David, thanks so much for the Lightfood and Cox reference. I definately
want to find it and check out their distinctions. At a minimal level, I
agree that Paul keeps making distinctions between the social and the
psychological and between the mental and the social that bother me.
Unfortunately he hasn't responded as yet to some of my complaints (but he
doesn't forget them either).
Mike and Nat, I agree with you that Paul has frequently argued that
Vygotskian work (including mine) takes a cultural transmission point of
view on learning/development. I decided long ago that he did that for
rhetorical reasons--it makes his argument cleaner (constructivism on one
side and sociocultural theory on the other with his position in the middle
somewhere). It helps me to know that his own background comes from
constructivism first, then was influenced by ethnomethodology, and is now
(I believe) increasingly influenced by Cultural Historical Activity
Theory. In the Kirshner and Whitson book, he calls his position emergent,
in previous pieces he called it constructivism, in the Educational
Researcher article he calls it interpretive. That's why I suggested that
he's a moving target. His framework titles and his arguments shift from
one piece to the next in part due to his intended audience. The
Educational Researcher article was a response to the CMU authors of the
previous debate about situated cognition (Anderson, Simon and Reder). The
chapters in the Kirshner and Whitson book and in the Contexts for Learning
book were responses, in some way, to the fields of situated cognition and
sociocultural psychology.
In addition to Paul's oversimplication of Vygotsky in terms of cultural
transmission, I believe he also over-simplifies the role of cultural tools
and signs and the distinction between the social and the cultural (two
issues that are intimately related).
BUT I agree with Mike that Paul's "grounding in practice is essential" for
both Paul's work and Vygotsky's theory. Paul and his colleagues (Kay
McClain and others) have edited a volume on symbolization in mathematics
education which takes the field, I believe, much closer to issues of
semiotic mediation. In his new work, he is focusing much more on the
institutional and historical context of educational reform and he is
paying much more attention to cultural diversity. I know that he's reading
more Activity Theory to try to understand some of these issues. Finally, I
think he's making an important contribution to the grounding of theory in
practice by extending and validating Ann Brown's notion of design
experiments. Unfortunately some of that work is still being written (with
Leona Schauble and Richard Lehrer from the University of Wisconsin). But
it was the essence of the talk Paul gave at a conference at CMU last
month.
Enough for now. I still have to digest the last few messages on this
topic.
--Ellice Forman
University of Pittsburgh