Hi John,
Thanks for your interest. Rather than provide answers, I'll mention some
of the questions I'm struggling with. Following Cobb and Yackel's (1996)
_Educational Psychologist_ piece, it is convenient to label
sociocultural theory as a deterministic enculturation in which the
norms of the wider society become appropriated by the novice. As they
frame it, the sociocultural perspective is a view from outside of the
society, in which the society is held as a relatively stable entity.
This contrasts easily with their "emergent approach" (based on
symbolic interactionism) in which the perspective position is local,
within the society (but outside of the interaction). From this perspective
the relationships are horizontal, rather than vertical; and the
structure of the local community is seen as reciprocally constituted
through "mutual adapations" of the group and the individual. This mutual
emergence of individual and local-social processes seems to be central
to symbolic interactionism. But I don't think that sociocultural theory
is so easily relegated to a determinism. For instance Wertsch and Bivens
in their 1992 piece in _The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory
for Human Cognition_ identify two strands of sociocultural research,
one that focusses on vertical (hierarchical) relations and one on horizontal
(collegial) relations. So I wonder about the connections between symbolic
interactionism and this latter aspect of sociocultural theory.
Regards.
David
David Kirshner
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA USA 70803-4728