Helen,
I read your comments about your research with interest. You seem to make
the
fundamental assumption that there is one
activity, the object of which is the acquisition of of specific concepts,
etc. and that the subject of this activity includes both the teacher and the
learner. Whereas I do think, following Dewey, that this is the
case in the all human activities in which education forms a
part, I think that in the context of institutionalized education the
teacher's activity system and the learner's activity system are radically
different: A
separation that occurs historically with the creation of schools as we
know them There is a continuum here and you point to the seminar form where
this isn't the case but, to the best of my knowledge it is only at the
highest end of institutionalized education, eg graduate seminars, where the
teacher and the students co-participate in such a way that the teacher's
role
can simply be described in the Deweyan term of more mature or experienced in
the activity, as simple guide, or what have you. At all of the lower
levels, the teachers produce the instructional unit in which the students
participate, that the students consume as a tool is consumed. That is what
teachers are paid to do and what they have been trained to do. The
instructional unit for the students is not simply, or even most importantly
the acquisition of skills or concepts but normally a requirement that they
find listed in the educational institution's catalog as a necessary element
for the program of studies they are pursuing. This is overwhelmingly true
at the
K-12 level (american system) where students are required to take courses
that fulfill the
institutional and society's definition of what they should know and becomes
less so as they move into post-secondary education although there as well
they must meet breadth requirements that they will, to the best of their
ability and the availability of classes, fill with courses that "interest
them."
This of course raises the question of object and motive in activity systems
and a collective subject defined in terms of a division of labor between
teacher and learner might seem to provide an alternative, as you seem to be
suggesting. Thus what I am calling different objects of the activity could
be considered simply different motives of the members of the collective
subject of the activity system. But as I see it the teacher produces
instructional units as part of a job, produces a commodity that is exchanged
within a framework of division of labor broadly conceived as the educational
system, while students use instructional units to gain knowledge of subject
areas, in part, but equally importantly to attain what is sometimes called
symbolic capital ie, the record of having taken the class, a diploma, etc.
The activities
of teacher and student not only have different motives, they have different
objects. The fact that the teacher fashions instructional units out of the
materials you mentioned, selecting from a broad range of elements including
all academic and institutional resources to which s/he has access and that
the student also uses these materials in realizing the instructional unit
doesn't change this. The student uses only those the teacher has
selected -- only those will count toward completion of the class. Sort of
like blueberry muffins which I can make out of different kinds of flour,
different amounts of sugar, etc. (and of course, blueberries!) but which
when eaten only contain what I
put into them from the pantry out of which I worked. The fact that the
muffins my kids are eating contain the same materials that were found in the
pantry to begin with doesn't create an equivalence between my activity as
muffin producer and my kids activity as muffin eaters.
Your comments about the multiple vocabularies were very useful to me however
and I plan to see how to incorporate something along those lines into our
ongoing research. I'm wondering whether Carspecken's approach has influenced
your research at all since this "vocabulary/community" framework parallels
it closely. But I'm a little unclear, however, as to how you identified the
communities and whether they recognize each other as separate communities..
Also I'm unclear as to how the four communities interact concretely in the
educational activity that is the focus of your research. Are you saying
that there is a technical community, a subject/topic specific community, a
pedagogical community, and a strategic community or are these different
aspects of the activity system referring to the rules, the community, and
the division of labor, aspects that a single individual or group of
individuals reflects at in different contexts of the total process of their
activity; e.g., the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of
the object.
Perhaps its obsessive on my part but from my perspective commoditization is
the determinant dynamic in all activity systems in capitalist society. My
analysis of the instructional unit in some sense is an analysis of education
as commodity, an analysis which nevertheless needs to take account of the
"use value" of education which is, to paraphrase your definition: the
transmission of concepts, skills, and cultural tools. By separating out the
teacher's activity as pertaining to a separate activity system I find it
much easier to give an account of the factors that lead to the kind of
situation we actually find: e.g., pressure toward elimination of tenure and
use of
part-time faculty or substitute-teachers, interplay of specialist
community/research area and teaching responsibility, gap between
institutionally defined edcuational goals and student goals, etc . . . As
we all know, these factors have a dominant influence on the quality of
education and also contribute to determine its content . I find it hard to
get a handle on
such crucial phenomena when I look within the classroom alone although I
certainly can see that the classroom/teaching-learning space is crucial.
Paul H. Dillon
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