-----Original Message-----
From: renee hayes [mailto:rhayes@UDel.Edu]
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2003 1:33 PM
To: Eugene Matusov
Subject: message for XMCA discussion (for forwarding, please!)
Eugene, I want to participate on xmca discussion of Kirsten Foot's article,
but I cannot send my message. I have tried using Outlook, then using UD
account directly (through Pine, shudder!), but something is wrong. I keep
getting error messages. I receive messages from XMCA but cannot send. Can
you forward this to the list for me? Please?
Thanks a lot!
Renee
I very much enjoyed reading the Foot article, especially because I am still
coming to terms with how to define an activity system, and this article has
raised some interesting questions about that. Dale brought up one of my
focal issues: "a viable activity system must allow each individual member to
construct (at least) compatible "individual" objects that are very much
"part" of the ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE OF THE ACTIVITY SYSTEM as a whole."
So how compatible do these individual constructions of object have to be?
Foot quotes from Schatzki and note that his use of "practice" is analogous
to activity theorists' use of "activity": "Their (actors) agreement,
however, need only be partial. Participants in a practice can have
conflicting interpretations of it."
OK. So my question emerging from all that is "How much can participants in
a practice/activity have conflicting interpretations (or objects, I suppose,
in Foot's terms) before we need to break down the activity into multiple
activity systems?" A concrete example for me is a classroom, where kids and
teachers have distinctly different objects, and even teachers may have very
different and conflicting objects from each other. More specifically,
consider a child who is learning English as Second language and has a
mainstream teacher (whose object might be mainly coverage of subject
material) and an ESL teacher (whose principle object might be proficiency in
English). I have found in my own research into a situation similar to that
I just described, that these objects of student, mainstream teacher, and ESL
teacher can be rather strongly conflicting.
So in a situation like this, how many activity systems are there? It seems
I have read in some places that in an activity system objects should at
least be compatible, and in other places a single activity system may
involves participants with conflicting views of what the object of the
activity is. Actually, Foot's article raises this second possibility.
Any ideas? I don't profess to be any kind of expert on activity theory,
just still trying to develop my own understanding...
Renee Hayes, Ph.D.
University of Delaware
108 Willard Hall
Newark DE 19716
(In case any of you don't recognize my name, it's because I am a reforming
lurker - sorry about that..:-)
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