Re: Lisa Butler's request for info

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Wed, 06 Mar 96 22:55:50 EST

I agree very much with Barb Smith's comment about peer tutoring
vs cross-age tutoring. There are many communities in which one
does not shift, much less reverse, role relations in an 'apprenticeship'.
What happens is that the person who is a novice in relation to
some expert becomes in turn an expert for some other novice.

Someone here will be able to reference the wonderful cross-age
tutoring project in ?South Carolina that Shirley Heath has observed
and supported, and in which the tutors initially are doing pretty
poorly (in literacy skills), but improve as much or more by
tutoring their younger 'novices' as do the younger students who
are being tutored.

Pace Habermas, egalitarian ethos is not a prerequisite for learning
in the zone of proximal development. What should be judged is the
whole network of relationships in which all participants participate,
and not each dyadic exchange in essentialist isolation.

JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU