I certainly agree with Edouard that Lave & Wenger's view passes
through 'distributed cognition' (an widely acceptable notion
today, I think) to a more radical view of practices that do not
philosophically presume 'knowers' distinct from a 'known'. And I
know schools well enough not to see them as neutral, or even
benign, (though perhaps well-intentioned) passers on of
'knowledge'; they function indeed much more as builders of
habitus, in which one may include notions of identity (identities
of action, not just of self-representation) as well as of acting
one's assigned part in an often unjust social order.
Chuck commends to us practices that travel well and widely, and I
am sure that so have all the curriculum planners that ever
mandated what must be learned. Even, unfortunately, sometimes me.
But we also know that many school-learned practices do not travel
at all outside their institutional support-structures, and we
despair at not being able to fashion more that would. Perhaps we
should imagine with Chuck that what really characterizes these
successful practices is the extensibility or portability of the
sustaining networks of humans and nonhumans that, we agree, it
takes to make the practices succeed _anywhere_? even, of course,
in their places of origin.
And how else can we expect a habitus to travel? How portable are
our identities and identity-sustaining practices outside their
networks (cultural milieus)? Think about culture-shock, going-
native, and like syndromes. Identities and habitus only travel
well within the networks we can build and extend to support the
practices that constitute them and are constituted by them.
But a habitus can include dispositions for certain forms of logic
practices and discourse practices (e.g. scientific, mathematical
reasoning) or esthetic judgments and ways-of-making, or moral
ones. Are the networks within which these travel more extended,
or more easily extensible, than, say, those for playing a sport
or using a particular material tool in a particular task? The
extensibility of networks depends, among other things, of course,
on resources and power, on potential opposition or rivalry. We
have been taught that we can take a gun anywhere in the world and
shoot someone, or take our math skills anywhere in the world and
succeed in problem-solving -- but can we really? are there not
many hidden presuppositions about constancy of context (the reach
of the network that grounds these practices for us) that we tend
not to take into account? Do we not need to account, as Latour
reminds us, for the successful traveling of practices in the same
terms as we account for their failure to travel successfully?
Perhaps what we should be teaching people is not just 'higher-
level' skills, but how to extend the scaffolding that keeps those
skills so high up there ... or, more subversively, how to
dismantle or modify such support structures, if that is possible
by individual or collective action.
JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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