> >In short, in childhood, the money relation exists on the periphery of her
>>world, but it is the periphery that leads to the real world, the world
>>outside of family and teachers, the world into which she will one day
>>"grow
>>up".
>
> this comment about the 'real world' or money relationships being on a
>child's periphery struck me so directly - like the obverse of Lave &
>Wenger's notion that one is on the periphery of an activity, moving more
>into greater and greater participation - yet the way you've described it
>from the participant's - the individual's - perception, it is the
>activity that is peripheral - i like this - especially as a classroom
>teacher - it also for me reflect's on a batesonian notion of context
>being so critically important in perception and activity.
Hi, you might want to think about these issues in terms of Bourdieu's
work, which is a sociological phenomenology where structure and
construction work together in a dialectic relation. So for children,
they always and already come to a world in which money and exchange
shape interactions; these patterns have the potential to shape the
individual, but whose perception structures whatever there is to be
perceived. Bourdieu talks about structured structuring dispositions
(which he called habitus) a notion that was taken up by Jean Lave
(1988).
So I don't see why a distinction between real world and other world
is necessary. The child's world is different, because all of our
lifeworlds ('umwelts'...) are different from the phenomenological
perspective, but at the same time, they are not entirely independent
because developed under similar conditions.
I am not sure whether it makes sense to distinguish inside world from
outside world, they are likely to share considerable structure, and
the changes are on a continuous scale rather than from black to
white, inside to outside.
I assume similar things to occur in the Vygotskian distinction
between internal and external, social space and psychological
space... If cognition is distributed, there are gradations of
internal and external, and making maximally use of available
resources, distributing cognition across resources, seems to lead to
successful problem framing and solving.
M
------------------------------------------------------ Wolff-Michael Roth Lansdowne Professor Applied Cognitive Science MacLaurin Building A548 Tel: (250) 721-7885 University of Victoria FAX: (250) 472-4616 Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4 Email: mroth@uvic.ca http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/ ----------------------------------------------------
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