Vera John-Steiner seems to have put her finger on a key issue in
breaking away from 'reproduction' models of education: for there
to be significant creative recontextualization in the ZPD, _both_
collaborators must be open to changes in their views and
practices.
This may even be necessary to move education beyond mere
training, ie. to not just initiate novices into existing
practices, but to prepare them to adapt practices to new
situations, uses, etc. That habit of transforming and adapting is
the situational core of what our intellectual culture lauds as
critical and creative thinking. It is not, however, a matter of
just 'thinking' in the sense too much cognitive theory proposes
(internally generated, internally motivated, internally
executed): it is a way of being in (construing, partly
constructing) a social and ecological situation, and a practiced
disposition at taking a certain range of stances to such
situations -- most especially stances that promote appropriation
and transformation.
How can novices learn to use tools creatively and critically if
these stances are suppressed in the ZPD? and how can such stances
be effectively taken by one partner (e.g. the teacher adapting
instruction to the needs of the learner) if they are denied to
the other (learners transforming practices in the learning so
that they are truly appropriated, i.e. become learners'-own-
practices rather than dead clones of teachers' practices)? The
unit of dynamics here is the situated-dyad; its basis is
interactional activity. Vera is quite right that the Vygotskyan
paradigm is not reproductionist. Its dynamical approach implies
on-going change in social practices as they are appropriated and
transformed in each dyad, in each new situation.
But there is a fundamental obstacle to this process in the
learned resistance of teachers (and curricula) to themselves
being open to appropriating and transforming _learner's_ prior
(and emerging) practices. The issue here is not _symmetry_ (a
straw man posed by conservative educators to ridicule, e.g.
Freirean models), but _reciprocity_. Teachers need not just to
learn _about_ students' theories and models (the better to engage
meaningfully with them), but to _adopt_ (in some transformed way)
some practices (e.g. viewpoints, ways of engaging
interpersonally, ways of learning, habits of mixing -- or not
distinguishing -- work and play, etc., etc.) of their learning
partners. Vera offers us expert-expert collaboration as a model
for the missing dimensions of expert-novice collaboration. Freire
long ago argued for this paradigm on moral grounds (and in the
context of adult education). It is necessary, I think, to also
argue for it in terms of a more adequate learning theory than
those that dominate education today. I hope Vera will develop her
thesis for a wide audience of educators, many of whom are
receptive today to neo-Vygotskyan models.
I also think its worth examining the assumptions that have
largely blocked adoption of the collaborative model for the
education of children. One of these I think is the developmental
fallacy: that adults are better in every way (that adults think
important) than juveniles of their own species. I believe this is
a deeply held ideological conviction. It denies the biologically
reasonable thesis that a successful species is adapted to its
environment at _all_ stages of its development, and not just in
its adult phase. (Cf. my earlier posting about whole
developmental trajectories as the unit of evolution, rather than
adult forms of the organism; selection acts all along the
trajectory, and evolution of trajectories is what links ontogeny
and phylogeny, as well as one generation and the next where they
overlap ecologically).
It may still be a heretical and minority opinion, but I also
believe that the developmental fallacy (a rather recent cultural
construction) itself rests on a more insidious need to
rationalize and justify and naturalize the exploitation and
oppression of some age-grades of humans by the dominant age-
grades, just as we long have with gender categories, social
classes, and Other cultures. By dispensing with the self-serving
scientific certainties of the past, we are already saving a
moribund patriarchal culture from collapse by fruitful reciprocal
collaborations with all these other Others. Why not with the
remaining 20-30% of humanity, formerly thought too young or too
old to treat as full partners in activity.
JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU