Re: DIALECTIC, SYNTHESIS

From: Vera John-Steiner (vygotsky@unm.edu)
Date: Sun Apr 08 2001 - 11:36:05 PDT


Jay,
Are you going to AERA? I will only be there for 2 days (Thursday p.m. and
Friday. ) But if you are there we may all go out to eat after the SIG
meeting. Sarah took some beautiful pictures in Budapest, did you take some
as well?
warm regards,
Vera
P.s. I will be heading to NYC after AERA to give a talk at CUNY, and to look
for a place to stay in the Fall of 2001. Any suggestions? Will you be
leaving the greater NY area? Ideally, I would like to exchange my house for
a pad in the city or environs for the fall semester.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, April 08, 2001 10:55 AM
Subject: Re: DIALECTIC, SYNTHESIS

>
>Nate's question takes us one next step. When an innovation (after-school
>programs) links itself (horizontal boundary crossing) to a more established
>institution (school), what determines whether it gets coopted and swallowed
>up (after-school as just more schooling) or triggers a dialectical
>synthesis .... what I characterized as the emergence of a new institutional
>joint or hybrid system in which each element is changed by entering into
>new relationships with the other(s)?
>
>This way of looking at things would lead me to ask: How is schooling
>changed by the after-school movement? what tug back does after-school exert
>on schooling? or if not directly on schooling, then, say on our ideals of
>how learning is best accomplished? or on our values about what development
>should lead to?
>
>If after-school programs just become another resource for the goals and
>means of schooling as an activity, then there is no synthesis, there is no
>real change, there is not even reform, much less revolution. There is only
>extension of hegemony. Not "expansion" at all in Yrjo's sense.
>
>We usually come back here to issues of scale. How can a small movement like
>after-school tug on a gigantic institution like schooling? even on the
>local scale of the community where they are less unevenly matched? I think
>it is possible. Probably Mike has strategized about these issues. What
>happens if teachers as well as students are involved in 5D? does it change
>their notions of what "these students" are capable of? of what students
>respond to? of what sorts of methods work? ... that much could lead to
>reform (not revolution because I don't see it as likely that even then
>there would be much change in notions about the goals of schooling).
>
>Do we know other examples where small innovative institutions-in-the-making
>have exerted disproportionate influence on much more established
>institutions to which they were linked by the horizontal trajectories of
>people and things?
>
>JAY.
>
>---------------------------
>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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