My answer to some of the important issues raised by Jay is expressed in the
motto, "Global is local" (of course the reverse is true as well). For me,
this means at least two things: any "local" situation is an intersection of
multiple and diverse "global" contexts (locality "betrays" person's
backgrounds and history of participation in sociocultural practices -- the
ways of how I mispronounce English words reveal that I learn English
primarily from books) and any "global" level is realized as a local activity
or situation (which means that "local" and "global" are relational concepts
implying that one is the background of the other).
>From this point of view, Jay's concern,
>How far do we have to go
>before we begin to use some more macro-social or global-
>perspective notions _like_ age-group culture, social class
>difference, culture- or gender- specific habitus in order to
>structure the relations across different activities, different
>participants, different philosophies of practice?
can be addressed by blurring the boundary between the "global" and the
"local" which is often is considering as being "over there" as objectively
present in phenomenon but instead emphasizing researcher's focus. In other
words, I think that researcher should ALWAYS consider global features in a
local activity situation that are relevant for understanding of the
situation. These global features provide background of the analysis. In
this approach, we don't need to worry about a laundry list of currently
fashionable variables (e.g., gender, SES, race) or levels (e.g., micro,
macro, meso) to plug mechanically them in the analysis -- instead, relevancy
becomes the guiding principle for research. Can we miss something? --
Absolutely! But it will be honest, historically- and
socioculturally-situated omission/misperception/bias (because any research
reveals not only the phenomenon but also the researcher).
Jay wrote,
>If I apply the same sort of argument to the case
>Eugene describes from his own work with Barbara Rogoff, I would
>think about the limitations of the locally-defined nature of the
>phenomenon and the data being gathered. If it is 'how students
>learn to work collaboratively in the classroom' and the data is
>from classrooms, and involves teachers and parents, then I am
>sure that Eugene and Barbara must have also considered the
>potential relevance of other sites and activities: How do
>students learn to play collaboratively outside the classroom? in
>the home? with parents in the home? How did the parents, and the
>teachers, come to acquire the views they have about learning,
>about collaboration, about responsibility, individual vs group
>projects, accountability and output? ways of teaching? What
>happens in these activities and situations?
I agree with Jay that these thoughtful questions seem to be relevant for our
study and we'll probably address them (or some of them) to ground our future
findings. But we'll try not to be taken over by these questions but keep
them as background questions (at least within this project). It is like in
a story, the description of the background of events and characters should
not take over the author's narration but be supportive for the main events
and characters.
Eugene Matusov, UCSC
Reference
Rogoff, B. (1995). Observing sociocultural activity on three planes:
Participatory appropriation, guided participation, apprenticeship. In J. V.
Wertsch, P. del Rio, A. Alvarez (Eds.), Sociocultural studies of mind.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
At 12:25 AM 1/6/96 EST, you wrote:
>
>Eugene describes the emergent nature of good interpretive
>research, and uses this as a basis for optimism that we can
>overcome methodological problems inherent in the limitations of
>purely 'micro' or situation-defined data.
>
>He points out how the course of thoughtful research tends to
>redefine the objects and extend the focus of attention of our
>work. For him this means that the inherently arbitrary, fuzzy,
>and permeable boundaries of what we define as 'the phenomenon' of
>interest allow us to escape the limits of the local and gradually
>extend our purview more globally.
>
>So far as he goes, I certainly agree. But I still think that the
>movement from local to local, even looking at links of the first
>to the second and each later one, will still miss (or already
>presuppose) important connections and perspectives that
>characteristically come from non-local ways of conceptualizing
>social phenomena.
>
>I did not expect Eugene (or anyone really) to respond to my
>gender and phone conversations example. I picked it to make
>allusion to the most famous of all ethnomethodological studies,
>and because the issue came up when a colleague was planning a
>discourse analysis project on a different sort of conversation a
>year or two ago. If I apply the same sort of argument to the case
>Eugene describes from his own work with Barbara Rogoff, I would
>think about the limitations of the locally-defined nature of the
>phenomenon and the data being gathered. If it is 'how students
>learn to work collaboratively in the classroom' and the data is
>from classrooms, and involves teachers and parents, then I am
>sure that Eugene and Barbara must have also considered the
>potential relevance of other sites and activities: How do
>students learn to play collaboratively outside the classroom? in
>the home? with parents in the home? How did the parents, and the
>teachers, come to acquire the views they have about learning,
>about collaboration, about responsibility, individual vs group
>projects, accountability and output? ways of teaching? What
>happens in these activities and situations?
>
>And if we follow these links to such other situations and
>activities (which links should we follow? why? why do they even
>occur to us as relevant?), will we not perhaps begin to see other
>relevant dimensions of similarity and difference: between homes,
>families, play groups, teacher's and parents' own school and
>educational experiences and contexts?
>
>Of course most of us already have such more socially global
>concepts as tools that we have found useful (and discovered the
>limitations of) in the past. We use them to imagine possibly
>relevant factors, potentially revealing comparisons, putative
>linkages to other activities. And hopefully we also modify and
>refine these notions as we adapt them to new studies.
>
>Insofar as there is a practical methodological problem here, it
>can be as simple as which of these different activities and sites
>will we collect data on, in addition to our original focal site
>of interest? Of course in practice we may go step by step, and
>different researchers will extend their work along different
>lines of linkage in the networks. But I am not sure that even
>describing each activity in each site, and its interdependencies
>with other activities in other sites, can be enough to get a
>global or adequate conceptualization of social phenomena. There
>is something more. And it is very important. At the moment I
>conceptualize it in terms of the self-organizing dynamics of such
>a network of interconnections, the emergent larger-scale
>properties of the network as a whole, which can never be
>described in purely local terms, though these properties have
>their local 'aspect' inevitably.
>
>When researchers took the methods, such as micro-ethnography and
>discourse analysis, that had given such detailed descriptions of
>classrooms, and extended them to students' homes and the
>community, and then sought to see the interdependencies among all
>these sites and their activities, the most salient features of
>their conclusions were framed in more macro-social terms: class
>differences, ethnic culture differences, sociolects, dialects,
>gender norms, etc. Granted these are very crude concepts still,
>much in need of critique and refinement, but they capture
>something of interest that may become salient in single sites and
>activities only when comparisons across different ones has
>already directed our attention to it. JAY.
>
>----------------
>
>
>JAY LEMKE.
>City University of New York.
>BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
>INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>
>
------------------------
Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz