[Xmca-l] Re: CHAT Discourse

[White, Phillip]

greetings, David - in my experience, when xmc a participants discuss a paper from MCA it doesn't appear that there is any discussion uses the research to critique CHAT/sociocultural theorizing.  it doesn't seem to be an object of xmca - and i can't think of examples when the MCA paper has been used to clarify particular theoretical points.  however, i've no data to back up these two statements - they are instead a reflection of my general impression.

in my own research when i've used CHAT/sociocultural theory to explicate the activities i've documented in my research, i have come to not see the value of attempting to identify motives.  the field of motivational theory is highly complex what with intrinsic / extrinsic categories, much less all of the other categories.  in fact, it seems to me that motivational theories are much like Maslow's theory of needs hierarchy - there's no research that supports it, even though it is taught as a concrete reality.  it's much like Perry's initial theory of adult development, or Kohlberg's hierarchy of moral development, not to mention Piaget's stages of development: they have all merely formalized cultural beliefs of western white male heterosexuals and pronounced their understandings as universal.  just as problematic for me, i've always found Leontiev's example of the tribal hunt as an example of shared motives.  the fact that people are working together on a joint activity does not indicate that they have shared motives, and i've yet to read any research in which the researcher can demonstrate with clear evidence that participants in a shared activity also all have the same motives.

on the other hand, i just finished reading "A Pedagogy of Powerful Communication; Youth radio and radio arts in the multilingual classroom", an ethnography of high school students in which community members mediate the students' thinking, emotions and creative productions.  the ethnography was written by Dana Walker, published by Peter Lang 2014.  it's an interactional ethnography working with sociocultural psychology.  she employs as support for the theoretical foundations the works of Gutierrez, Moll, Wertsch, Rogoff, Lave, Wenger, Bakhtin, Cole, Gee, Lemke, Leander, to name but a few of our contemporary xmca-ers. (well, excluding Bakhtin).  while Walker does not critique CHAT/sociocultural theory, she does expand the understanding for those interested in how to work towards a pedagogy of powerful communication.

well, my two-bits worth and as always quite half-baked.

phillip
________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David H Kirshner [dkirsh@lsu.edu]
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2014 3:26 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: CHAT Discourse

Mike,

Clearly, as in Katherine Neal's response, and in MCA, CHAT/sociocultural theory informs empirical research.
What's less clear is that empirical research informs CHAT/sociocultural theorizing.
Not quite sure what to make of that.

David

greetings,