RE: History and CHAT

From: Phillip Capper (phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz)
Date: Sun Nov 03 2002 - 13:54:10 PST


Thank you Bill for that nice summary. I would want to add the point that the
historical understanding of the mesogenesis is not only necessary so that
one can understand how the embedded tensions came to be, but also so one can
understand what cultural factors that explain what came to be THEN have
changed such that NOW there are tensions in the system that are
manifestations of cultural obsolescence.

To refer to your example of schooling it is arguable that what we now see as
primary (sorry, elementary!) schools was a fine response to the cultural
context of 18th century Prussia, and what we now see as secondary schools
was excellent for that of Arnold's Rugby. It's just a pity they haven't
changed since.

Phillip Capper,
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business Ltd. (WEB Research),
Level 13
114 The Terrace
(PO Box 2855)
WELLINGTON
New Zealand

Ph: +64 4 499 8140
Fx: +64 4 499 8395
Mb: +64 021 519 741

http://www.webresearch.co.nz

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Barowy [mailto:wbarowy@attbi.com]
Sent: Monday, 4 November 2002 7:10 a.m.
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: History and CHAT

Jay raised the question of how well history is integrated into CHAT. I find
the integration explicit in several places, although not often applied in
many recent publications. In particular, chapter 5 of Learning by
Expanding
(LBE) provides a "doubly historical" incorporation of H with AT. First,
there is an historical overview of the development of the expansive
methodology, traced through Vygotsky, Scribner, and Cole and finally
including Holzkamp's theory-historical analysis. Now I haven't read
Holzkamp
-- the reference is in German, and has been inaccessible a couple of ways.
In a nutshell, what I garner from LBE is that to better grok the "system"
one
has delineated, one needs to understand the "concepts and models" that
mediate actions in the system and the development of these artifacts to
their
present forms. For me this has meant getting into an historical and
dialectical analysis, because understanding the development of the system,
the collective system, i.e. the mesogenesis (my interpretation of Mike's use
of the word), leads into inquiring into the tensions in the system -- and
those have often taken years to come to their present form. There are three
things to say that can expand the explicit inclusion of H in CHAT.

First, the resilience of some tensions is in some ways similar to the
annealing of a metal -- successive cycles of heating and cooling toughen a
metal and make it less brittle, i.e. more hard to break. I prefer this
analogy to that of "burying contradictions" for the following reason.
Successive work *around* tensions in a system, that do not get at the
underlying causes, seem to toughen the contradictions, because the
transformations in a system that would address a contradiction, after years
of its annealing, must address all those other changes in the system that
have built up around the contradiction. Example? My first pick is the
Bowles and Gintis book on the problems of educational reform, which has
taken
a well worked out historical and dialectical analysis of the present form of
schooling (at least up until 1976, the date of publication of the book).
The
resilience of educational inequality to change is a well marked and, well,
yes, still arguable issue. I recently wrote Sam Bowles about updates to his
study and he has since done a bit of work on intergenerational inequality,
but the bottom line, he says, is still the same -- the schools continue to
reproduce the inequalities in our economic system. Making changes to the
schools alone will not substantially alter the problem.

But by another example that i introduced earlier -- the time it takes for
children to "settle into the classroom" gets minor patches to shorten their
acclimatization. For example, teachers spend more time upfront making
metacommunicative acts -- telling the children what things will be like for
them. (In higher ed, we spend time up front talking about the syllabus at
the beginning of a course.) But the time it takes to settle in is
consequence of the "new school-year/new-teacher annealed structure that
won't
easily go away.

Second, relating to another thread here, locating concepts and models (and
patterns of interaction, including routines and scripts) is greatly
facilitated by discourse analysis. It is not only through discourse
analysis
that one can get a sense of what "concepts and models" are mediating
people's
interaction through utterances, it is also through discourse analysis that
one can begin to grok how those mediators are changing. Vygotsky's general
genetic law, extended beyond children to all ages, provides some insight
into
the social uptake of new concepts -- a new concept will appear in the
discourse as it is being taken up by people who enact that discourse.
Discourse analysis helps us to understand that those "concepts and models"
are not "out there" in some durable form, independent of semiosis, but they
are constantly in flux as people remake their meanings in response to each
other, and as they enact the patterns of the system, including
contradictions
and their resolutions. To me Bakhtin's dialogism is immediately useful
here,
but that connection can be made better by those who are far more expert in
it
than I.

Third, discourse analysis often occurs at the microgenetic scale -- so IMHO
there are immediately two time-scales linked here: mesogenetic and
microgenetic. In a way one can't actually separate them - doing so is more a
methodological "convenience", offering some advantage to the researcher
because otherwise the problem of understanding the system all-inclusively is
great.

There's more to say here, but time is running out and there are other tasks
at hand.

bb



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