[Xmca-l] Re: History(ies) of this discourse community and futures past

[Helena Worthen]

Greetings:

I have now read the Gack and Finkelstein 1992 piece, The Seeds of XLCHC, and most of Eva Ekblad's 1998 piece, Contact, Community and Multilogue: Communication in the Practice of Scholarship, up to the section "Relations of Interweaving and Tension".    

There is a lot to think about here.  However, I feel some urgency to find out more about this statement, which is in a quote on page 3-4 of Gack and Finkelstein: 

Only grant proposals that de-emphasized social factors in favor 
of individual change, or which promoted new technologies 
in a culturally neutral way, won support (Carnegie, 40)

There is no entry for Carnegie in the References on page 49. However, on the timeline at the back of the paper there is a mention of a 1984 Carnegie interim report and a 1985 request for funding. 

I am interested to see "social factors" opposed to "individual change." I assume social factors include things like race, poverty, diversity in a classroom. "Individual change" would be the kind of things that are measured by standardized tests.

I would like to know if it's possible to track the overall de-funding of research on social factors and the shift to focus on individual change into the present time.  At what point did it stop even being a topic that people talked about?

The unspoken phrase, from my point of view, is "collective change," in the sense that social factors affect collective change (and collective learning), whereas what affects individual change is inherent personal factors. So the study of social contexts, specifically learning and development in their social context, is a politically charged topic.

Am I on the right track, here?

I will read the rest of Eva's paper soon. She's one of the most brilliant people ever to have been on this list. Where is she now?

Helena Worthen
510-828-2845
helenaworthen@gmail.com