[Xmca-l] Re: "Context" or Object of activity

[mike cole]

et all-

Very interesting discussion. One of the questions that I had in reading
Jon's text was his assertion that Vygotsky practiced contextualism as his
world hypothesis. David's example seems to provide a clear argument for why
one should argue that Vygotsky was, indeed a contextualist in Jon, Pepper,
and most contemporary sociocultural scholars.

One could also turn to the concept of the social situation of development
to make
a ssd - context connection, e.g., what different work are the two terms
doing? Or are
they what Peg taught me to think of as "notational variants"?

I am totally with the idea that we are dealing with text and context. With
respect to the
5thD I have from the beginning thought of it as a text that emerges with
its con-text. In the case
of the 5thD it was common to think of the activity in its room with its
people as the text and the
youth facility where we worked (including its personnel at different levels
within the club's
own organizational hierarchy.

What Andy has been referring to is the observations we made at the time of
the Iraq war that
trace the series of contingent events that came together to prevent the
5thD from terminating
and led to a reorganization of 5thD-Club relationship into a different
configuration that then
continued for several years successfully (in our view) but terminated
suddenly when the income levels of the community within which the Club
operations (the club and its context, perhaps?) led to closing
and reorientation of the Clubs program that no longer could accomodate an
activity in the form of the 5thD.

With respect to the Pepper ideas, which provoke a good deal of interest
among scholars in human
development at present, like Jon and myself, my own view is that we are
dealing with a hybrid system involving phylogeny and (cultural) history.
For Pepper that is a no-no.  Overton et al provide relational developmental
systems, Jon, I think, is with Pepper and believes Urie is too. I am not
sure of that
part.

mike

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 4:42 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, I got that. I have read a lot of your work on projects, as well as
> Mike's on the Fifth Dimension and after school activities. But the word
> "context" has the word "text" in it, not the word "project" or "activity".
> And "text" pertains to my own work.
>
> Let me be a hardcore linguist for a moment: it's interesting in its own
> right, and I think you will see it's not entirely irrelevant to the
> question at hand. The word "that" begins with a voiced inter-dental sound,
> which is often spelt "th" in English ('this', "that', 'these', 'those',
> 'there', 'then' and of course the most common word in any length of English
> text, 'the'). If you put your hands over your ears when you say them, you
> will feel and hear vocal cord vibration. There are also a lot of words in
> English with unvoiced interdentals like "thick', "thin", "thought", and
> "three". If you put your hands over your ears or put a hand on your throat
> when you say them, you will not feel any buzz.
>
> Now, does this phonological difference relate in any systematic way to
> context? I think you can see that it does. The words that begin with voiced
> inter-dental sounds are all deictic: they are used to point, to indicate,
> to refer exophorically to the context of situation ("That on that") or
> endophorically (anaphorically or cataphorically) to co-text (e.g. "That is
> what I meant"). That is what Vygotsky meant by "sense". But the words that
> begin with unvoiced interdental sounds are not deictic in this way: they
> refer symbolically to dictionary definitions (or concepts). That is what
> Vygotsky meant by "signification".
>
> Of course, both types of meaning involve contexts: a dictionary is as much
> a context as a supermarket. But Vygotsky teaches us that they are different
> kinds of contexts and they entail developmentally different kinds of
> meanings. Bronfrenbrenner distinguished his contexts by scale (and also,
> crucially, by the degree to which the child participates in the context).
> Malinowski distinguished a context of situation, which includes all that we
> need to make sense of a particular instance of text, from a context of
> culture, which includes all that we need to make sense of the whole
> language system. In both cases, the context is bounded, and in both cases
> it is bounded by text. In fact, the relationship between situation and
> culture is exactly the same as the relationship between language and text:
> a situation is an instance of culture, and a text is an instance of
> language. For that matter, weather is an instance of climate.
>
> Consider the "project" of writing a novel, Andy. In this situation, what is
> really important is not the room you are sitting in or the window you
> are looking out of or even the country you are living in. In this
> situation, what is important is the imaginary context which is created by
> the text you are generating. The relationship between text and context
> seems to be almost reversed, and yet it is largely the same. The reason why
> nothing essential changes is the same as the reason why "context" can
> describe both exophoric and endophoric relations equally well. It is
> because context does not mean a material situational setting for a project
> or for an activity; it is rather an abstraction from a language or an
> instance of language, i.e. a text.
>
>
>
>
> David Kellogg
>
> Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
>
> Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
>
> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 9:07 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
> > I can't follow your message at all, David, but perhaps a few
> > words of explanation will help.
> >
> > Faced with, for example, a design experiment like 5thD, of
> > course, the project leaders and researchers are aware of the
> > importance of the context of the project and know that the
> > success or early failure of the project will depend on
> > events coming out of an unbounded context (s well as the
> > resilience and self-sufficiency of the project). The problem
> > is (1) how to conceptualise this unbounded context. (2) If
> > you want to use the method of analysis by units, you ask
> > yourself what is the relation between a unit of analysis and
> > the context of the research. But (2) answers (1).
> >
> > (2) In designing the project you will analyse the unbounded
> > context by means of analysis by units; specifically, you
> > would understand that the world is made up of projects.
> > These projects can be conceptualised as *mediating*
> > elements, because the project which forms the subject matter
> > of the research has *collaborative relationships* with a
> > range of projects (the university, the local council, etc,
> > etc.) and these projects, when you add all of them up, are
> > the world. Still unbounded, but by means of analysis by
> > units you have an approach. The context is analysed in terms
> > of its units, projects, and those projects with which the
> > subject project collaborates are the mediating elements and
> > are in focus. No guarantee, but a start.
> >
> > So (1) the context is not *included* in the "unit of
> > analysis" but is subject to analysis by units itself. The
> > world is not a subordinate part of one of its units.
> >
> > This is in fact how Mike approached the problem.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > Andy Blunden
> > http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> > On 2/02/2018 8:25 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> > > The late Leo van Lier, who more or less single-handedly
> > > created an "ecological applied linguistics" after he moved
> > > to the USA from Peru, used to tell a story about getting
> > > his eldest child, a boy who grew up speaking Spanish and
> > > Quechua, to speak an English sentence. Children who do not
> > > know what language can be easily trained to repeat
> > > meaningless phrases out of context (I have a lot of data
> > > on this), but children who already speak one language tend
> > > to be quite careful about speaking a new one (and they
> > > seem to be particularly careful about who gets to hear
> > > what language). So the boy refused to speak any English at
> > > all for a full year. One day Leo was in a supermarket
> > > buying breakfast cereal, and the boy was riding in the
> > > shopping cart. They passed another cart with another child
> > > and exaclty the same brand of breakfast cereal. The boy
> > > pointed to the other cart and then to their own and
> > > distinctly said "That...on that".
> > >
> > > I don't see how the context of "that" is unbounded, Andy.
> > > Yes, the cereal in question bears my name, but no, the
> > > relationship is not close, or not close enough to do me
> > > any good, as my father used to say over breakfast. But I
> > > don't see why I cannot draw a boundary between the
> > > breakfast cereal and my own name (as Bronfenbrenner does)
> > > and say that the box and the cart are part of the context
> > > of situation and the name and the Road to Wellville are
> > > not. To say that "context" in this situation is an
> > > "unbounded abstraction" is like saying that today's
> > > weather is an unbounded abstraction. Weather, like any
> > > other context of situation, is a context bounded by text.
> > > One of the boundaries that text places on context is
> > > distinguishing a context of situation from a context of
> > > culture. That, as I understand it, is the distinction
> > > between a micro-context and a macro-context, to use
> > > Bronfenbrenner's labels. Or, if you like, the distinction
> > > between weather and climate.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > David Kellogg
> > >
> > > Recent Article in /Mind, Culture, and Activity/ 24 (4)
> > > 'Metaphoric, Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A
> > > Commentary on “Neoformation: A Dialectical Approach to
> > > Developmental Change”'
> > >
> > > Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
> > >
> > > http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
> > > <http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full>
> > >
> > >
> > > On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 10:39 AM, Andy Blunden
> > > <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
> > >
> > >     As Mike has pointed out on numerous occasions the
> > >     "context" of even the most modest project or action by
> > >     an individual, may turn out to be a
> > >     geopolitical/historical event. There is no boundary
> > >     which can be draw such that 'nothing outside this
> > >     boundary counts as context'. So, when a theorist
> > >     refers to 'context', either they have privileged
> > >     God-like prescience or they mean by "context" the
> > >     entire, unbounded totality of events in the world
> > >     during or prior to this action. So to refer to this
> > >     unbounded totality with the term "context" and join it
> > >     to either the research subject or within the "unit of
> > >     analysis" is to utilise an "unbounded abstraction."
> > >
> > >
> > >     The issue raised here is not whether analysis is
> > >     impossible of course, but simply, what is the
> > >     appropriate methodology for researching unbounded
> > >     totalities?
> > >
> > >
> > >     Andy
> > >
> > >     ------------------------------------------------------------
> > >     Andy Blunden
> > >     http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> > >     <http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
> > >     On 1/02/2018 12:09 PM, Alfredo Jornet Gil wrote:
> > >>     ....
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>     That said, I am very sympathetic to the idea
> > >>     that "context", if it is external in the sense of
> > >>     arbitrary, does not add much to our
> > >>     understanding. But Andy, how does your point about
> > >>     "unbounded abstraction" connect to this?
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>     Alfredo
> > >>
> > >>     ------------------------------------------------------------
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
>