Ch 5

From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Jun 15 2001 - 07:29:06 PDT


Hi Folks,
Checking the archives, the following seems not to have been posted over the
last couple of days -- apologies if it actually has been. But persistence is a
valuable strategy, so here is another attempt:

My work is drawing fairly heavily upon the methodology laid out in chapter 5.
At present I have decided to immerse myself and surroundings in activity theory
-- bringing the processes and language to bear in as many situations as
possible. This includes (1) participation in a university-wide academic
planning process on assessment, (2) program redesign meetings, (3) a grant
awarded to a colleague that aims to introduce computational modeling curriculum
in the university, and of course (4) two case studies that I have initiated
relating the university to schools through two different kinds of partnerships.
 The first two, perhaps three, situations are not intended as systematic
approaches to the transformation of the environment in which I work, but rather
are the focused and deliberate externalization of a desperation that grows with
recent and local changes -- far from an intellectual terrorism (it is my strong
displeasure to use adversarial terms ;-). The side effect being some personal
growth in facility with theory, its articulation, and application. The system
is so "ripe" to accept a framework that will provide a handle on systemic
issues, that in the third situation the uptake was immediate and led to
inclusion of my preliminary analysis in a presentation at recent meetings in
D.C.:
 
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/e/

[This paragraph describes briefly some modifications I have made to the
extended activity system model in the URL above and can be skipped.] The
"community" category with this "ultra-institution" (nice phrase, Mike) must be
interpreted, as Paul recognized in an earlier posting, to be sliding towards
gesellschaft, away from gemeinschaft, characterizing the alienation that
accompanies systemic movement towards partitioned, stratified, and hierarchical
organization. "Social and Cognitive Structures" is a rephrasing of the category
"rules" to provide a form that is more receptive to the detailed description of
individual development (IMHO Yrjo, we still have much more work to complete on
this aspect, and private communications are to follow, hopefully soon)

It should also be mentioned that I have been reading the book "Schooling in
Capitalist America". (As the authors apologize, their book is only having to
do with the United States. But, as such, the title captures the disposition
held widely across the U.S. that the two terms are synonymous, and this
disposition is part of what constitutes the U.S. culture of schooling. The
title is provided as a tribute to how deeply cultural imperialism is embedded
in the collective consciousness of the country). Reading this book comes in
part from my need to weave more delicately into an activity theoretical
analysis of education the economics of schooling that has been primarily
missing in contemporary US educational research. (This relates to a case study
of a school in a county with a high level of poverty) The book takes an
historical and dialectic approach to understanding the culture of schooling -
and being well researched, it has been useful thus far, and quite radical in
view, even though it is 25 years old. The prime point of the book is that
there is a correspondence principle relating the structure of schooling to the
structure of capitalist society -- that the structures are not only similar,
but that schooling in the US reproduces and legitimatizes the inequalities,
especially economic inequalities, that exists in society. Consequently,
schools are resistant to change because of their embeddedness in larger
petrified societal economic structures that are not democratic (even though the
political structures may be). The authors claim that reforms and theories that
ignore these economic relations and will have little effect on change. My gut
instinct here is that there is a lot of work that the authors have done that
CHAT (applied to U.S. schooling research) can benefit from, and the basis in
dialectics should help with translations of former to the arena of the latter.

A side comment about the dearth of respect that tradition carries for applied
studies in the social sciences -- in education it seems to be something quite
different happening. There is a great deal of work day to day occurring within
institutions that is "theory-free" -- and it is recognized by some researchers
( Tyack and Cuban for example) that discourse among teachers often includes
very little theoretical content except of the personal kind. This is not to be
taken as disparaging of teachers. I count many friends among teachers and many
more who have my deep respect. Rather, I think it's a testimony to the
unimportance of 'in-the-head' cognitive theories that do not account for the
social, material (technological), and economic dimensions of schooling that
practitioners face in their day to day work.

Ok so -- the major weakness that a contender (known as "design experiment"),
to the developmental research laid out in chapter 5, displays is its singular
basis on cognitive theory, to the exclusion of other developments in the social
sciences. For example, the development of design experiment methodology, to
the best of my knowledge, ignores Bronfenbrenner's work on ecological validity
and reciprocality. Ironically the term "design science" purveys the facade of
science's success in shaping engineering practices, while ignoring science
itself as an historical, accumulative, and diversified ensemble of experimental
and theoretical strategies, technologies, and conceptualizations. With such a
narrow foundation, for example, it is possible to delineate and articulate
independent and dependent variables on learning outcomes. Consequently, the
focus is primarily on cognitive skills, and an approach thus defined never
comes to fully challenge the culture of schooling, and instead propagates the
deep technocratic-meritocratic structures that energize it. Furthermore, the
methodology being blind to the ecology and economy of schooling, it is not
possible for many teachers to participate in design experiments, and so while
wide-spread tinkering is not possible, perhaps it is only for those Ph.D.
candidates who can muster the resources and overcome the two major constraints
imposed by U.S. society, i.e. money and time.

I do not necessarily find that the specific sequences Yrjo provides as ideal
must be followed for developmental researchers, but that indeed, inclusion of
each of the steps described improves the richness of the work that can be done.
 As Mike has pointed out, systems come to the point where problems,
contradictions, become salient to everyone, or nearly so, and this is the
situation faced by my co-author, Cindy Jouper, in our joint study of change
with her and her school. One of the greatest difficulties faced is what to do
about such systemic problems, the key word being 'systemic' meaning that
resolution demands complex and coordinated developments by and of the many
people and of the many things that constitute the system. So it would seem
that it is necessary for the creation of new instruments to be systemically
oriented, to lead to comprehensive reforms. Unless there is experience in the
system to do so, I think that this is far from being guaranteed -- in Cindy's
situation, she appropriated the fruits of systemic change experience from
another institution, ESD113. Still, however, the constraints of the county's
economic basis militate strongly against the sustainability of an approach that
encompasses only the school system.
 
(The working paper can be accessed at
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Raymond.pdf)

What I think is special about the change lab approach is the use of such
instruments as the expanded model to help the people who constitute the system
to comprehend and conceptualize it and its processes of development. It is the
vision, and the process of envisioning, that the expanded model and the
expansive cycle, as instruments, make possible -- in asking "what is wrong?"
people can address "what do we want to do" and begin to map out a path to get
there -- these instruments mediate the collective zone of proximal development,
by providing a selective mirror through which an institution can see its
future. There are some contrasts to Senge's approach that are useful to make,
and extend the vein that I have started mining. First, Senge does promote the
creation of instruments, such as through modeling, that can lead to systemic
developments. The modeling promoted is termed "system dynamics" and there are
some well thought out connections to mathematics and using computational tools
that makes economic modeling possible and highly productive. That many
institutions have ignored the economic basis of their functioning in a systemic
view, or leave economic considerations to a few individuals, is part and parcel
of the problems institutions face in a capitalist society, where the division
of labor become highly fragmented, and where change necessarily includes
economic transformations. System dynamic modeling helps people to see, in
causal and varied degrees of quantitative description, what their system is
like -- and where to look for leverage points of change, and this is its
greatest affordance. Unfortunately, the qualitative transformations that are
necessary to enact change, to envision a new model -- hence a new structure --
are not addressed very well in Senge's work at all. But these ARE the
strengths of the expansive learning model.

I disagree with Diane that CHAT universalizes conformity and normalcy -- rather
CHAT has provided a mediational tool for a researcher to account for, and
model, major patterns in activity systems, which tend to be more universal
(within a particular ensemble of cultures/societies) and so also defining of
what is normal. CHAT goes further in describing how these systems break down,
i.e. the basis in Marx's work provide a way to account for how people become
alienated from their activity -- and thus what it is that sets the stage for
the break from normalcy. Conformity is an essential attribute of capitalist
systems, (though not limited to capitalist systems) and it seems that any CH
activity theoretical analysis would necessarily reveal what are the rules by
which a system functions -- this does not mean that CHAT promotes conformity,
but recognizes what exists. It would seem to me that is is a highly useful
step in subsequently identifying what is different, and the challenge as Yrjo
has put in one of his change lab papers is how diversity can be recognized with
such a framework. I interpret this is a call for what instruments, what forms
and models can be constructed that will contribute to richer conceptualizations
of systems in which diversity is to be valued.

BTW, the marx/heaven joke was great.

bb

=====
"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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