>Ray McDermott has a paper in the Chaiklin and Lave volume on "Understanding
>Practice" called " The acquisition of a child by a learning disability."
>There is a two way appropriation process going on. That is why I added
>transactive. BOTH the person and the world are active.
>mike
Pickering talks about the interactivity of tuning as well:
"...the key point about tuning...is that it *works both ways*, on human as
well as nonhuman agency. Just as the material contours and performativity
of new machines have to be found out in the real time of practice, so too
do the human skills, gestures, and practices that will envelop them."
(*his italics*, _The Mangle of Practice_, p. 16)
A bit later he talks about tuning as a "dance of agency."
After I sent off my earlier post (about the models that might underlie
"appropriation"), I thought of a piece by Rand Sprio and colleagues. They
were working with medical students who apparently were stuck on the (often
inappropriate) metaphor of the heart as a pump. Rather than try to fashion
a metaphor that would cover the whole system or to rule out any metaphors,
they decided to develop an explicit set of images/metaphors (a pump, a
battery, people rowing crew, a Chinese finger puzzle, etc.) that together
captured key notions and then to discuss how each mapping worked and how it
didn't.
If the circulatory/heart system needs this kind of complex treatment, maybe
the notion of internalization/appropriation of cultural means in activity
systems does too (i.e., borrowing, appropriating, stealing, internalizing,
transforming, resonating with, dancing with, externalizing, creating, etc.
may all capture some important part of living culturally and be misleading
in other ways).
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign