RE: [xmca] Link to this month's article

[smago <smago@uga.edu>]

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA
Mike Cole is heading out on vacation, and so asked me to start the discussion of the MCA article "Construction of Boundaries in Teacher Education: Analyzing Student Teachers' Accounts," which the electorate identified as this issue's paper for us to consider on the network. I didn't know that Mike actually took vacations. But I did agree to help launch this discussion, and help to sustain it once it gets going. I have done a number of studies with similar populations to those featured in this article-that is, I've studied the transition that teachers make when moving from their university preparation through the first year of full-time teaching. I've also been part of a university teacher education program in English Education (which is the teaching of literature, writing, and language; it is not ESOL) for the last two decades, and before that regularly mentored student teachers in my jobs at secondary schools in the US. So I do have some familiarity with the issues at stake in this article. 

One difference: Jahreie and Ottesen use what they call "Cultural-Historical Activity Theory" to motivate their work, and I once did too. But as CHAT has gravitated to Engeström's interpretation and exposition via his Triangle, I have moved away from this orientation and now only claim to use Vygotskian principles to formulate my analyses. So if I were to pose an opening question that perhaps might appeal to those who aren't interested in teacher education, it would be: What is CHAT, and which version of it do we invoke when we claim to use it? Cole's Cultural Psychology did include the famous Triangle, yet seemed very ecumenical in drawing on a host of sources so that it was not the centerpiece of his conception of CHAT. Engeström's system seems more closed to me, involving a specific set of terms and constructs all bound in The Triangle. Perhaps because I entered this field through the writing of Vygotsky and Wertsch (and Engeström is clear in the introductory chapter to Perspectives on Activity Theory that Wertsch is not an activity theorist, nor are Lave and Wenger), I don't equate Engeström with either Activity Theory or CHAT, and have disavowed that nomenclature in my more recent work. So what is it about the Triangle that has become so alluring that it has squeezed out other compelling conceptions of Leont'ev's reformulation of Vygotsky's work so that it shifts attention from the individual-in-context to the collective itself? I find this shift to be particularly troubling in U.S.-based scholarship in which the Triangle is often thrown up on conference screens but never put to any evident use in the research reported. For Scandinavians and others from nations with more collectivist orientations, the adoption of a wholeheartedly Marxist approach makes better cultural sense. And with that I will move to the article in question, authored by faculty members from the University of Oslo. 

Jahreie and Ottesen's article concerns the conflicting demands of the different settings faced by student teachers-those who are at the end of their university teacher education programs and beginning to transition to school-based teaching positions by apprenticing under the mentorship of a full-time teacher, ideally one who is a "master" teacher (but as I know from experience, this is not always the case). In my reading of the paper, I see an effort to use Engeström's terminology to account for processes involved when student teachers engage with established members of different settings that inevitably provide different "objects" for activity: the university with its effort to produce a particular kind of teacher, and the schools with their efforts to produce a particular kind of student. A second general question I would pose is: From what I can tell, most countries have settled on a very similar model for teacher education: general education coursework, specialized disciplinary course work, education course work, field experiences, student teaching, and then the first job. Given that this model seems to occur worldwide-amidst nations of different emphasis, orientation to learning, economic structure and process, history, demographics, and so on-what broader activity setting seems to suggest this approach as the most efficacious in the preparation of new teachers, regardless of national character and culture? In the U.S. there are presently moves afoot to provide alternative pathways to teaching careers, but most university programs follow this sequence. Apparently this process, with expected variation, is universal. But why?

To return to a separate point emerging from this same general observation: The authors say (p. 231) that "The object of the activity for the [university Department of Teacher Education] is student teachers' learning trajectories. The object of activity for the schools, however, is pupils' learning." Actually I think it's more complicated than that, at least in the schools, where a primary problem facing educators is agreeing on the purpose of education. Even "student learning" is a highly contested construct, one that creates the sort of boundary problems elaborated in this article. In schools, it's often the ability to perform on tests, while in the "progressive" university environment, it might involve learning more about the self and how to express or explore it. Or something else. For some people, schools exist to socialize young people into adult roles, often based on the economic circumstances of their families. For others they should promote upward mobility. Or learn a trade, or become better informed citizens, or learn to follow authority, or learn to question authority, or learn how to memorize information, or learn how to construct knowledge, or learn how to answer questions, or learn how to pose questions, or do any of many other things. I've referred to this problem as the "mixed motive" of the setting of schools, one that can shift from teacher to teacher, which complicates the idea that the "object of activity for the schools is student learning." Another question thus might be, For complex settings like schools, how do we know what the object of activity is? (I'm using the authors' language here; I'm more comfortable with Wertsch's use of "motive" [1985] to describe the overriding teleological goal toward which activity in a setting is directed.)


I'll pose one final question before inviting others to contribute to the discussion: What are the perils involved in using The Triangle as an a priori framework for studying activity? Engeström, at least from what I've read, employs it as a consultant to business management to help construct settings more conducive to collective productivity. To what degree can it then be extrapolated to other kinds of settings that do not share the business environment's relatively closed-ended motive (to produce and sell widgets, etc.)? When the objects/goals/motives are less amenable to agreement, how appropriate is The Triangle as a template for understanding activity, or promoting activity of a certain sort? When the transfer of The Triangle involves a great leap, as from a post office to a school, to what degree might it serve as a Procrustean Bed rather than a useful heuristic for understanding activity? (Procrustes was an Attican thief who laid his victims on his iron bed. If a victim was shorter than the bed, he stretched the body to fit; if the victim was too long, he cut off the legs to make the body fit. In either case the victim died.)

OK, that's enough of a starter kit. Please join in and feel free to ignore what I've written and launch something else, or help me clarify my confusion regarding the questions I've raised.
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