RE: Space and time in chat

From: Eugene Matusov (ematusov@udel.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 26 2003 - 09:07:08 PDT


Hello Jay and everybody-

 

Thanks, Jay, for your reply.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 10:19 PM
To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
Subject: RE: Space and time in chat

 

I was very happy to see Eugene's message about chronotopes and educational
ethnography. It is just one of the topics that I raised at the recent
Ethnography in Education research conference at the U of Pennsylvania. (I
was asked to do a keynote address.)

Unfortunately I did not do a full paper, but my notes are linked from my
website at:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/new.htm

Thanks, Jay, for the paper!

The html powerpoint may only work if you have a very recent version of your
web browser, but the ppt file itself should work fine.

My major point was that ethnography increasingly has been emphasizing the
multiple sites of people lives and how we move among them, while educational
ethnography, for practical reasons but also because of not seeing schools as
tightly integrated into the rest of students' lives, has tended to stay
within the classroom or within the school. I linked this to my notion of
traversals and timescales, more or less saying that learning that matters
has to be, and is, learning that extends along the larger trajectories of
our/students' lives, and that these are never confined to classrooms or
school.

To add some flesh to the bones, it seemed to me that the notion of
chronotope can usefully unite the spatial traversals and the temporal
pacings, interruptions and resumptions, etc. of both activities-in-situ and
activities-across-places.Characterising the chronotopes of learning, in
schools and across home-school-elsewhere can be a rich project for
educational ethnography, and hopefully for formulating alternatives to
school-obsessed and classroom-myopic views of education.

Eugene usefully reminds us that Bakhtin, especially in his earlier essays,
always added the value dimension to his characterisations of how novelistic
worlds portray our human lives. This is still strong in his work on
heteroglossia (ideational and axiological unite to define a "social voice":
what we say of the world and how we feel about it). We lose something in
social science when we attempt to make value-free or value-neutral
descriptions of how people live ... even the effort to say simply what
people do and when and where they do it is misguided if it neglects to also
say how people feel about what they are doing. This is a very deep insight
in Bakhtin, and it is not surprising that it comes from his
literary-humanistic sensibility, which we appropriate today into social
science.

I just talked with Ana Marjanovic-Shane in "meatspace" (we both live in
Philadelphia) and she reminded me work by Stanislavskii (famous Russian
theater educator). Stanislavskii also focused on (at least) three
chronotopes for actor's work that roughly correspond to three chronotopes of
schooling that I described. Actor chronotopes are: 1) chronotope of play
("didactic chronotope" in school); 2) chronotope of scene (here-and-now)
(cf. "local chronotope of the classroom"), and 3) chronotope of the actor's
past experiences (cf. "ontological chronotope" although I think that
ontological chronotope is not only about past experiences, but it is also
future oriented). Ana promised to bring references from Stanislavkii..
(thanks, Ana!)

Take this in its strong form: there is no valid characterization, or even
description, of activity without a concern for evaluative orientations or
how people feel about what they are doing (good/bad, bored/surprised,
proud/guilty, enthusiastic/reluctant, etc.).

Yes. That is why is should be called "axiological chronotope" to include
value. Although, the term becomes a bit too long and awkward.

To some extent we also tend to lose sight of this key dimension of activity
when we abstract to the level of social-cultural activity systems, which are
of course very important to characterise. But it is easy to wonder how at
this level do the elements of feelings and evaluations enter? For they are
not the same for all participants, and indeed there are not often general
rules to assign value orientations to particular participants roles. The
distribution of value orientations may not be systematic when the activity
as such is the unit of analysis. Bakhtin's suggestion here is heteroglossia,
as sociologically re-interpreted to mean that the distribution of value
orientations becomes systematic in relation to participants social positions
in a larger system, across activities as well as in them. (Bourdieu makes
much the same point about habitus.)

I think we need to unpack the notion of "voice" (any help can be highly
appreciated). My students, preservice teachers, become so excited when I
stated that, in my view, the purpose of teacher education is to develop
their teaching voices. That seems to liberate them from any standardized
judgment that does not take their personal agency into account in changing
their performance. However, they challenge me, as an educational researcher,
to develop the same "voice-oriented" approach to all academic areas like
math, science, English. They said that it is easy for them to see open-ended
voice- and person- oriented approach in teacher education, art education,
even English education but it is more difficult to see it in math or science
education. What is a math voice as personal agency? What can be personal in
2+2=4?

So, I'm on the mission from my students to find answers to their questions.
I'd appreciate any help from XMCA community.

So far, I contacted Paul Cobb and Ellice Forman, as great math educators and
researchers, whom I tremendously respect. From reading they suggested, I've
come to a conclusion that constructivist folks avoid this question by
avoiding "teaching facts" (like 2+2=4). Although I understand that
educational priority can be on teaching concepts rather memorizing facts, I
think we should not surrender teaching facts to educational
decontextualists.

Of course activity theory wants very much to retain a humanistic
perspective, and at the level of the individual-in-activity, this is done.
But at the level of the activity system, we find ourselves with a notion of
social norms of activity, and that characterizes for us the possible and
typical attitudes and value orientations -- but not necessarily how they are
distributed among actual and possible subjects engaged in the activity,
especially differentially, or why the distribution is as it is.

Yes, and I think we should get away from mono-chronotopic view of an
activity system.

What do you think?

Eugene

So the chronotope does I think offer us an important extension of our ways
of characterising activity systems at the collective and social-historical
level, not just in reminding us of the importance of space as well as time,
but also in defining a unit of analysis at this level, in which we cannot
say what sorts of things people typically do without also saying what those
actions mean, not just in relation to an object or to typical social norms,
but with respect to our value orientations quite generally. Here again is an
important case where we need to think of feelings in this sense as fully a
part of meanings. We have all long ago agreed that we have to characterise
actions and activities in terms of what they mean for the participants ...
and we still need to remember that such a sense of meaning must include also
how we are feeling about what we do. No meaning without feeling.

JAY.

PS. I think Kevin's article is faithful to this conception in the many ways
that it tells us how the students feel about activity that takes place, or
move them, from one place and space to another, which has a different kind
of meaning for them.



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