cf. sitcog, chat RE: [xmca] Unbelievable - & Spanish

From: Tony Whitson (twhitson@UDel.Edu)
Date: Sat Oct 21 2006 - 09:52:24 PDT


I never had a chance to contribute my thoughts on the thread questioning
the relationship between situated cognition and socio-cultural approaches,
but Anna's & Michael's comments here touch on one of the points I would
have included in my response.

I don't see sitcog and chat as alternative theoretical frameworks; I see
them more as overlapping traditions. For now I won't say more about
comparing those overlapping traditions, except that I think a difficulty
in comparing them is that chat does have an LSV, but sitcog has no one
like that. (I'm using "chat" here as a shorthand for socio-cultural.)
That means chat has something of a canonical core, no matter how
critically or dialectically that core is used in ongoing discursive
practice, while sitcog has nothing like that.

Jean Lave, for example, is nothing like an LSV for sitcog. My sense is
that when the Lave & Wenger book was published, they had both moved on to
their respective approaches to Legitimate Peripheral Participation in
Communities of Practice (which I & others refer to now as CoP, rather than
as sitcog), and already were no longer thinking of "situated cognition" as
their orienting framework. Meanwhile there is a more cog-psych oriented
sitcog movement that is still developing. I think they have a new Handbook
soon to appear (Cambridge UP?).

CHAT has a kind of richness and maturity that is unlike sitcog, partly due
to how it's rooted in the LSV-anchored canon (to mix metaphors). I think
bb shared a co-authored paper maybe 2 years ago in which he explained
using chat rather that CoP because chat provided resources lacking in CoP
for analyzing some of the things in that paper. Not a choice between
differing theories so much as a selection of one toolbox rather than the
other (as I understood it).

One implication is that when it comes to a question of comparing chat with
sitcog, it's harder to even know what is the "sitcog" to be compared with
chat, IMHO.

What do you thiink?

On Sat, 21 Oct 2006, Stetsenko, Anna wrote:

> Michael, I could not agree more...Not that long ago I have argued for the same approach - being critical of the premises of CHAT in way of critically transforming them in view of new realities and challenges and also suggested that this is in line with the spirit of this very theory with its transformative (rather than contemplative) gist. Yes, this should not be viewed as heretical or dangerous.
>
> To bb: no absolute, universal, pre-existing, a-historical template against which to judge and define 'heights' was meant to be suggested. 'Heights' can only be relative to the goals one sets to pursue, i.e. they are historically and culturally determined, from within activities with their agents, participants, adressees, that is, relative to questions like 'what for,' 'for whom', 'againts whom,' 'in whose interests' etc. (somewhat similar to standpoint and critical theory). That is, 'heights' (and all associated ideas of progress) as socially constructed yet tangible, useful, and above all, necassary -- if one wants to act rather than merely contemplate how things are. A whole different philosophy and epistemology, I would say.
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Wolff-Michael Roth
> Sent: Sat 10/21/2006 8:26 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Unbelievable - & Spanish
>
>
>
> Anna,
> I meant fully not as finite and complete, but as infinite and
> incomplete. I also meant to say that we ought to be allowed to say
> things LSV hasn't yet said because it was unfinished in his thinking
> WITHOUT being called heretic.
> There is a nice essay by Husserl in his Crisis texts, it is called
> something like the "Origin of Geometry" where he writes about the
> reproduction and production of ideas, a process by means of which
> geometry becomes ideal... and his use of the word ideal appeared to
> me not unlike the one by dialectical philosophers such as Il'enkov.
> Michael
>
>
> On 20-Oct-06, at 5:05 PM, Stetsenko, Anna wrote:
>
> Michael, there is a curious contradiction in what you are saying --
> because "fully thinking dialectically" (your expressions) is
> impossible by the very nature of what dialectics takes thinking to be
> -- positing it as a process that can never be complete, full,
> terminal in any sense. Instead, dialectical thinking presupposes that
> there is always a next step, and a new height, however 'full' one's
> thinking is. Vygotsky at least was fully aware of this, by the way,
> as is clear from many of his works, including the 'Crisis' (where he
> is extremely self-critical and self-reflective as to inclompleteness
> of his own thinking and where he predicts that his own ideas will
> have to be challenged in the future; see last passage of this work).
>
> And how about this, from Vygotsky:
> 1. one can certainly think without words
> 2. the ability to think without words is only given by the words.
>
> pretty dialectical, I'm thinking (though not fully dialectically).
> AS
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Wolff-Michael Roth
> Sent: Fri 10/20/2006 3:46 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Unbelievable - & Spanish
>
>
>
> In all your deliberations about (mono, bi-, multi-) lingualism,
> consider the following incompossible, contradictory propositions that
> are truly dialectical in their tenure and are sublated in actual
> human praxis:
>
> 1. We only ever speak one language.
> 2. We never speak only one language.
> (Derrida, 1998, p. 7)
>
> Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the Other; or, The prosthesis
> of origin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
>
>
> To anyone interested in a dialectical account that LSV never could
> achieve because he was not fully thinking dialectically---according
> to a number of texts I recently came across---I recommend this little
> booklet very highly.
>
> I think we are allowed, and this is fully compatible with a
> dialectical theory of science (see Il'enkov) to go beyond the giants
> (i.e., LSV) on whose shoulders we stand.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Michael
>
>
> On 20-Oct-06, at 10:08 AM, nacho.montero@uam.es wrote:
>
> Ok guys,
> let's go with bilingualism
> Vale,
> vamos con el bilinguismo
>
> As a first time, I´m going to try with both languages at the same time.
> Como es la primera vez, voy a intentar usar las dos lenguas.
>
> My comment today is that it is very important to realize that a real
> bilingualism should include scientific knowledge -whatever you want to
> understand by this.
> Mi primer comentario es que considero muy importante darse cuenta de
> que un
> bilinguismo total debe incluir el conocimiento científico.
>
> Last week, Olga Vazquez visited my University and made a presentation
> on "La
> clase mágica". One of the most relevant comments from the audience -
> all of us
> spanish researchers and undergradute students- was about the
> assymetrical
> bilingualism that we still perceived within that so interesting
> experience
> implemented by Olga and her collaborators.
> La semana pasada Olga Vazquez estuvo en mi Universidad presentando su
> investigación en "La clase Mágica". El comentario más repetido por
> parte de la
> audiencia fue sobre nuestra percepción de que el bilinguismo
> implícito en la
> experiencia es todavía asimétrico.
>
> We expressed this idea in terms of a defense of Spanish as a scientic
> language. But we also realized that it would be applied to other
> languages and
> we made a parallelism between the Mexican at the USA and the arabian
> at Spain.
> Expresamos esa idea como la necesidad de defender el español como
> lenguaje
> científico. Pero también éramos conscientes de que eso afecta al
> resto de las
> lenguas. Reflexionamos sobre la situación de los inmigrantes de
> origen árabe
> en ESpaña y establecíamos un cierto paralelismo con la situación de los
> inmigrantes de origen Mexicano (hispanos en general) implicados en la
> Clase
> Mágica.
>
> So I think is time to tackle the issue in XMCA, but I wonder if
> Thought &
> Language is to long as a first attempt. We can go twofold. Just some
> chapters
> from T&L. Or just some chapters from M in S. I'll delighted any way.
> Así que creo que ha llegado el momento de abordar este asunto dentro
> de XMCA
> pero creo que Pensamiento y Lenguaje puede resultad demasiado largo
> para un
> primer intento. Podemos empezar por algún capítulo aunque también
> podemos
> hacer lo mismo con "Mind in Society". Estaré encantado con cualquiera
> de las
> dos opciones.
>
> NACHO.
>
>
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Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK DE 19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
  are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                   -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)

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