Just a comment on Carol Lee's article, which is as wonderful as this sort
of empirical work can get, imho. Every now and again an article comes out
that is culminative & at the same time transformative. That's what Carol
Lee's article was for me. It finally pushes the linguistic/discursive
concerns with mis-fit in home-school practices into the cognitive. I take
that as Hillocks' influence, but realized in Carol Lee's impressively
data-rich empirical terms and w/ her sociocultural acuity. Bill uses B & G
to characterize another aspect of Lee's contribution. I echo his
conclusion: brilliant; a must read.
Judy
>There is a recent article in AERJ by Carol Lee at Northwestern "Is October
>Brown Chinese?" that describes the use of chat for what I would interpret
as a
>design experiment -- an intervention that is shaped by, and evaluated through
>the use of theory -- and that also is appropriate to the present
discussion of
>development of children. She draws upon Leont'ev (1981) and the
categories and
>relations of his paper; goals, artifacts, routines, and contexts. She draws
>upon an historical analysis of the school, the students (African
Americans) and
>their discourse community, and the classroom to construct strategies for
>intervention. Her analysis focuses on the development of the activity system
>-- her classroom. She writes, as if to foretell our present discussion:
>
>"The teacher saw these youngsters as she saw her own biological children, for
>whom failure is simply not an option. She had to appreciate the humanity of
>these young people, their innate talents, and their infinite ability to
learn,
>grow, and develop. They could not garner enough resistant behavior to deter
>her determination that they would learn and master intellectually difficult
>problem solving. There is no question in my mind that such a stance was
one of
>the most powerful tools in the teacher's pedagogical toolkit." (Lee, 2001,
>p133)
>
>I find Carol's paper intriguing, especially this quote in the context of our
>exchanges here and now. The use of first and third person captures her
>analytical separation in the writing of the paper, but the import of her
>message denies the separation, affirming her (the teacher) egalitarian stance
>by the researcher (also her). There are powerful wafts of the tensions
between
>respecting diversity, and the integration of these children into society,
with
>the concurrent normalization: technocratically, the acquisition of problem
>solving skills being the necessary smudging of the childrens' difference and
>separation from the rest of society. The children resist the acculturation,
>but she won't let them -- failure is not an option. She projects herself and
>her past onto her students' future. Simultaneously, she unites what Bowles
>and Gintis specifically address as the tensions of the egalitarian and the
>productive functions of educational institutions in capitalist society --
they
>claim that both cannot be satisfied, but Carol's actions do not comply.
>
>And there is this regret and wonder, on my part, had Carol been able to draw
>upon an extended mediational form, with explicit handles for scripts, how
>cognition is distributed, and how community inserts itself into her
classroom,
>would the work and the paper have been different? It is brilliant
>nevertheless. A definite must-read.
>
>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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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 01 2001 - 01:01:39 PDT