a big chunk, but allow me to give a narrative to contextualize
this suggestion.
story:
an eight year old girl moved into a new neighborhood in
Colorado, from California. the neighborhood allowed for horses to be
stabled on residential property, and the girl, Sarah, was given a horse by
her parents to help soften the blow of lost friends and family connections
in California.
Sarah developed a great passion for horses as she learned for care
for her horse. at school, she was a third grader, Sarah's teacher
assigned a research project to his students. the research had to focus on
a mammal, to Sarah's delight, and she decided to study horses.
over the next three weeks Sarah read extensively and took copious
notes. she didn't really pay much attention to the due date, until she
realized it was the next day. she was faced that evening with books still
to be read and note cards to organize. realizing she couldn't complete
the report she had envisioned, she went to the encyclopedia, and rewrote
in her own words what was written about horses. she went to bed in tears,
feeling a failure, miserable, unhappy with her paper.
a week later the teacher handed back the papers, save one. it was
Sarah's. then he read it aloud to the class as an example of a superior
paper. he graded it an A+.
as years passed by, and Sarah reflected upon this event, she
realized that as her paper was being read that she would never again put
in the effort she had put in for her report on horses. instead, she would
learn as much as she could about what it was the teacher wanted, and do
only that.
_______________________________________
end of story.
i relate this to all that we've talked about recently about how we
as teachers grade students's work - as well as Cole & Wertsch & Hodges.
if Sarah's teacher had not used the report as an artifact of
learning, if instead he had investigated the activity that Sarah had been
engaged in through the writing of the report, his assessment and hence
evaluation might have been very different.
i relate this to the activity triangle - in Mike's book the
triangle on page 284 focused on the subject being the individual readers,
and the object 'reading for meaning'.
i am wondering is instead of the researcher placing her/him self
outside of the activity triangle, if the researcher were to place her/him
self in the activity, which indeed the researcher is, as the subject, then
the students would become the object, and this would change the
relationship so that the researcher had to determine what was learned
other than just artifacts, observations, interviews, etc.
also, perhaps, especially if the researcher is the _teacher_ -
Judy Diamondstone has talked about the roles of teacher as researcher -
then the kind of disidentification / resistance to learning that Wertsch
discusses, that Sarah demonstrates would be a difference that made a
difference to the teacher, not just the student. also, if the researcher
is part of the activity itself, wouldn't the construction of
intersubjectivity, alterity and intermental functionings that Wertsch
discusses in chapter four become more apparent?
in short, i'm wondering about the 'lines' of the activity
triangle, if these lines aren't affective connections / lines of
relationships / and by placing the researcher into the activity itself,
doesn't this begin to alleviate some of the concerns that activity theory
doesn't seem to take into account the affective domain, such as what Vera
and others have voiced concerns about? i wonder about how it might have
been different for Hodges if her instructors had placed themselves within
the activity of becoming an early childhood teacher, rather than the role
of the distant instructor. (admittedly an assumption on my part.)
Wertsch comments at length about the necessary conditions for
appropriation of learning which includes a dialogic function (Bakhtin),
yet it seems that much of education and research avoids such a function in
favor of the teacher/researcher as participant observer, who is somehow
outside of the activity triangle.
anyway, Mike, i put this up as a suggestion for discussion
sometime this year -
something i'm attempting to work out.
phillip
phillip white pwhite who-is-at carbon.cudenver.edu
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A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated,
is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not
as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that
is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency.
Michel Foucault / Discipline & Punish
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