Tim Ingold's second paper caught my interest for three reasons. First, and coincidentally, I have been doing a background study of people walking in airports, to pass the time (I accumulated over 65,000 miles last year). Second, Tim is positing that human development is not simply that of transmission of cultural and biological units of information:
"For the growth of practical knowledge in the life history of a person is a result not of information transmission but of guided rediscovery. By this I mean that in each successive generation, novices learn through being placed in situations in which, faced with certain tasks, they are shown what to do and what to watch out for, under the tutelage of more experienced hands. "
At first blush, one might think that Tim is overlooking the innovations that individuals enact in society, changing what is the culture per se in which people participate, but that is not the case. Tim writes earlier:
"The key to this understanding lies in the recognition that humans, like all other creatures, set up through their own actions the environmental conditions both for their own future development and for that of others to which they relate. Thus they figure not as passive 'sites' of evolutionary change but as creative agents, producers as well as products of their own evolution."
These ideas resonate with the studies in education that I have been pursuing. In my work with teachers, I have found that their practices do not just change with changes in the structures and processes of their thinking, but their practices change with the changes in the configurations of material things that also make up their practices, and change with the changes in children across schoolish units of time; i.e. within and from one school year to the next, and from one class period to the next, as two examples. Students and things (and the teacher too) inextricably link the classroom to the "world outside it", and consequently the research on "teacher isolation" is misleading. It is a consequence, in part, of a research focus on what is in the teachers head. I find that it is useful, instead, to begin considering greater ecological and developmental units such as "teacher-and-classroom", and "teacher-and-school" system. Unpacking the development of these systems is, to use the traditional dichotomous language as a bridge, a matter of considering the co-evolution of teacher and context.
Third, Tim addresses the embodiment of 'cognition' as skills and orientations. He indexes Bourdieu in addressing the dichotomous separation of ideal and material:
"What [Bourdieu ] has in mind is the kind of practical knowhow that we associate with skill - a knowhow that we carry in our bodies and that is notoriously refractory to codification in terms of any system of rules and representations."
Again, there is strong resonance with the questions I have been pursuing in the developments of "teacher-and-context" as people do move from place to place in the course of their work. For example, a teacher does learn something in a school of education, in a training center, and so on, regardless of how otherwise removed are those institutions from her classroom. As people change in their participation in one context, they subsequently bring a changed self to their participation in another context. Two of the contexts I have indexed so far, "school of ed" and "classroom" are often resilient to change. Moreover, they are often resilient to changing each other even though teachers participate in both contexts, as teacher in one, as student in the other. To use Jean Lave's term, they are "durable". But sometimes they are not. When they are not, I am interested in how this is possible. How is it that people enact the processes through which two or more systems of collective activity influence each other? How do people constitute one side of the material coin of intersystemic change, with the other side being the role of artifacts, that of 'boundary objects"? How do people themselves change in concert, thus linking intrasystemic change and intersystemic change?
-- Bill Barowy, Associate Professor Lesley University 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790 Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169 http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html _______________________ "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful." [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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