proximal development and its problematic
interpretations and implications. She points out that the scenario of
sociocultural learning is typically based on adultocentric assumptions.
These assumptions lead to an image of perfectly orchestrated dyads for
smooth acquisition of adult wisdom. Resistance, conflict and creation by
the child are all but excluded from such an image.
Each of these authors points out in their own way, using different
literatures and units/levels of analysis dynamic relations between
and within identitiy formation processes that disrupt the ascription
of dichotomous categorical terms (core/periphery, insider/outsider,
powerful/powerless).
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