Re: not just language!

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Sat Apr 01 2000 - 19:30:44 PST


Very, true, Mike.

My recent paper at Berkeley made just this point, suggesting ways of
rethinking development as a more general and a less linear process, a
paradigm to in effect replace that of 'learning' and fill-in more of what
we try to mean by 'socialization', 'enculturation', etc.

Two dimensions to the emerging ideas: (1) that you have to look at
development as a process that takes place across multiple levels of
organization of a system, with the organism somewhere in the middle of the
levels -- all developing, dynamically bootstrapping, with emergence and
"self"-organization -- and (2) that at any given level of organization the
developing "units" are internalizing diversity from their milieus as they
re-organize their internal constituents in interaction with those milieus,
thus becoming developmentally heterochronous, mosaic mixes across what are
typified as stage-specific dispositions. One might call it internal and
external heterochrony, if that did not have unfortunate resonances.

Still a lot of working out to do with these ideas. I should soon get around
to putting the Berkeley paper on the web, where it can join with the rest
of this new series (which should include my paper for MCA eventually, too).
I've just been invited to give a plenary paper at another conference on
complexity theory sponsored by NSF in May, so there may be more
'development' after that.

JAY.

At 07:56 AM 4/1/2000 -0800, you wrote:

>Jay-- Your wrote the following with respect to language, but it strikes
>me as true about development in any domain of human life.
>mike
>----
>Also called into question were linearized models of development, or
>learning through stages. What seemed much more realistic was that (a)
>people at any given time have speech repertories that are heterochronous in
>the sense that practices and forms considered typical of many earlier and
>later 'stages' co-exist and interact and are differentially produced in
>different contexts, and (b) that development is not only 'uneven' but
>proceeds at multiple rates simultaneously in regard to different practices,
>even anticipating future stages that should not yet be possible.be possible.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------



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