Jay raised the question of how well history is integrated into CHAT. I find
the integration explicit in several places, although not often applied in
many recent publications. In particular, chapter 5 of Learning by Expanding
(LBE) provides a "doubly historical" incorporation of H with AT. First,
there is an historical overview of the development of the expansive
methodology, traced through Vygotsky, Scribner, and Cole and finally
including Holzkamp's theory-historical analysis. Now I haven't read Holzkamp
-- the reference is in German, and has been inaccessible a couple of ways.
In a nutshell, what I garner from LBE is that to better grok the "system" one
has delineated, one needs to understand the "concepts and models" that
mediate actions in the system and the development of these artifacts to their
present forms. For me this has meant getting into an historical and
dialectical analysis, because understanding the development of the system,
the collective system, i.e. the mesogenesis (my interpretation of Mike's use
of the word), leads into inquiring into the tensions in the system -- and
those have often taken years to come to their present form. There are three
things to say that can expand the explicit inclusion of H in CHAT.
First, the resilience of some tensions is in some ways similar to the
annealing of a metal -- successive cycles of heating and cooling toughen a
metal and make it less brittle, i.e. more hard to break. I prefer this
analogy to that of "burying contradictions" for the following reason.
Successive work *around* tensions in a system, that do not get at the
underlying causes, seem to toughen the contradictions, because the
transformations in a system that would address a contradiction, after years
of its annealing, must address all those other changes in the system that
have built up around the contradiction. Example? My first pick is the
Bowles and Gintis book on the problems of educational reform, which has taken
a well worked out historical and dialectical analysis of the present form of
schooling (at least up until 1976, the date of publication of the book). The
resilience of educational inequality to change is a well marked and, well,
yes, still arguable issue. I recently wrote Sam Bowles about updates to his
study and he has since done a bit of work on intergenerational inequality,
but the bottom line, he says, is still the same -- the schools continue to
reproduce the inequalities in our economic system. Making changes to the
schools alone will not substantially alter the problem.
But by another example that i introduced earlier -- the time it takes for
children to "settle into the classroom" gets minor patches to shorten their
acclimatization. For example, teachers spend more time upfront making
metacommunicative acts -- telling the children what things will be like for
them. (In higher ed, we spend time up front talking about the syllabus at
the beginning of a course.) But the time it takes to settle in is
consequence of the "new school-year/new-teacher annealed structure that won't
easily go away.
Second, relating to another thread here, locating concepts and models (and
patterns of interaction, including routines and scripts) is greatly
facilitated by discourse analysis. It is not only through discourse analysis
that one can get a sense of what "concepts and models" are mediating people's
interaction through utterances, it is also through discourse analysis that
one can begin to grok how those mediators are changing. Vygotsky's general
genetic law, extended beyond children to all ages, provides some insight into
the social uptake of new concepts -- a new concept will appear in the
discourse as it is being taken up by people who enact that discourse.
Discourse analysis helps us to understand that those "concepts and models"
are not "out there" in some durable form, independent of semiosis, but they
are constantly in flux as people remake their meanings in response to each
other, and as they enact the patterns of the system, including contradictions
and their resolutions. To me Bakhtin's dialogism is immediately useful here,
but that connection can be made better by those who are far more expert in it
than I.
Third, discourse analysis often occurs at the microgenetic scale -- so IMHO
there are immediately two time-scales linked here: mesogenetic and
microgenetic. In a way one can't actually separate them - doing so is more a
methodological "convenience", offering some advantage to the researcher
because otherwise the problem of understanding the system all-inclusively is
great.
There's more to say here, but time is running out and there are other tasks
at hand.
bb
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