Eric,
I think that one of the areas where the attempt to apply these theoretical
constructs as a unified <scientific> discipline" is being or has been made
is activity theory itself. I bracket the word science since it is sooooooo
loaded and, as Leslie White said , "Science is Sciencing", long before any
of the current wave of people who claim originality for discovering that
there's a difference between what scientists do and the way they account for
their own activity. (Grind axe, grind!) This of course doesn't mean that
people working with one or another of the elements out of which activity
theory has been constructed are in fact making any contribution to this
effort. And I'm sure you've been able to appreciate here the fact that
people working or claiming to work with one or another of the elements out
of which activity theory has been constructed often are in fact using those
decontextualized elements to reinforce a very non-dialectical, status-qup
preserving perspective under various guises.
All of this leads me to wonder why we aren't discussing Ch.2 of LBE or now,
since it's sunday, CH3. I sort of understood that AERA meetings would have
an effect but now that's a week ago and I'm sort of surprised that Bill and
Michael, who presented on research grounded directly in the CH2 proposal
(triangles and contradictions in profusion) haven't weighed in. But then
everyone has their priorities. I've been trying to understand why the
recent theoretical discussions of activity systems (in general) seem to have
developed little on the basis of the practical implementation and why the
practical implementations have so little coherent relationship to an ongoing
theoretical development. I think your point about the restricted position
within which academics work is very relevant: the dominant activity system
has more to do with the production of academic commodities than it does with
the kinds of transformation to the object activity system that "learning by
expanding" presupposes.
There are exceptions. Yrjo Engestrom's presentation at AERA ; as it turns
out, disccused the very same systemic contradiction that has emerged in the
work i'm doing with a local cyber-culture project with kids who are in the
continuation high school they put you after they kicked you out of the first
level continuation high school. (sounds a little like Dante's circles of
hell, and in certain respects it bears the comparison). To my mind it's a
question of expanding the ZPD concept to take in much more explicitly the
social class codes and the ZPD becomes a two street in which the one
providing the tools has to modify what they expect to provide, the teacher
might not be able to present the "tool" (in this case
multi-media/computer-based video production) in relationship to the
"object" they imagined (eg, learning to produce professional videos) but
might have to see that object changed to something that only has meaning
within the kids' space (or as Freire would put it, within the
situation-limits that they themselves relate to), and as a consequence the
whole pattern changes. Those situation limits are also perceived
differently by the teacher and the kids participating in the project.. I
suspect I'll be writing more about this to xmca as it unfolds since it bears
so closely on LBE, esp. ch3 and ch4. Theoretically it involves the whole
smorgasbord: ZPD, school culture, working class/lumpen teen age rebellion,
etc. on one side, and our attempt to provide these kids with some tools but
being bound by our own class/cultural background, ideas about the kids
"attitudes" (eg., "I won't play into their game of freeloading!"), on the
other. Well all of this is kind of confused right now, but that's good,
it means somethings happening in general, and I'm looking forward to the
interplay of working with this group using an activity systems approach to
orient the practice. Hopefully everyone involved will come through with a
new self-concept, that is new subjects and objects, and hopefully an
expanded one in which the relative positions of subject and object are
rearranged if not totally sublated in a new synthesis.
Paul H. Dillon
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