Re: Mind as Action

Peter Smagorinsky (smago who-is-at peachnet.campus.mci.net)
Mon, 16 Nov 1998 05:41:48 -0500

Honorine, thanks for helping us return to this discussion. I've not read
the section of Mind as Action (like others, I'm always playing catch-up)
but will offer a comment nonetheless, based on current work I'm doing. Our
project is to see how teachers' conceptions of teaching/practices of
teaching change as they enact them in particular settings. We're focusing
on early career transitions from preservice programs to the work force,
including the key period of student teaching, where the often-idealistic
conceptions stressed in universities often clash with the pragmatics of
day-to-day teaching. We're finding that, as Honorine, says, "the mediating
roles of the teacher/guides who are present and essential to the production
of student mastery, even in an altered participation structure" is an
important factor--I'd say that they in fact *create* altered participant
structures. I'm thinking in particular of what are known as cooperating
teachers or mentoring teachers--that is, those teachers whose classes
provide the arena for student teaching, and who provide the structure and
guidance for teachers in their initial teaching efforts. What's
interesting is that they might (and often do) hold different value systems
than those professed in the university, and often work to dissuade teachers
from practicing the approaches learned during preservice course work and
field experiences. The problem is compounded when university supervisors
visit to evaluate the teaching, which is often then conflicted by the clash
in goals, affordances, constraints, and practices in the two settings
(school/university). And so, to use Leont'ev's term, the *motive* that
obtains in the student teaching arena is often one that results in
confusion on the part of the developing teacher. Furthermore, the *role*
of the student teacher shifts between the two settings of university and
school: at the university the role is that of student, while in the school
the role is that of teacher, each of which suggests the pursuit of
different goals and, as a consequence, the adoption of different sets of
practices.

There's an additional set of variables that I'd like to add to Honorine's
attention to mediating agents, and that's the nested set of social arenas
in which teaching is practiced. The mentoring teachers act within settings
that constrain and guide decision-making: the school and its curriculum and
other institutionalized goals, the district and its goals and requirements
(do they require standardized tests? emphasize the arts? legislate against
whole language? etc.), the state and its mandates (often a statewide set of
competencies, but in states like Kentucky a requirement of portfolio
assessment), etc., all of which either suggest or require particular
assessments and their attendant practices.

Looks as though I've got some reading to do. The papers we're developing
will eventually be available at the web site of the Center on English
Learning and Achievement (http://cela.albany.edu).

Peter

At 08:23 PM 11/15/98 -0800, you wrote:
>
>The conversation on Mind as Action dropped off while I was trying to
>get my thoughts together about Chapter 4. Eva eventually assumed
>responsibility for the lull in the conversation, which probably was
>greatly due to many of us struggling to get copies of the book.
>I still have some questions, so, fortified by the current
>atmosphere on the list, here goes:
>
>In Chap. 4, Wertsch argues that intermental and intramental
>(interpsychological and intrapsychological) processes are the same. Both
>involve mediated action in social space. Both are mediated by "texts"
>that are at once univocal (derived from information transmission and
>characterized by movement toward intersubjectivity) and dialogic
>(characterized by multivoicedness/alterity and thereby generative of new
>thought).
>
>Per Wertsch, for Vygotsky, the intermental is the intramental transformed.
>Wertsch argues that the transformation results from alterity, or in
>Bakhtinian terms, the multivoiced nature of the socio-cultural texts with
>which one is engaged and which provide one, as agent, with multiple
>potential meanings from which to master and/or appropriate the text,
>and by extension produce new texts.
>
>Wertsch provides as an example of intermental and intramental processes as
>the same process,a study of reciprocal teaching, which,
>he argues, is an instance of the intramental (strategies used by good
>readers to comprehend and remember text) made intermental (made explicit
>and used in a group reading process) and both mastered and appropriated,
>though unconsciously, as an intramental process by the participants in the
>experience, who had previously been identified as poor readers. Wertsch
>attributes the development of the reader's mastery and appropriation to
>both the mediational means, i.e., the technique of reciprocal teacheing,
>and a change in the participant structure of the reading action context
>such that the students assumed new roles as active agents which allowed
>them to master alterity--they were challenged to pose questions of and
>about the text and this required them to see different perspectives, or
>the mutlivocality of the text (and, by implication, their agency).
>
>Wertsch compares the success of the reciprocal reading model to the lack
>of development associated with a "locating information model" used without
>changing the participation structure, or the reader's role from passive to
>active consumption of the text and generator of meanings. Reciprocal
>teaching was marked by rapidly diminishing levels of teacher interaction
>and progressively greater student/reader control of the process. In
>addition, Wertsch alludes to the time element involved in reciprocal
>teaching in order for the students to achieve mastery.
>
>"Cultural tools in and of themselves are relatively
>meaningless in the absence of competent use by an agent. Some minimal
>degree of mastery by an agent is required before these tools can really
>begin to be part of mediated action on the intramental plane.(p. 131)"
>
>This Wertsch relates to Cazden's notion of performance before
>competence: "There seems to be something essential about handling, or
>this case, 'mouthing,' a material form that provides the basis for
>attaining future levels of intersubjectivity, alterity, and mastery.(p.
>133)"
>
>In this chapter, Wertsch emphasizes the "power of the mediational means"
>as sociocultural production as well as the power of the agent as consumer,
>linking the two in mediated action, which is always socio-cultural, but
>not socio-culturally determined. This argument is extended in Chap. 5,
>and the role of the individual agent as active and powerful consumer, and
>by implication, transformer, of the products of the dominant social order
>is reinvoked.
>
>What I find myself wondering, and it is a question that I also am faced
>with in using activity theory, is what is the role of other agents present
>in the action context, and not only in the abstracted social order? Can we
>talk about the mediational means, e.g., reciprocal teaching, and not talk
>about the mediating roles of the teacher/guides who are present and
>essential to the production of student mastery, even in an altered
>participation structure? What about distribution of the mediational means
>and the power relations at work even in very local social contexts, that
>influence access within groups and between groups, elite and non-elite?
>
>I understand that Wertsch is limiting his analysis to the subject/agent
>and mediational means, but even with that restriction, are other humans
>in the context not also powerful means to action, both enabling and
>constraining that action?
>
>
>Honorine Nocon,
>Dept. of Communication
>Laboratory of Camparative Human Cognition
>University of California, San Diego
>
>
>
>