My last message got too long ..... those who know me won't be surprised ...
I write messages here as I synthesize my own thinking, which is the value
to me of xmca, which provides the world of difference whose horizontal
traversal impels my own vertical development.
I wanted to reprise another version of my conjecture about how living
across differences of concrete situations and meaning systems impels
development of greater adaptive complexity. First I should expose the
assumption that more complex systems are inherently more adaptable because
they can generate more requisite variety to accomodate fluctuations of
conditions in their environments (minimally). This is an old piece of
information theory wisdom (Ashby) that has remained in later complexity
theory models. Of course that argument is just about survival and
sustainability. We are interested in innovation and creative action on the
environment as well, as with human material technological (and social
organizational) innovation. But they amount to much the same thing, if we
accept that you cannot act 'on' a system that you are inside of; you can
only adjust your functioning within it, and by doing so, the whole system,
including you and not-you, MAY change on some longer timescale (or it may
neutralize, ignore, filter out, or buffer your effort).
So imagine the horizontal expansion that comes by living your way, as a
child, or at any age, across interactions with different people and things
in your 'village'. You interact with those older than you, for whom
practices and meaning systems are different; and with those younger than
you, ditto. You interact meaningfully and functionally with those of other
social backgrounds and categories (gender, occupation, class, beliefs, etc.
across all social divisions of labor and cultural diversities of practice)
.... more or less. You learn to live adaptively in the village. You never
exhibit all the practices you encounter, but you make some sense of them,
enough to get by. Members of the same community do not actually share the
same repertory of practices and beliefs; we parcel these out among us and
learn how to articulate our parts with others' parts. We develop vertically
to the extent that we can manage articulations with more and more of the
diversity of Others (human and nonhuman) in our villages. The more complex
and diverse our village, and the more of it we traverse and successfully
articulate with, the greater the adaptive complexity of the repertories of
practices we CAN develop. (My last posting notes that there are additional
conditions for whether we do so.)
This notion of horizontal expansion by traversal and articulation across
the diversity of the village has some interesting implications for how we
characterize vertical development. The traditional view of vertical
development is that we are at any one moment in some particular stage of
development, showing behaviors that are characteristic of some age group.
We may lag behind retardedly or we may be precociously advanced. But if we
are successfully interacting and articulating with both those much younger
and much older than ourselves, then it seems to me that we must have at
least a 'passive' (interpretive, but not necessarily productive) command of
what and how they mean. And it is observed that in normal development (not
precocious) there are anomalously advanced productions as well as
'regressions' to earlier forms. Our total repertory of adaptive practices,
including interpretive practices, it seems to me is not age-bound. That is,
at any given chronological age we can be functionally represented by a
frequency distribution across the whole range of behaviors that are typical
of all ages in the community. The peak of this distribution moves forward
as we mature (our most frequent behaviors tend to be typical of our age
peers), but old forms do not die out, and advance forms are already present
... in particular I would expect that earlier-age forms can be activated in
interactions with younger villagers, and that advance forms are activated
by interactions with older ones (a version of the ZPD). True vertical
development, however, only occurs to the extent that the different
age-typical repertories that we can mobilize across all situations at any
particular age have become integrated into a productive resource system.
It may seem odd to think of development in this way with respect to age.
But it is exactly analogous to how we think about development,
horizontally, with respect to learning across all the other kinds of
diversity in the village. We may not exhibit the behaviors of other
genders, but we recognize them, make sense of them, respond appropriately
(by some criteria) to them. And more so as we encounter and learn to manage
ourselves with more of them (there are dozens of genders in a complex
society). And so also across social class divisions, cultural divisions,
etc. ( I assume that all social categories form a single integrated matrix
system and that every cell of the matrix represents essential information
for maximum vertical development, i.e. for becoming able to reflect on and
become conscious of the system as a whole and one's traversals through it,
so that this too becomes a productive adaptive resource.)
I think it is safe to say that my own society is systematically organized
in such a way as to inhibit maximum vertical development by segregating
people by age, class, gender, and culture and making system-spanning
traversals extremely difficult and improbable. This segregation of course
affects not just access to people, but in coordinated fashion access to
situation types and activity types. We even segregate children by age in
schools, which must fundamentally inhibit both social development and other
forms of learning. If crossing horizontal boundaries is the dialectical
engine of development, then almost every traditional feature of the design
of modern school-based education tends to inhibit rather than promote
development.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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