Readers who encounter a new journal are rightfully curious about what it promises, other than one more journal to read. In the present case, it is easy to put aside worries on the latter score; as indicated on our masthead, this journal is the continuation of an already existing publication, The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (QNLCHC). So, the relevant questions about Mind, Culture, and Activity (MCA) are why a journal has emerged from the previous publication and what the new forms of scholarly communication indexed by the terms “newsletter” and “journal” portend for its future. The simplest answer to the question of why we have decided to go “upscale” with the Newsletter is that times have changed and with them the need for a new institution and a new kind of discourse.
When the Newsletter first appeared in 1976, its contents were largely devoted to methodological studies. This was an era when cognitive psychological methods were routinely used to draw far reaching conclusions about differences among human beings associated with such categories as culture, ethnicity, and race. On the basis of extensive comparative work in Africa, Mexico, and urban centers in the United States, we were convinced of the inadequacy of standard psychological theories and methods, and we were distressed about the uses to which they were being put. The Newsletter was seen as a forum within which scholars from a broad range of potentially relevant disciplines could seek a way out of the problems into which methodological behaviorism had led the study of culture and mind. The pages of early Newsletter issues contain articles by sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and linguists, all of whom were seeking a way to include the sociocultural world more fruitfully in our methods for studying human nature.
It is striking that the name, L. S. Vygotsky, is nowhere to be found in the first several issues of the Newsletter. It was interdisciplinary American social science that was our common source. Matters soon changed, and dramatically, with the unexpected boom of interest in the ideas of the Russian cultural-historical school that was triggered by the publication of Vygotsky’s Mind in Society in 1978. Here, it seemed, was a way of thinking that had enormous potential for according culture a fundamental role in constituting human beings’ psychological natures. To its prior methodological critique the Newsletter added explanations of a theoretical framework that could enable the formation of a new paradigm.
An essential consequence of the investigation of Russian cultural-historical psychology was the subsequent realization that it was the Russians represented only one in a broad, international, set of similar traditions which had been submerged in the rising tide of the positivist division between social sciences and humanities a century ago. In response to this realization, conscious efforts were made to re-cover the common historical routes of “sibling” traditions in Germany, England, and France. And, of course, it did not take long before additional unrecognized cognate traditions in Europe, Asia, and South America made their voices heard. The Newsletter became a more self-conscious, international undertaking.
Recent issues of the Newsletter reflect the enriched discourse that has grown up over the years. One easily sees the increased interest in post-Vygotksian activity theories deriving from the work of Alexei Leont'ev, but heavily influenced as well by northern European scholarship in the tradition of critical psychology. Early Newsletter discussions of methodologies for the study of cognition in non-experimental contexts have been superseded by more sophisticated ways of combining theory and practice in the design of new forms of activities and of studying the links among the various settings where practices labeled “everyday” occur.
It is interesting that along with the evolution of the contents of Newsletter discussions one sees an evolution in their structure, as well. In place of relatively short, “think pieces” longer and more substantial statements became the norm. Our Newsletter was becoming more “journal-like” at the same time that it was becoming broader and deeper in its intellectual and international scope.
In the last several years, discussions in the Newsletter began to intersect and overlap with discussions in the then-new medium of electronic mail. In the late 1980’s, XLCHC, an electronic discussion group that had begun as a way of maintaining contact among scholars who had spent time at our Laboratory, began to grow rapidly to include people interested in the general theoretical/methodological movement of which we were one small part. XLCHC discussions moved very rapidly, bringing together unusual, and often stimulating juxtapositions of ideas. However, our experience with XLCHC and the other discussion grouped under the XFAMILY electronic umbrella showed that while it could stimulate many interesting ideas, it did not lead to collective self-reflection. Some way of putting communication in the electronic medium into interaction with communication in printed media seemed a possible means for creating more effective forms of collective reflection.
While each of these trends contributed to our decision to create MCA, none was decisive. The final element in our decision was influenced by the fact that young scholars who had been raised to believe in the kinds of approaches that appeared in the Newsletter did not have a bona fide source in which to publish their substantial contributions. The fact that the publication was “only” a Newsletter meant that articles could not be placed in the vita category called “refereed journal articles.” What had been a useful, semi-formal means of communication was becoming a liability for the next generation.
Taken together, the various threads we have just enumerated (and others which we have not) provided some of the key ingredients of our justification for expanding the Newsletter into a journal. There is a substantial international scholarly community which takes a serious interest in study of mind as a cultural-historical process of human development. It is to serve as one of the useful media of this process that we have initiated MCA.
A basic conclusion from our brief glance at recent changes among those who read the Newsletter and participate in the electronic XFAMILY discussions is that there is much interest in and intellectual curiosity about cultural-historical theories of activity and mind. On the other hand, there is a lot of uncertainty and vagueness about key concepts, ideas and appropriate methodologies: What is the proper unit of analysis in cultural-historical studies of cognition? What are the relationships between practice, activity, and action? What do we mean by objects, motives and goals? How should we understand such concepts as community, context and mediation? What is the role of history, time and development in analyses of mediated activity? How can ethnography and discourse analysis be employed to warrant conclusions about mind within a cultural-historical and mediational framework? Many such theoretical and methodological questions are expressed in the form of dichotomies: stability versus change, theory versus practice, internal versus external, discourse versus structure, product versus process, quality versus quantity. We see this journal as a forum for joint elaboration of these issues, for the search, articulation and testing of new mediational means to overcome and transcend such dichotomies.
Such a search and elaboration requires opening up new frontiers of exchange and interaction. We will actively seek contributions from schools of thought that may not traditionally be connected to cultural-historical activity-theoretical traditions or with psychology and cognitive science as disciplines. Such schools of thought are to be found by extending our view both in time and in space. Historically, important traditions – such as pragmatism or Wittgensteinian philosophy, for example – have offered dynamic and fruitful sources for reflection. But their connections to cultural- historical activity approaches to mind have only recently begun to be widely rediscovered. In terms of space, we know too little of relevant theoretical and empirical work done around the globe, particularly outside the United States and northern Europe. By the same token, adherents of similar world views in differently located disciplines need to discover each other. The task of exchange and interaction of these kinds is central to the mission of MCA.
The articles to be published in MCA fall into four categories, the relative weights of which will change somewhat from issue to issue. The first category is devoted to articles of general theoretical and empirical import that go through a regular peer review process. We refer to the second category as “symposia.” The symposia are built around a central article that addresses important theoretical themes to which we invite commentaries from scholars from different intellectual traditions and cultural contexts. As the symposium in this issue demonstrates, our goal is to open up discussion across borders, not at closure and identification of approved ideas. The symposium authors will typically be available for further discussion in the electronic XLCHC network.
The third category contains less formal communications. They can be reports of interesting work-in-progress, summaries of e-mail discussions, or experiments in alternative genres of writing. A poem by Ray McDermott represents this section in the present issue. Our intention with respect to this category of contributions is to maintain the Newsletter’s tradition of encouraging discussion of ideas that are in the process of emerging.
The fourth category contains substantial book reviews and shorter book notes. Books about which book notes are written may or may not later be chosen for fuller review.
In putting together this inaugural volume of MCA we have sought to present as representative a set of topics and theoretical perspectives and methodologies as our restricted page limits allow. The initial article, by Dorothy Holland and James Reeves brings to bear the approach of two cognitive anthropologists on the activity of student computer programmers participating in a course on software engineering. Holland and Reeves seek to extend activity theory approaches to cognition by tracing how different programming teams develop different perspectives on the objects of their activity over time. Their analysis links local actions to their institutional contexts and different activity systems to each other in ways which make available for analysis structures of power.
Jaan Valsiner returns us to the work of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose ideas about the temporal aspects of life processes, cultural mediation, and the creative nature of evolution have generally been overlooked owing to the unpopularity of the vitalist doctrines he espoused in the later part of his life.
The affinity of Bergson’s ideas to those of more widely cited cultural- historical thinkers in the 20th century is clear from his characterization of the source of human uniqueness among species in Creative Evolution.: “If we could rid ourselves of all pride, if, to define our species, we kept strictly to what the historic and prehistoric periods show us to be the constant characteristic of man and of intelligence, we should say not Homo sapiens but Homo faber. In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools for making tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture (p. 139).” Valsiner’s wide ranging discussion makes clear the many ways in which history is central to the concerns of those who place cultural-historical processes at the center of their theorizing about human mind. The links he draws between Bergson’s ideas and those of the Russian cultural-historical psychologists and those of James Mark Baldwin on the other index a broader set of affinities that are much in need of elaboration.
The importance of perspective returns in Robert Serpell’s comparative analysis of parental ethno-theories about child development in two very different sociocultural circumstances. Serpell’s focus brings to the fore another theme central to those who ground their theorizing in everyday practical activity the necessity for academicians who theorize about social action to enter into ongoing dialogue with those who must be the informed agents of their own lives
in this case, the parents’ whose children are source of social concern that generates the research in the first place.
Our first symposium is built around an article written by Arne Raeithel for a conference that took place six years ago. Even at the time, as he notes in the introduction, there was dissatisfaction among cultural-historical activity theorists in the “paradigm of production” as the linchpin of a theory of human mind and nature. Since that time, we have witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, where that paradigm was institutionalized as one of the legitimizing ideological foundations of the social structure.
It seemed to us that the questions Arne was posing have only gained in urgency in the intervening years. Consequently, we suggested to him that he submit it for review, in the hopes that the commentaries would provide resources for further development. At the same time we sent the reviews to Arne, we asked the reviewers if they would be willing to expand upon their comments for publication. One reviewer declined, the other, Nile’s Engelsted, accepted. We then recruited two additional commentators, one a sociologist (Leigh Star) and one a philosopher (Adrian Cussins) to provide as broad a discussion as possible on the issues raised in Arne’s paper. We also invited Arne to write a commentary on his own article, since he had indicated his own dissatisfactions with it after a six year interval filled with additional scholarly contributions to the issues he had addressed.
What we offer the reader, then, are several points of view on Arne’s attempt to understand the origins and mechanisms by which human beings produce and reproduce the social coherence of human communities and the special characteristics of human mind that are associated with their forms of social life.
Ray McDermott’s verse commentary on a presentation by V. V. Davydov, a leader in applications of activity theory ideas to education, touches on many of the themes that appear in the earlier article. It reminds us, in addition, that essayist academic prose is neither the only, not necessarily the most effective, way to promote reflection on theoretical concepts or the implications of our theories for the people upon whom we practice.
Taken as a whole, the articles offered here indicate the scope of our concerns. The authors are from several countries and disciplines. Their concrete concerns include the study of adult work, the enculturation and schooling of children, the historical origins of important theoretical ideas, and the crucial importance of the actor/analyst’s perspective in framing and evaluating both data and theory. We invite our readers to join with us in expanding this inclusive discussion of mind, culture, and activity.
Note: In the Fall of 1995, XLCHC, the electronically mediated discussion group, has changed its name to XMCA. To subscribe to XMCA, follow these instructions:
1. send an e-mail to xmca-request@weber.ucsd.edu, with a single word, subscribe, in the BODY of the message.
2. In reply to your subscription request, you will receive an instruction to send a personal profile message to xmca-request@weber.ucsd.edu. Prior to accepting your subscription request, XMCA requires all participants to introduce themselves and their interests to the group by submitting their personal profiles.
3. Please send your personal profile to xmca-request@weber.ucsd.edu, with the words, self-description, on the SUBJECT line.
Central to cultural-historical approaches to the study of mind is the assumption that characteristically human psychological processes are culturally mediated, historically developing, and arise from the socially organized activities of everyday life. The three articles presented in this issue of MCA each illuminate and elaborate upon different aspects of this basic starting point.
Geoffrey Saxe begins with the point that fundamentally new approaches to a scientific problem require thorough rethinking of the methods of research and analysis. As Saxe notes, the 1970’s were a period in which those who pursued cross-cultural studies using standard psychological techniques experienced severe doubts about both methods and the theories that justified those methods. In many cases, these doubts were generated by discrepancies between conclusions warranted by existing psychological procedures and those obtained by participation in the life of the people being studied. At some point, critiques of the old began to give way to proposals for a new way of doing things, of which Saxe’s approach is one exemplary result.
The methodology Saxe describes combines certain elements of the cultural- historical approach followed by A. R. Luria in his cross-cultural work with a developmental approach proposed by Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan. While this combination is uniquely Saxe’s, it has the interesting property of re- connecting two historical lines in the study of culture and cognitive development, as Werner’s early work had a major influence on the development of the Russian cultural-historical school. From Luria, Saxe adopts the idea that periods of rapid cultural change and historical discontinuity, offer especially rich opportunities to observe the dynamics of cognitive change. From Werner and Kaplan, he adopts a dialectic of form-function transformations in which new functions embodied in cultural practices give rise to abandonment of old cognitive forms and the search for new, more adequate forms; when new forms adequate to new functions are achieved, cultural practices change and the conditions are then ripe for the discovery of new functions. Note that these ideas are illustrated in both domestic and cross-cultural research, emphasizing the point that cross-cultural research is only one way to study culture and cognitive development.
Sherry Turkle’s article illustrates a quite different kind of cultural practice and equally different mediational means the new forms of activity afforded by role playing games instantiated on international computer networks, an infrastructure which, as Turkle comments, means that the world that people inhabit, in conventional terms, does not even exist, giving rise to the popular notion of virtual reality.
As Turkle makes clear, the kind of gaming she describes cannot be dismissed as simple escape. Rather, it has an instrumental function in people’s lives, although it is not a strictly utilitarian activity. Here we see a connection between Turkle’s characterization of the function of computer-mediated role playing games and Marx Wartofsky’s (1979) ideas about the existence of a special kind of artifact he dubbed “tertiary artifacts” “ . . which can come to constitute a relatively autonomous “world,” in which the rules, conventions and outcomes no longer appear directly practical, or which, indeed, seem to constitute an arena of non- practical, or “free” play or game activity (p. 208).”
Wartofsky remarks that such “possible worlds” provide candidates for conceivable change in existing practices. Such imaginative artifacts, he suggests, can provide tools for changing current praxis. In modern psychological jargon, modes of behavior acquired when interacting with tertiary artifacts can transfer beyond the immediate contexts of their use. Although Wartofsky applies this hierarchical conception to works of art and processes of perception, they seem entirely appropriate to Turkle’s objects of analysis, extending significantly the range to which the notion of artifact mediation can be applied.
Elizabeth Finkel and Jim Stewart introduce yet another system of activity and mediation, high school science lessons. Although they do not mention his name, their work can be seen as an analysis of the processes that occur when schools engage students in authentic activities, as Dewey long ago urged they should. Their starting point is the work of sociologists of science who highlight the facts that scientific research involves collaboration, knowledge is used to produce knowledge, and cognitive strategies change in the process of knowledge production. The processes of change they document are quite heterogeneous, but it is striking that the normative pattern is one that accords quite well with the process of change proposed by Saxe: once anomalies are discovered, a period of “mucking around” begins as a result of which new cognitive forms emerge, which in turn leads to application of new forms to the “old” problems. The authors analyze students’ use of models in learning science. Models are a potentially powerful type of mediating cognitive artifact, heavily used for example, by V.V. Davydov in his pathbreaking instructional experiments. The exploration of this and other mediational modalities will surely be a continuous concern of this journal.
References Wartofsky, M. (1979). Models. Dordrecht: D. Reidel
It is one of the benefits of publishing The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition for 15 years before undertaking Mind, Culture, and Activity that articles become recognizable as part of a long conversation in the lives of the authors. Jim Wertsch’s early applications of Vygotskian ideas to questions of metacognitive development first appeared here in January, 1978. In April, 1978, Barbara Rogoff published an early account of her use of spot observation techniques to study questions of culture and cognitive development. The intervening years have been rich in interactions they have generously contributed to, and rich in historical changes in the contexts of those interactions. It is a special privilege to be able to publish recent expressions of the trajectory of their thinking in this issue.
Jim Wertsch’s article on mediated action, like Arne Raeithel’s article (Mind, Culture, and Activity, issue 1-2, 1994) on symbolic creation of society, is, properly speaking, not really altogether recent, having been written for a conference two years ago. It is all the more interesting that the future course of events has confirmed Wertsch’s insistence that the enterprise of achieving a more powerful sociocultural theory of human nature will require a broad interdisciplinary effort.
Wertsch’s choice of “Sociocultural studies” as a title for the enterprise invites extended discussion which we would be glad to see in the coming issues of MCA. The names one chooses to use do a lot of symbolic gesturing, and it is not always clear what is at stake. It is important to explore the common ground among related approaches, along with their differences.
Since Wertsch offers the work of Barbara Rogoff as a fellow advocate of sociocultural studies, it is especially fortunate that her article on communities of learners appears at the same time. A characteristic of theories that focus on mediated action as a unit of analysis is a tendency to present distinctions and linkages between actions and the activity systems (to use Leont'ev’s term) which constitute them as a relatively faint or insignificant outline. The notion of a community of practice broadens the perspective. Yet, the theoretical content and dimensions of the concepts of community and practice are still largely unspecified. In particular, the idea of object- relatedness of activity, so crucial to Leont'ev and activity theory, presents a conceptual challenge to theorizing on communities of practice.
As Kozulin and Venger note, their study of the enculturation of Russian Jews into Israel is best considered a pilot study. Given the necessary element of arbitrariness in dividing consciousness into separate spheres, the emphasis of institutional consciousness among emigrés speaks volumes to the way in which the state apparatus mediated their everyday activities. The authors’ analysis suggests homologies between processes of change that occur not only on the microgenetic and ontogenetic levels, but also on the level of entire national sociocultural systems.
In the lead article of this issue, Vera John-Steiner writes about cognitive pluralism. She illustrates just a few of the many ways in which to mind and activity are constituted through mediating objects, considered as residues of prior mediated action. John-Steiner is concerned with a theory that subsumes macro and micro levels of analysis in a processual theory of how macro and micro are created in the course of human activity. We particularly want to point out the many sources of data that John-Steiner and her colleagues have drawn upon in developing the idea of cognitive pluralism; experimentation, diary studies, and not least a study of the history of words and activities are a part of John-Steiner’s methodological tool kit.
In the first issue of Mind, Culture, and Activity (Vol. 1, Nos. 1-2, 1994), we published a symposium centered around an article by Arne Raiethel. In this issue, we continue the genre with a symposium on the work of Anselm Strauss, specially edited by Susan Leigh Star, herself a student of Anselm’s.
Anselm Strauss’s work is important for the readers of MCA for several reasons. Strauss is a follower of the pragmatist tradition of Dewey and Mead. His version of symbolic interactionism is above all an interactionist theory of action, systematically presented in the recent book Continual Permutations of Action (Strauss, 1993). This theory has striking similarities with Vygotsky’s and Leont'ev’s cultural-historical theory of activity. As Strauss’s article points out: Because of the phenomenon of multiple actors, significant interaction is also developmental it evolves over time, the consequences of previous phases often folding back into the next interaction as relevant conditions for it. (... ) This is homologous with the sense in which previous actions become materially mediating objects in activity theory.
Strauss is a sociologist. His theory of action and his grounded theory methodology build conceptual bridges between the micro events of everyday life and the macro-sociological order. This endeavor is shared by the cultural-historical approach. Activity theory and other mediational theories of mind need to be more than psychological theories in the narrow sense of the word. In this regard, much can be learned from Anselm Strauss and the commentators of his work who write in the symposium.
References
Strauss, A. (1993). Continual permutations of action. Hawthorne: Aldine de Gruyter.
Personal examples, narrative schemes, crepe paper streamers, mathematical symbols – what is the common denominator here? All these are cultural mediators of human activity and cognition. Each one of them is a central focus of one of the articles in this issue.
The exhortation to “begin where the student is” has been a central tenet of activity-based approaches to education for the better part of this century. However, as Stanton Wortham points out in his examination of “Paiedea” or “Great Books” discussion methods, the use of personal examples as a tool for helping students to discover the meaning of texts runs the risk of sidetracking discussion into the particulars of the case rather than creating a link between the universal and the particular. Especially salient in Wortham’s analysis is the tendency of participants to enact the events recruited by the personal example, undermining the analytic strategy that invocation of personal experience is supposed to facilitate.
How is the human experience of time mediated by language? Jens Brockmeier argues that we should move beyond debates and reformulations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism at the level of grammar. From the viewpoint of language in use, narrative is the key mediating device for constructing the experience of time. Brockmeier suggests that our everyday discourse is saturated with the use of narrative schemes which tacitly support and mold our conceptions of time. He calls the study of such forms of discourse cultural pragmatics of time.
Smokejumping is an activity that requires coordination between a number of human actors, technological artifacts, and natural forces under time pressure. Rick Jonasse uses the framework of distributed cognition, developed by Ed Hutchins, to analyze how such coordination is achieved in practice. Here the crepe paper streamers are used as primary mediators, and narrative interpretations as secondary mediators of collaborative cognitive and practical actions. Together they make possible a robust, yet flexibly self-adjusting process of coordination.
Guida de Abreu addresses recent decades of research on mathematics in school and community settings. She seeks to enrich past discussions by examining the values associated with different forms of mathematical representation to the narrowly cognitive aspects of mediation through mathematical symbol systems. Consistent with current emphasis on the ways in which mastery of cultural knowledge systems is intimately connected to the forms of participation in group activity, de Abreu uses the concept of social identity as key to understand the ways in which home and school mathematical practices organize children’s mathematical problem solving. Her results highlight both the diversity among children’s mathematical activities across settings and the disrupting effect of the high status of school mathematical practices on for children from low status families.
Together these four articles point toward the conclusion, formulated by Jonasse, that “any distinction between language, other shared artifacts, and activity needs to be drawn very carefully, for (...) all are tools for providing the common meanings necessary to make the concerted action possible.” At the same time, Wortham and de Abreu’s analyses remind us that mediational artifacts and the narratives of which they are a part participate in many different activities. This implies that whenever they are introduced into ongoing interactions, their polysemic nature gives rise to multiple possibilities for joint construction of next moments of the activity. Consequently, one cannot be confident that the semiotic potential that practitioners introduce into the activity may or may not have the desired consequences, depending on the mediational system brought to play in the interaction. In short, mediators have a tendency to run amok, distorting the ends toward which action is oriented.
Both of the books under review, Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave’s Understanding Practice and Patricia Greenfield and Rodney Cocking’s Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, address issues of central concern to this journal. Chaiklin and Lave’s book reports on an important symposium held in the mid- 1980s which brought together many different traditions of work on context, activity, and practice to begin the task of seeking points of synthesis and conceptual growth. Greenfield and Cocking’s book brings together an equally diverse and interesting group of scholars to address questions of culture and development among the various minority group peoples that live in the United States. Our reviewing strategy for the Greenfield and Cocking book was to call it a “review symposium” and invite several reviewers to comment. In retrospect, we should have done the same with the Chaiklin and Lave book, but we are still learning the trade.
Because both books deserve additional commentary, we invite readers who would like to contribute to the discussion to send along their comments for publication, including, of course, the editors of the two volumes and any and all of the participants. We will open a “continuing discussion” section as materials appear our doorstep.
Personal examples, narrative schemes, crepe paper streamers, mathematical symbols – what is the common denominator here? All these are cultural mediators of human activity and cognition. Each one of them is a central focus of one of the articles in this issue.
The exhortation to “begin where the student is” has been a central tenet of activity-based approaches to education for the better part of this century. However, as Stanton Wortham points out in his examination of “Paiedea” or “Great Books” discussion methods, the use of personal examples as a tool for helping students to discover the meaning of texts runs the risk of sidetracking discussion into the particulars of the case rather than creating a link between the universal and the particular. Especially salient in Wortham’s analysis is the tendency of participants to enact the events recruited by the personal example, undermining the analytic strategy that invocation of personal experience is supposed to facilitate.
How is the human experience of time mediated by language? Jens Brockmeier argues that we should move beyond debates and reformulations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism at the level of grammar. From the viewpoint of language in use, narrative is the key mediating device for constructing the experience of time. Brockmeier suggests that our everyday discourse is saturated with the use of narrative schemes which tacitly support and mold our conceptions of time. He calls the study of such forms of discourse cultural pragmatics of time.
Smokejumping is an activity that requires coordination between a number of human actors, technological artifacts, and natural forces under time pressure. Rick Jonasse uses the framework of distributed cognition, developed by Ed Hutchins, to analyze how such coordination is achieved in practice. Here the crepe paper streamers are used as primary mediators, and narrative interpretations as secondary mediators of collaborative cognitive and practical actions. Together they make possible a robust, yet flexibly self-adjusting process of coordination.
Guida de Abreu addresses recent decades of research on mathematics in school and community settings. She seeks to enrich past discussions by examining the values associated with different forms of mathematical representation to the narrowly cognitive aspects of mediation through mathematical symbol systems. Consistent with current emphasis on the ways in which mastery of cultural knowledge systems is intimately connected to the forms of participation in group activity, de Abreu uses the concept of social identity as key to understand the ways in which home and school mathematical practices organize children’s mathematical problem solving. Her results highlight both the diversity among children’s mathematical activities across settings and the disrupting effect of the high status of school mathematical practices on for children from low status families.
Together these four articles point toward the conclusion, formulated by Jonasse, that “any distinction between language, other shared artifacts, and activity needs to be drawn very carefully, for (...) all are tools for providing the common meanings necessary to make the concerted action possible.” At the same time, Wortham and de Abreu’s analyses remind us that mediational artifacts and the narratives of which they are a part participate in many different activities. This implies that whenever they are introduced into ongoing interactions, their polysemic nature gives rise to multiple possibilities for joint construction of next moments of the activity. Consequently, one cannot be confident that the semiotic potential that practitioners introduce into the activity may or may not have the desired consequences, depending on the mediational system brought to play in the interaction. In short, mediators have a tendency to run amok, distorting the ends toward which action is oriented.
Both of the books under review, Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave’s Understanding Practice and Patricia Greenfield and Rodney Cocking’s Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, address issues of central concern to this journal. Chaiklin and Lave’s book reports on an important symposium held in the mid- 1980s which brought together many different traditions of work on context, activity, and practice to begin the task of seeking points of synthesis and conceptual growth. Greenfield and Cocking’s book brings together an equally diverse and interesting group of scholars to address questions of culture and development among the various minority group peoples that live in the United States. Our reviewing strategy for the Greenfield and Cocking book was to call it a “review symposium” and invite several reviewers to comment. In retrospect, we should have done the same with the Chaiklin and Lave book, but we are still learning the trade.
Because both books deserve additional commentary, we invite readers who would like to contribute to the discussion to send along their comments for publication, including, of course, the editors of the two volumes and any and all of the participants. We will open a “continuing discussion” section as materials appear our doorstep.
A basic tenet of cultural-historical, activity-based theories of human nature is that mind is understood as an emergent aspect of culturally mediated experience in the world. Mind is a process that exists in, and emerges over time, and hence to study mind is to study processes of transformation over time. Such research, in short, must adopt a genetic/developmental methodology.
In principle (which is to say, in a world organized just to the likes of the analyst!) one needs to consider genesis on several, co-constitutive, “levels of time” or “genetic domains”: phylogenetic, cultural-historical, ontogenetic and microgenetic. In practice, cultural-historical research is, by and large, limited to a single, or perhaps a combination of two levels. The most common combination of levels, which appears to be gaining acceptance among mainstream psychologists in recent years, is the study of microgenesis and ontogeny: how do processes of change observed at the microgenetic level become different or remain the same as children age? One way of trying to combine ontogeny and cultural history can be found in the studies of the parallels between the ontogeny of number development and historical number development in the ancient Middle East.
Cross-cultural work is sometimes viewed as a way to combine the study of ontogeny and cultural history; this was the idea, for example, behind A. R. Luria’s studies among Central Asian peasants and collective farm workers. Taking advantage of a period of rapid changes in social life associated with Soviet power and collectivization, Luria sought to determine how these socio-cultural changes impacted thought processes. Patricia Greenfield’s recent replication of work she conducted with Childs several decades ago in Chiapis is yet another example of research in this genre.
The papers by Naoki Ueno and Yasuko Kawatoko examine the constitution of literacy through the reification of artifacts in cultural practices, particularly the practices associated with trade and cooperative irrigation management. The papers by King Beach develop an activity-theoretic approach highlighting the notions of heterochrony and leading activity, and offering a way to think about the problem of transfer of knowledge as a social-cultural, rather than privately cognitive, process. Although different in their idioms, these papers are highly complementary to each other, providing an unusually fine grained analysis of the inter-digitation of individual, group, and cultural change. They also indicate the genuinely international character of current research in cultural-historical, activity approaches to cognition. The work reported in by Beach, Kawatoko, and Ueno was supported by the Toyota Foundation.
An unusually broad range of basic issues concerning the co-constitution of relations between mind, culture, and activity await the reader.
Ernst Boesch provides an extended thought experiment in the paradoxes of psychological research which seeks to illuminate the role of culture in mental life through the use of cross-cultural comparisons. His analysis pushes us inexorably to search for alternative methodologies in which rich knowledge of local circumstances is essential.
Mariane Hedegaard takes up the important challenge of practice as the crucible of cultural-historical, activity-based approaches to mind. She reports on an extensive teaching experiment (also referred to as “experiment-by-design” or “formative experimentation” which has a long tradition in Russian psychology and is currently gaining popularity elsewhere. Hedegaard’s study is one of a small number of Western European studies that apply Vasilii Davydov’s “germ cell” approach to developmental teaching. Her account makes it clear that successful applications of this approach are possible, while indicating the enormous amount of work that will be required if such practices are to become both routine and effective.
Eugene Matusov’s contribution takes up a theme with many reverberations in this journal, the role of discoordinations, ruptures, and conflict in constituting mental life. Distinctive in Matusov’s contribution is the search for ways such discoordination participates in its seeming opposite human intersubjectivity. In Matusov’s view, current approaches to intersubjectivity tend to overstate the homogeneity of experience required to permit intersubjectivity and at the same time what seems to him an overly individualistic conception of cognition. He seeks to reformulate the issues within a communities-of-practice approach. From this perspective, intersubjectivity is the emergent outcome of joint participation in the “whole ongoing activity” and individual perspectives need not be (indeed, cannot be) perfectly coordinated.
Next we present a review symposium featuring Edwin Hutchins’ monograph, Cognition in the Wild. We are especially pleased with this opportunity because Hutchins’ work, which has appeared in brief articles in this journal over many years, has had an important impact on the development of the ideas which are central to this journal’s goals.
As each of the reviewers makes clear, this is a book that deserves the widest possible attention for its unusual success in synthesizing contemporary contributions to cognitive studies from a variety of key disciplines, including anthropology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. From the perspective of MCA, Cognition in the Wild is of special importance because it demonstrates that a rigorous theory of mind which starts from the analysis of joint, culturally mediated, human activity is now a practical possibility. We are grateful to the reviewers for helping guide discussion of productive ways to build on Hutchins’ achievements.
We close this issue with a review of Sociocultural Studies of Mind, edited by J. V. Wertsch, P. del Rio, & A. Alvarez.
As indicated by their titles, common to the feature articles in the current issue of MCA is a concern with the problem of learning. But the approaches taken to learning by the current authors are distinctly not those that one would find in the pages of leading journals in educational or developmental psychology. Rather, each can be seen as an effort to articulate approaches to learning as an aspect of participation in culturally mediated joint activity, considered in relation to its institutional and societal context.
Gordon Wells seeks to increase students’ opportunities for learning by seeking to create what he calls “classroom communities of inquiry.” A major challenge in evaluating attempts to create alternative classroom practices is to come up with analytic schemes that make it possible to compare practices across classrooms with respect to their interactional dynamics. Wells proposes an approach that combines concepts of activity theory (as promulgated by A. N. Leontiev and Y. Engeström) and the systemic functional theory of language developed by Halliday.
Deborah Hicks draws upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose ideas have increasingly been brought together with those of cultural-historical activity theorists. After providing a succinct summary of several Bakhtinian principles, Hicks uses them to make several interesting arguments, including: 1) cognition is best considered a form of dialogic inner speech in which thought and feeling are co-present; 2) every action is carried out by a unique “I” who performs it and thus, action is central to the creation of individual identity. Hicks then applies her reading of Bakhtin to the analysis of a storytelling event as a way of reinterpreting the issues involved in acquiring the ability to read and the impediments that result when working-class children encounter the literacy practices of the middle class school.
Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell are also concerned with learning in schools, but the “learning” in their title is focused on the difficulties that researchers face when they seek forms of pedagogy to combat sexism deeply embedded in social practices involving new information technologies. Suspicious of current accounts of gender inequalities that see technologies as already (masculine) gendered, Bryson and de Castell seek a way to conduct research that disrupts deeply held beliefs about gender, technology, and learning. They apply this tactic, as well, to the manner in which they approach their topic, offering readers an “anticipatory” stance that invites us to engage with them in seeking research strategies that can effectively re-mediate current inequitable theories and practices. To this end, the editors invite readers to join in a discussion of the issues they raise by subscribing to the electronic mail discussion group, xmca. To join, send a message to xmca-request@weber.ucsd.edu Leave the subject line blank with the single word “subscribe” as the body of the message.
In addition to our regular book review section, we are pleased to present a poem by Charles Underwood on the experience of fieldwork in our continuing efforts to push the envelope of representational genres for the study of mind, culture, and activity.
The articles presented in the current issue of MCA confront the reader with an extraordinarily diverse range of topics. Despite this diversity, a variety of themes appear in different guises in every contribution.
We lead off with Jean Lave’s account of her efforts to formulate an approach to learning that radically criticizes theories of learning as a process of individual change, replacing it with a view of learning as an aspect of changing participation in social practices. Readers familiar with Lave’s earlier work criticizing the distinction between formal and informal schooling and her efforts to create a social theory of learning will find here a fine summary of the trajectory of her thinking, offered initially as a lecture to the American Educational Research Association on the occasion of receiving the Sylvia Scribner Award for her contributions to educational theory. Among many provocative ideas, Lave challenges educational researchers to re-examine and challenge the given hierarchical social relations that structure student teacher relationships.
This challenge is taken up by Ann Shea Bayer in her work as the instructor of a teacher education course. Bayer begins by discussing Vygotsky’s idea of a zone of proximal development and the notion that change in the process of teaching/learning can be fruitfully viewed as a process of orchestrating a shifting responsibility in joint activity in which different student perspectives are validated as the legitimate starting point for the process of change. She demonstrates that in the classroom she taught such a shift in social relations did take place, producing a form of education she terms “collaborative apprenticeship learning.”
On the surface, at least, Toomas Timpka and Cecilia Sjoberg take as their object a very different kind of learning situation the process by which multi-disciplinary design groups engage in what they refer to as “participatory information system design.” Despite the widespread belief that conditions of modern work require new forms of participatory design, such efforts have met with only limited success. The challenge in this case is to understand the barriers to success as a precondition for overcoming then. Invoking the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin they identify three distinctive “voices” those of participatory design, engineering, and practice” that must be coordinated if the design process is to be successful. Again, as in the case of Lave and Bayer, an important theme is the restructuring of social relations among traditionally dichotomized participants, where in place of teacher and student it is designer and user who must be brought into a new, dialogical, relationship with each other.
The themes of dialogue, learning, education, and the practical world of work are picked up in Gary Shank’s presentation of a portion of an exchange he initiated on XMCA, the internet-based discussion group that is part of our effort to expand the potential of traditional scholarly publications by deliberately mixing print media with computer-based telecommunications. The occasion for Shank’s intervention was the tenth anniversary of the explosion of the Challenger space module during its launch, which killed its entire crew including a teacher. Echoing critiques of education that treat children as passive elements in the process of schooling, Shank asks us to rethink the issue of school failure in terms of the possibility of “living O-rings” (the system elements which broke under the conditions of lift-off, thereby providing the proximal “cause” of the disaster. He then provides a summary of some of the ensuing discussion, which takes up his invitation to rethink the both the process of education and the way in which research conceive of it, illustrating the potential of forums such as XMCA for leading inquirers beyond the considerations that he introduced in his initial essay.
Susan de Castell takes these same themes yet another step by creating a multi-voiced review of David Barton’s text on literacy in which she includes not only students in her course on “Literacy/Education/Culture” but Barton as well.
The editors take great pleasure in the new genre of multilogue that appears to be emerging through these pages.