RE: [xmca] method of double stimulation

Eric, whether or not there's an intervention is probably open to
interpretation. Most of us would agree that by introducing an outsider (me)
taking notes on a laptop, there's, if not an intervention, a new variable to
account for, and I try to do that when appropriate in the articles.
Generally, I've been invited to study classes, or have gotten teachers to
agree to have me observe and record, when the teacher is doing something I
might be interested in, e.g., doing multimodal composing in an English class
(or the Language Arts strand of an alternative school curriculum). So, it's
the teacher's instruction intersecting with my research interests that puts
me in the position of collecting data then and there.

I also wouldn't say that my goal is to measure learning, at least since my
dissertation when I crunched numbers in accord with the local cultural
practice of Chicago's ed faculty at the time. I generally study people
talking while they work as a way to make inferences about how they think in
relation to task and setting. Originally I used protocol analysis in the
in-the-head tradition of information processing, although to study writers
in relation to instruction. But before long my goal became to expand what
info processing folks call the "task environment" which is largely unfilled
in their models but is the place to start from a Vygotskian perspective as I
interpret it. So, I study either individuals talking as they work (often as
they write, but also as they design houses, ranches, and home interiors) or
groups talking as they work together (e.g. as they interpret a work of
literature through art, dance, drama, music, etc.). Part of the goal is to
document situated cognition to make the argument that nonverbal composing
potentially has all of the virtues of writing as a medium for both
generating and representing ideas (tool and sign functions), an idea that
has gained traction through the popularity of first, Gardner's theory of
multiple intelligences, and now the New London Group's notion of
multiliteracies. I think that what I've tried to do complements both
efforts, although I'm less convinced that technology has primacy when it
comes to multimodal composing--the cognition required to design a house or
interpret Hamlet through pencil- or marker-rendered drawings is no less
complex than what it'd take to do something on a computer.

Hope this help to clarify, Peter

Peter Smagorinsky
The University of Georgia
125 Aderhold Hall
Athens, GA 30602
smago@uga.edu/phone:706-542-4507
http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/smagorinsky/index.html

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2008 9:37 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: RE: [xmca] method of double stimulation

On March 1, 2008 Peter Smagorinsky Wrote:

"I don't think I'd characterize my research as employing a
double-stimulation, if it means a situation "in which children convert
external assistance into means that lead to task success."
(http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327884mca0402_4) Rather, I
study (at least in the work that Eric refers to) what I'd term situated
cognition in a classroom setting. While collaboration does take place and
while I attempt to situate the students' work as well as I can
culturally-historically and in relation to the teacher's instruction, I
don't do an intervention. Rather, I study how students work in relation to
routine classroom instruction designed by the teacher (for the most
part)--a
major reason that the teacher is almost always credited as a coauthor in
the
publications and presentations."

Such an important statement - placing practice as THE primary research
tool. Perhaps, the intervention is so subtle it is difficult to discern?
"student's work (unit of analysis)" being the goal of the student (?)
"effectiveness of instruction (unit of analysis) being the goal of the
teacher (?)

the dialectic being the different unit of measuring instruction and a
different unit of measuring learning: however, in both cases 'word
meaning' is the methodology (?)

any sense at all?????

eric

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Received on Sun Mar 2 04:51 PST 2008