Actually I saw byproduct a little differently. My concern with identity
was not so much it being a byproduct, but historically education as an
activity setting turns byproducts into a rather explicit objects. For
example, internalization happens in any cultural activity, but for better
or worse in education it becomes an explicit goal and technologies have
emerged that measure it.
When one looks at recent attacks on whole language, new math, and other
curricular ideas it is one where the tension is not only about product vs.
process, but also identity. In reading Tudge and Co's. chapter in Artin's
book on play, it reinforced the notion that education is centrally about
identity. Education (highschool vs higher education) was the determiner of
working class / middle class and it very much impacted identity in the
sense of parental values during the preschool age.
Implicitly or explicitly identity has always been a part of education, and
I saw you pointing towards looking at it with a more explicit focus, which
I agree with. Lave (1991) stays away from the educational context for good
reasons, although, the notion of "community of practice" has been applied
in that arena. My concern lies when terms like identity are used as a good
"in itself" without asking the question of "what" such as what kind of
identities are being created in schools.
I agree when you say,
"But we are always in the process of 'doing identity' as we do other
things, and which things we do, or how passionately or seriously or
interestedly we engage with them, often makes more sense when viewed in
terms of how they sustain or advance identity projects than otherwise.
Yet, as Walkerdine describes it the above would be part of the "regulation
of pleasure" that, we, as educators create environments for. Or as Rose
(1999) argues that "freedom" is not in opposition to governing but a
technique of governing itself. I don't assume that education can not be
about identity, its part of education and culture, what I do have concerns
about is when identity is seen as a good "in itself".
A "what" may point towards how the opportunities we give children are very
limiting. To use Gloria Landsing Billings language we give students
minimal opportunities to experience "success". If one, for a host of
reasons, is not that "successful" in the more academic aspects of schooling
one is left out in the cold. So, while agreeing that identity is central
and connected to the historical timescale I am left with what it all means.
Does it mean that education becomes a broader concept that takes into
account the multiplicity of histories that are involved, or is it another
tool in which we as educators "exploit" those histories for our
assimulationist project.
/\ / /\ | /-----
/ \ / /__\ ---|--- /---
/ \/ / \ | /----
Nate Schmolze
http://www.geocities.com/~nschmolze/
schmolze who-is-at students.wisc.edu
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"Pedogogics is never and was never politically indifferent,
since, willingly or unwillingly, through its own work on the psyche,
it has always adopted a particular social pattern, political line,
in accordance with the dominant social class that has guided its
interests".
L.S. Vygotsky
********************************************************************
----- Original Message -----
From: Jay Lemke <jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu>
To: <xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Sunday, November 07, 1999 11:22 PM
Subject: Re: November identities
> Some very important and rich questions in the last few comments on the
> timescales paper. I will get to a number of them, at least briefly, as I
> snatch time in the next couple busy days.
>
> Nate particularly asks about the issue of doing identity work in
situations
> where identity development may be at best a by-product, where students,
> say, do not have a lot of choice about tasks, or where other goals are
> foremost and identity development indirect or automatic.
>
> I think what I am trying to say in the paper is that USUALLY identity
> development is a by-product in this sense; I don't think we have much
lore
> in our culture about how to go about doing identity development as such
> (except perhaps for the impulse to try new things to see if they are
'us').
>
> But we are always in the process of 'doing identity' as we do other
things,
> and which things we do, or how passionately or seriously or interestedly
we
> engage with them, often makes more sense when viewed in terms of how they
> sustain or advance identity projects than otherwise. What we are
conscious
> of, I think, is how much we like doing something, how good we feel about
> doing it, how competent or fascinated, how 'right' it feels for us. These
> feelings are a manifestation of dispositions, with longer timescale
> relevance to our lives beyond these moments of activities, which
constitute
> identity. Identity as lived, as well as, or more than, identity as
> articulated. I think there is often a great difference between who we
would
> say we were if asked, what we would identify with, and how we tend to act
> and what we tend to feel while acting. There are very limited terms to
say
> our identities, but vast richness in the semiotics of action and feeling,
> to enact identities which are much more specific than we could have words
> to name.
>
> Identity, at root, is bodily. It is however also a key link between the
> bodily and the discursive; which is probably why it is so much an
> intellectual issue just now when the great problem of our times is
becoming
> the issue of articulating the bodily, the felt-material, with the
> discursive-representable. There are such great slippages today for many
> people between what our cultures let us say about who we are and what we
> feel and how we actually do feel and behave. 'Identity' means who/how we
> feel we really are/do, and that cannot be captured by the discursive, by
> what/who we can say we are, though there must be a discursive part to it.
I
> think many of us share the intuition that our bodily-material
integrations
> with the rest of the ecosocial system are what enable us to feel things
we
> cannot say, and ultimately to say new things because we have first felt
> 'them' (the said and the felt can never be quite the same, of course).
> Identity is a key part of the advancing struggle for new meaning, meaning
> that is meaningful for us because it speaks from what we have already
felt.
>
> The role of identity then is mainly about our affective engagement with
> tasks and activities, even with discursive activities like talk; with
> topics and school subjects, with sports activity or home activity, with
> career activity, sexual activitities, etc. In these ways (and many
others)
> the body carries meaning forward for us from task to task and activity to
> activity, linked by feelings and dispositions and habits, some of which
> have discursive representations.
>
> There are fundamental problems here for any science that limits its sense
> of valid knowledge to the discursive. Or of valid ways of coming to know
to
> discursive practices. This issue comes up again and again in the history
of
> the human sciences (I think of Polanyi's "tacit knowing" in the last
> generation; Freudians before that). The discursive is the tip of the
> iceberg, whether in learning, knowing, feeling, identity, or teaching. A
> very long tradition that has suppressed the bodily-affective 9/10-ths,
> denigrated it, feared it, identified it with women, children, primitives,
> serfs, working class people, non-Europeans, etc. has kept us safely from
> articulating identities and practices of real human power, especially in
> education, and produced a degree of alienation that is already turning
> explosive.
>
> What does this mean on the historical timescale?
>
> JAY.
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------
>