Dear co-voyagers on the expansive seas of Learning by Expanding,
Long years of experience have taught me that effective moderators are brief.
It seems to me that Yrjö Engeström (hereafter YE) has done a fine job of
summarizing both the original chapter 1 and the new introduction and there
is no need for me to do so. Let me raise a few preliminary points and then
get out of the way.
1. I suspect that we have a wide range of experience with cultural
historical activity theory (CHAT) among the participants. For some the most
pressing issues will be more technical, like the most appropriate unit of
analysis in some particular piece of developmental work research or whether
Il'enkov's dialectical logic gives us new insights into developmental
processes. Other may simply trying to become clear about what an "object" or
"artifact" is. I strongly encourage all of you at whatever level of
experience you may be operating to ask your questions, offer suggestions,
think broadly of how the ideas under review might be relevant to your work.
We can easily accommodate multiple strands of conversation if we are careful
to index them using the "subject" line of the message. As I said in an
earlier message, I think that the tone and structure of the work invites
collaboration on multiple levels.
2. That said, I think it is a fortuitous circumstance that we have YE's own
commentary on LBE to compare and contrast with the argument he makes in the
first chapter. He raises many issues within his own work and across the work
of others with which we might begin a discussion. One difference I see in
the two documents is that in Chapter 1 he seems keen to show the
inadequacies of traditional models of learning and expansion before
proposing his alternative (a standard ploy in introductory chapters), while
in the new introduction he points to developments within CHAT itself. I
think it a distinct sign of maturity in a position when proponents do not
continually need to justify themselves before elaborating their position
further.
3. To get the ball rolling, one issue that particularly stuck me was the
idea of inner contradictions. All models of learning and cognition require
some sort of dynamic force to promote movement and change (e.g., Piaget's
disequilibrium, Skinner's reinforcement, Peirce's genuine doubt, etc.). In
the new introduction, YE states that the "expansive cycle begins with
individual subjects questioning the accepted practice....". My question is,
Why would they do that? How would they know that something was wrong
(assuming something was)? On what basis would they choose a path of
expansion?
Cheers.............djc
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 01 2001 - 01:01:34 PDT