There has been a lot of discussion around these terms. Both Wertsch and
Rogoff attribute it to Bakhtin.
Jim Wertsch in MIND AS ACTION (Oxford, 1998) has a nice discussion of
appropriation on pages 53-58, in the context of a discussion of Bakhtin's
original usage. He says that it, along with "mastery," is a form of
internalization.
This is different from Rogoff's usage in "Observing sociocultural activity
on three planes" (1995): her version is "participatory appropriation" and
she defines it as "the process by which individuals transform their
understanding of and responsibility for activities through their own
participation" (p. 150). She points our three distinct usages (p. 152) and
explicitly contrasts her usage with "internalization" readings (p. 151):
"rather than viewing the process as one of internalization in which
something static is taken across a boundary from external to internal, I
see children's active participation itself as being the process by which
they gain facility in an activity." Because she rejects separability
between person and context, she "treats thinking, re-presenting,
remembering, and planning as active processes that cannot be reduced to the
possession of stored objects" (p. 151).
R. Keith Sawyer
http://www.keithsawyer.com/
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
Washington University
Campus Box 1183
St. Louis, MO 63130
314-935-8724
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