I am in the process of submitting a paper to SRCD and was considering
submitting a second paper. The deadline is July 30 for electronic submissions.
The date of the meeting is April 24-27 in Tampa, Florida.
I learned upon reading the convention guidelines carefully that the only
way to submit a stand along paper is as a poster.... which I may do. But
I thought that perhaps there is a critical mass of people on xmca who
might like to organize a symposium.
So, pasted below is a "mock symposium proposal." If no one is interested,
I will turn it into a poster paper. But hopefully there will be 4-5
people who would like to join me in a joint exploration of this issue.
After our planned fall discussion, there ought to be more than enough
grist for this mill. The question is, are there enough nuts who want to
go to Tampa in April (remember, AERA is the same month) to have take a
crake at this topic? :-)
mike
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"Competing" theoretical approaches to the relation between
culture and cognitive development: Kissing cousins or Feuding Siblings?
Over the past decade there has been an explosion of interest
in developmental research growing out of interest in the writings
of LS Vygotsky and his students, on the one hand, and various
American anthropological traditions and the work of American
pragmatic philosophers on the other, for all of whom the role of culture in development is a central problematic. It is routine to see the
concepts of "context," "joint mediated activity," "communities of practice," "guided participation," "situated cognition" and a variety of other
terms grouped as if they shared a common interest in, and orientation
to, human development. Simultaneously, a close reading of the
authors assumed to share roughly the "same" theoretical position
indicates rather marked differences among them.
One major fraction line has been formulated as a difference between those who focus on "mediated action in context" versus those who focus on "activity" as a basic unit of analysis. Another common fraction line is between those who emphasize mediational tools and those who focus on forms of participation. Yet another set of issues centers on questions of the ability of one or another such position to deal with issues of power, gender, and difference more generally.
Finally, the different perspective often appear to differ with respect to the extent to which the concepts of development and culture are, or are not, central to their concerns.
In this symposium will contrast the main theoretical positions within this group of related theories and the empirical phenomena they study. We will seek to identify key points of tension which need to be clarified in order to conduct empirical work that might help distinguish terminological misunderstandings from theoretical disagreements. Such clarification, we believe, is necessary if future empirical work on the role of culture in development is to be usefully pursued.
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