>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.
Paul, I don't think that this is really justified. There are people
who do both work in practice and do theoretical work. Ken Tobin and I
have been teaching in inner city schools and have been theorizing our
work in terms of coteaching/cogenerative dialoguing, a pair of
activities dialectically related in the opposition of knowing to
teach and knowing about teaching, or in other words, the dialectical
pair praxis/praxeology. The inherent contradictions embodied in each
pair are growth points in our work, or points where learning by
expanding can occur.
We elaborate these points extensively in a new book which is going to
come out this year, which takes an activity theoretic (Marxist)
perspective on learning to teach in inner-city schools:
Roth, W.-M., & Tobin, K. (2001, to appear). At the elbow of another:
Learning to teach by coteaching. New York: Peter Lang.
As to your comment about "priorities." I guess as academic, I am
predisposed to writing when I am not in class teaching... the
objective conditions of university tenure promotion and salary
processes... But this is only half the story, or relatively
unimportant at this stage in my life. Writing is for me the primary
activity... unless I can write something in ways that others can
understand I do not have the sense that I understand. So writing IS
learning, whereas talk, and email is an extension of talk, doesn't do
the same thing.
Someone was writing here the other day that s/he was thinking
aloud... but thinking aloud is not understanding... it is a process.
For me, writing IS thinking--distributed across all the resources and
mediated by the particular community and its rules that you can
imagine.
If you are interested in a reflexive analysis of interpreting and
writing, why not go to the following URL:
http://wase.urz.uni-magdeburg.de/povel/fqs-texte/2-01/2-01review-roth-e.htm
Cheers, a nice Sunday afternoon for those who still have Sunday,
happy week beginning for people who are already beginning their work
week.
Michael
------------------------------------------------------ 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/ ----------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 01 2001 - 01:01:55 PDT