just a quick note -- for me, one of hte essential differences between the two
is the difference is their units of analysis -- and this could be an important
part of someone's toolkit -- to switch from a focus on the "internal" to the
integration of the internal and external, tapping into explanatory artifacts
with each its own power of insight.
In having of wonderful ideas, (p13) duckworth gives me a strong impression of
continuing to look at the individual child -- her repetoire of "actions and
thoughts" -- with a strong flow of causality outward -- read "the repetoires of
actions they carry out ON ordinary things" (as compared to the repetoires of
actions they carry out WITH ordinary things) -- and this internally driven
construction was promoted in a greater political world of educational theory as
a struggle against prior environmental determinism (i.e. learning=teaching).
Useful. But in a very interesting and contradictory manner, Duckworth arranges
the social and physical environment of the child in order to observe this
construction! (from the back cover -- "an approach to education that allows
"occasions" for learners, whether children or teachers, to construct their own
knowledge") Now apart from this strange tension between ideology of
anti-environmental determinism and acting with such a heavy 'environmental'
influence, the focus on the individual is still useful in todays world, as it
is that unit that goes from one school, one classroom, one job, to the next,
shaped by past interactions.
da##it, this is supposed to be short. Anyway Denis's Newman's (construction
zone, ch 4) recognition of cultural tools/signs ()artifacts), themselves shaped
by past interactions, allows him to look more at the integration across
internal/external and to think of (in my interpretation) a child's repetoire of
"actions and thoughts" in the zoped constituted by artifacts and others. I'd
love to see duckworths interactions with others re-framed out, re-interpreted
with this perspective.
bb
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