RE: [xmca] Ways With Words

["David H Kirshner" <dkirsh@lsu.edu>]

Thanks Andy for kinds words and for the link to Vygotsksy's "Crisis in Psychology", and thanks, David Kellogg, for further challenges.

For the benefit of those who have been scanning, but not closely following, this conversation, let me begin by contextualizing the genres discussion with respect to broader motivating concerns of XMCA-ites. The small question we are discussing is whether I have distinguish learning of skills from learning of concepts from learning of dispositions sufficiently to support my contention that teaching toward these individual goals can be coherently framed as separate enterprises, theorized as independent genres of teaching. The alternative perspective, constituting the current status quo, is that learning is a complex and multi-faceted construct, and consequently, "good teaching" ought to be viewed as a mutually self-referencing set of practices.

The bigger question is what are we about as scholars of learning and teaching? What kinds of intellectual work do we value? How do we understand our contributions to knowledge as enduring within trajectories of progress for sociocultural psychology? I have greatly appreciated the interest shown to my efforts at theorizing distinct notions of learning and associated genres of teaching. But I suspect the kind reception has been based in part on a lack of recognition of the extent to which the genres approach is an assault on the enterprise of psychology in general and on sociocultural psychology in particular ways.

My motivating concern, by now, is perhaps well understood: In comparison with say medical practice or engineering practice which are informed by paradigmatic science, educational practice is a grand mess. Alternative theorizations of learning produce conflicting pedagogical agendas, as in the Math Wars and the Reading Wars. Worse still, attempting to resolve these differences in perspective through dialectical synthesis leads to a holistic sense of the educational project that renders us incapable of articulating coherent and accessible principles of teaching. As a result, pedagogical guidance for teachers is conveyed as grand visions and inspiring examples or else reduced to a pablum of catch-phrases and platitudes. As Greeno, Collins, and Resnick (1996) put it, we have not met our obligation “to develop ... new possibilities for practice, not just to provide inspiring examples, but also to provide analytical concepts and principles for people who wish to use the examples as models in transforming their own practices” (p. 41). The genres approach enables more rigorous characterization of good teaching, each genre grounded in an independently coherent theorization of learning.

What may be less well understood is the totalizing scope of the genres solution. At this point--15 years later--the basic elements for theorizing learning as habituation of skills, construction of concepts, and enculturation of dispositions are pretty much in place (though much refinement is still needed). In limited and particular ways, habituation draws on behaviorism and implicit learning theory; construction draws on Piagetian and radical constructivism and conceptual change theory; and enculturation draws on social psychology and sociocultural theory. Most often it is earlier versions of theories that are useful, later developments often extending away from the intuitive core to capture broader interests of the field. Pedagogical theorizing thus parts company with the dynamic cutting edges of psychology laden as they are with the aspirations of the field.

For the now dominant, cognitive, branch of psychology, the genres approach repudiates hegemonic claims of adequately accounting for learning across the broad realm of interests enjoined by the various other branches. For sociocultural psychology the genres approach rejects as irrelevant the fecund intercourse of psychology with philosophy that opens sociocultural theory to continuing possibilities of reformulation. That is the price to be paid for having a finite and tractable knowledge base for teaching rooted in the hard ground of psychology's actual accomplishments rather than the shifting sands of its aspirations.

For those in the academy whose identity is vested equally in psychology and education--for whom the contribution to learning theory and to teaching practice are flip-sides of the same coin--the genres approach threatens nothing less than schizophrenic dissociation. I sense a recognition of and rebellion against the straightjacket of genres in David Kellogg's closing plaint:

"Perhaps that's the problem: not some kind of preparadigmatic squeamishness, but a need for a paradigm that respects the artistry which masters a paradigm and transcends it."

(Better, I hope, to be understood, than loved.)

Okay, on now to David's 3 questions (shouldn't there be 4?); none will be passed over.

1. "First of all, we have only TWO tests and we have THREE different teaching genres. The two tests seem to me to distinguish admirably between skills and dispositions. But concepts are decontextualizeable in much the same way that skills are (in fact, their separability is really part of how they are defined). So presumably DHK would argue that the acquisition of a concept is NOT a matter of regular and unambiguous feedback. I guess I would agree with that, even though (perhaps precisely because) it makes absolute nonsense of our current system of teaching concepts and testing for them (essentially based on reducing a concept to a skill)."

I am having trouble understanding the concern, David. What I sense is that you are looking for an over-arching theorization of learning that incorporates the 3 varieties in a consistent fashion. There isn't one. The trio of habituation, construction, and enculturation is a sociological theory of the learning goals that motivate educational practice, not a psychological theory of how human learning actually is constituted. So the boundary concerns are rooted in practical confusions that may arise in pedagogical practice, not in the need for theoretical consistency. Simply put, skills and dispositions need teasing apart, but concepts and skills or concepts and dispositions just don't. 

Now it's true, as noted in the latter part of your question, that "our current system of teaching concepts and testing for them [is] (essentially based on reducing a concept to a skill)." However, the problem is not definitional, that is mistaking skills for concepts. Rather the problem is in systemic confusion about the learning processes supporting each.

Briefly, what educators generally don't get is that skill development (understood as unconscious correlation of input/problem features and output/performance features) can be enhanced by explanation (lecture/demonstration) WITHOUT the mediation of concepts. This is because quite apart from any meaning that may or may not be gleaned from the lecture/demonstration, the teacher's discussion of the problem solution highlights certain perceptual elements of the problem and output spaces making them more salient, and hence more easily involved in the complex correlations that eventually constitute the skill. So, here's the situation. A teacher explains some problem, assigns some practice exercises on the problem type and finds that students who couldn't previously do the problems now can do them. The erroneous conclusion reached is that the students have understood the ideas conveyed in the lecture and their performance on the problems has increased as a result. Thus it has become common to believe that the ability to perform the skill (which is what is tested on the tests) also is a measure of understanding the content.


2. "The second thing that bothers me is that the "teasing apart" of the genre approach seems, in many cases, to involve a lot more tearing that teasing. DHK assumes that wedding procedures are an outlier, and that most politeness is ill defined. But in all cultures I know politeness is explicitly taught to children, using a system of decontextualized maxims and unambiguous punishments. I have always assumed that pronunciation is a skill par excellence. But stress and intonation, which are indubitably the meat and bones of pronunciation, imply the complete mastery of lexicogrammar AND pragmatics. Doesn't it seem likely that when skills are integrated in PRACTICE that it becomes almost impossible to disentangle them for teaching purposes?"

Let me address the first part of the question concerning how politeness is taught, and then I will try to say something about the second part, but my linguistics knowledge may not be sufficient for me to interpret it properly. 

The common cultural practice of explicit teaching of politeness requires a somewhat complex analysis to unpack, but it is an interesting one. First of all, one can certainly isolate discrete practices of politeness and teach them as a skill using praise and punishment to reinforce repetitive engagement. However, if we accept that politeness in large part is an ill-defined, context sensitive form of engagement, the question is why would one want to pull out certain parts and teach them as skills? 

To answer this, let's go back to the basis of enculturation--acquiring of the practices of a culture through immersion in the cultural milieu. My paradigm case of enculturation is proxemics, or body space. One learns the proxemic practices of one's native culture just by being there. No overt instruction is needed, nor would we even be aware of proxemics if not for the fact that different cultures have different proxemic practices (e.g., the famous nose-to-nose conversations of the French). So the fact that people feel a need to teach politeness proves only one thing, politeness is NOT a ubiquitous cultural practice like proxemics. Rather parents teach politeness because the culture is pluralistic with respect to politeness practices. 

This brings us to the second wing of the enculturation metaphor for learning: acculturation. In the event that there are distinct cultural subgroups within a broader culture, acculturation is the intentional emulation of cultural practices undertaken by someone who desires to become part of that subculture. Of course acculturation always takes place as a supplement to enculturation going on around it all the time. One only gains awareness of a limited number of cultural practices, and so only can acquire that subset of practices through emulation.

The pedagogical method associated with acculturation is modeling of cultural practices. For students interested in becoming part of the reference culture, the teacher's modeling is an opportunity to emulate practices. My AERA paper for this year deals with the ethics of acculturational teaching in schools. I argue that acculturation is ethically questionable whenever cultural practices are modeled for students who do not seek to become part of the reference culture. That's because enforcing participation in cultural practices remote from the student's home culture or aspirational culture creates identity conflicts for the student. Such concerns do not arise in enculturational teaching which consists in fostering tacit cultural practices in the classroom microculture that students spontaneously acquire (or not) through being part of the classroom community. 

This brings us back around to parents' enforcement of politeness standards for their children. While it does function as skills training, its broader purpose is to coerce the child's identity with the parents' native culture against the possibility of identification with the culture of other groups (nationalities, races, classes, etc.). (Whereas this kind of acculturational teaching is morally questionable in schools, presumably a different moral calculus applies in the case of parenting.)

Turning to the linguistics example involving pronunciation (as skill), lexicogrammar (as concept?), and pragmatics (as disposition), I take it the question you pose concerns how in PRACTICE could we ever disentangle them for teaching purposes? The short answer is that there is no one correct answer to how to teach toward multiple learning goals. One can teach cultural practice and skills separately, with the hope that skills will become incorporated into fluent cultural practice over time. One can attempt to coordinate the various forms of instruction together, for instance by inserting practice and/or explanation into enculturationally organized activity in such a way as to minimize the disruption of each agenda. The key benefit of a genres perspective, in this case, is that it reminds us that the methods one is using are mutually inconsistent, hence the need for trade-offs and hard choices. Finally, one can rely in what I call "advertent learning," as in the Whole Language approach in which the pedagogical support goes only to enculturation but with the expectation that skills will be practiced and picked up en passant, without the teacher organizing systematic rehearsal.


3. "The third thing that bothers me is what linguists call the "interface" problem, and what Andersen calls "DECPRO" or "PRODEC", that is, the question of whether and how implicit learning ("procedural knowledge", in Andersen-ese) becomes explicit knowledge ("declarative knowledge"). Of course the two CAN be kept separate, under laboratory conditions. But are they?"

This question is more challenging because it inquires into a learning theory position rather than into an instance of learning or teaching. Still, a claim of the genres approach is that learning of skills, concepts, and dispositions are theoretically distinguishable, so the purported morphing of one into another is of concern. Anderson's (1983) "proceduralization" theory of how declarative knowledge, deployed self-consciously and explicitly, eventually comes to be taken up into production rules, the fundamental structure for skill deployment, is a case in point. Certainly one can't deny that if given a set of written instructions for, say, opening a lock, one may first be able to complete the task by dealing with the declarative content, and that gradually, through much practice, this laborious mental process gives way to an automatically deployed skill. 

I analyze this instance in a manner similar to my discussion of question 1, above, with respect to how skill acquisition is often mistaken by educators as indicating conceptual attainment. As we read the instructions for opening the lock, two kinds of things MAY be happening. The first is that one's conceptual understanding of the mechanism of the lock may become more elaborated. This could be explained with reference to constructivist learning theory, cognitive conflict, thought experiments, and the like. Regardless of whether or not conceptual advance is made, the reading of the instructions will tend to make certain perceptual elements of the lock mechanism and of the possible response space more salient. Fiddling with the lock, one finds, lo and behold, it opens. The learning in this case is no different than the cat thrashing around and eventually finding its way out of Thorndike's puzzle box, except that the learning curve is fantastically truncated on account of perceptually salient elements coming into play. This analysis, actually, is not so different than Anderson's. Anderson (1983) did not see the process of proceduralization as starting with declarative knowledge. Rather he saw the declarative knowledge as initially incorporated within very broadly functioning production rules for how to approach problems of a certain sort. So what we really have is declarative knowledge as helping to specialize what initially are broadly functioning procedural routines. 

The other direction of skills bubbling up into concepts is more difficult. In mathematics education, Anna Sfard and others have highlighted the process of reification, the transformation of procedures into conceptual entities. For instance, if one takes the algebraic expression 5x + 3, the initial interpretation, coming from arithmetic experience, is procedural: Take the number represented by the symbol x, multiply it by 5, and then add 3 to the product. With experience in algebra one somehow comes to jump from engaging with such formulas as procedures to recognizing 5x + 3 as also signifying an entity, namely the result one obtains from performing the procedure. As Anna put it, only in mathematics are we invited to construe the recipe for a cake as the cake itself. Making this jump from engaging with formulas as procedures to engaging with them as entities is vital, as one eventually needs to be able to engage with these entities as elements in higher level procedures. 

The good news, for those eyeing the genres approach with increasing trepidation, is that I don't have a ready to hand genres explanation to offer, here. It certainly seems to be the case that a procedural routine is morphing into a conceptual entity in front of one's very eyes! One way I deal with this is by encouraging math teachers oriented by goals of concept development to be cognizant of such possibilities and build appropriate skills development into their instructional approach. However, because the conceptual restructuring does not accrue to cognitive conflict, it is not possible to plan for it in the same way as one typically plans to support conceptual development. A second approach is to recognize the jump from procedures to concepts as artifactual. It SEEMS that a procedure is morphing into a concept, but the real change is not coming up from below, in transformation of a skill, but rather from above in the appropriation of new culturally inscribed practices for how formulas are dealt with. The learning, thus, is enculturational. 

David Kirshner




-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2011 11:04 PM
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: RE: [xmca] Ways With Words

(I'll try to keep this response within one screen, because I WOULD like Andy to read it. Funny, though. I never read e-mails that are SHORTER than one screen--I always assume they are just tweets or spams or conference adverts or calls for papers for special issues which I always ignore.)
 
I have been a big fan of DHK's "genres" approach every since I attended a really brilliant presentation he made about it here in Seoul. I think it's particularly useful for LINGUISTS, because it does allow us to tease apart pronunciation, which is undoubtedly a skill, lexicogrammar, which are two forms of conceptual knowledge, and pragmatics, which is a disposition. They seem to me to differ precisely on the axes indicated by DHK's tests of definability (actually, "decontextualizability", or "distinct object like quality") and regular and unambiguous feedback. But there are three things that have bothered me a little, yea, ever since DHK's Seoul presentation (and this is going to take me well over Andy's limit, so I will only test Andy on my first bit of bother). 
 
First of all, we have only TWO tests and we have THREE different teaching genres. The two tests seem to me to distinguish admirably between skills and dispositions. But concepts are decontextualizeable in much the same way that skills are (in fact, their separability is really part of how they are defined). So presumably DHK would argue that the acquisition of a concept is NOT a matter of regular and unambiguous feedback. I guess I would agree with that, even though (perhaps precisely because) it makes absolute nonsense of our current system of teaching concepts and testing for them (essentially based on reducing a concept to a skill).
 
The second thing that bothers me is that the "teasing apart" of the genre approach seems, in many cases, to involve a lot more tearing that teasing. DHK assumes that wedding procedures are an outlier, and that most politeness is ill defined. But in all cultures I know politeness is explicitly taught to children, using a system of decontextualized maxims and unambiguous punishments. I have always assumed that pronunciation is a skill par excellence. But stress and intonation, which are indubitably the meat and bones of pronunciation, imply the complete mastery of lexicogrammar AND pragmatics. Doesn't it seem likely that when skills are integrated in PRACTICE that it becomes almost impossible to disentangle them for teaching purposes?
 
The third thing that bothers me is what linguists call the "interface" problem, and what Andersen calls "DECPRO" or "PRODEC", that is, the question of whether and how implicit learning ("procedural knowledge", in Andersen-ese) becomes explicit knowledge ("declarative knowledge"). Of course the two CAN be kept separate, under laboratory conditions. But are they?
 
At the Beijing airport yesterday, an advertisement caught my eye because it was perfectly designed, perfectly spelt, contained no grammatical problems of any kind, and nevertheless felt utterly wrong.
 
a) "Drinking water from the sea for millions of people?"
"Certainly!"
 
Anyone with an elementary feel for the English language must know that this should really be:
 
b) "Drinking water for millions of people--from the SEA?"
"Certainly!"
 
And that is in fact what it IS, if you read the Chinese. 
 
The problem here is what Brecht would call the "gestic" nature of language. Brecht's own example is from the Bible. Which is more horrifying?
 
a) Pluck out the eye that offendeth thee.
b) If thine eye offend thee...pluck it out!
 
Brecht means that language acts originate in gests, or rather gestures, actions which are both decontextualizeable (they have beginnings and endings exactly as nouns do) and not decontextualizeable (they are seamlessly embedded in contexts as speech acts are). It is the gestic nature of language that makes it possible to translate the Biblical injunction as a single horrifying image, but it is also the gestic nature of the language that dictates that the horrifying and surprising result of the gesture suggested must come last and not first.
 
We may say exactly the same thing about feedback. The two versions of the Beijing airport advert, and of Brecht's Biblical example, are both absolutely unambiguous in their rightness and wrongness (we have only to compare the English translation with the Chinese original) and completely resistent to consistent codification (in fact, both versions are usable and used, it's just that one feels far cruder and much less artistic). 
 
Perhaps that's the problem: not some kind of preparadigmatic squeamishness, but a need for a paradigm that respects the artistry which masters a paradigm and transcends it.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 

--- On Sun, 2/6/11, David H Kirshner <dkirsh@lsu.edu> wrote:


From: David H Kirshner <dkirsh@lsu.edu>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Ways With Words
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, February 6, 2011, 1:31 PM


Dear David Kellogg,

Thanks for pressing me on the habituation/enculturation distinction--particularly with respect to my assertion that some domains of activity are "precisely defined and hence subject to being learned as a skill, outside of cultural context," whereas others are not. As you point out, my notion of "precisely defined" is far from precisely defined.

This is a tough distinction to draw clearly; my delay in responding has largely been taken up with working it through.

To begin, the idea of a distinction between a skill and a "disposition" (my word for a cultural practice requiring cultural context to learn) is something that comes to me from educational practice. The genres approach is my attempt to untangle the coherent threads of pedagogical intention that all too often are tangled up within our integrative discourse about good teaching--a discourse that takes "learning" to be a complex and multifaceted construct rather than recognizing the discrete metaphors for learning that actually drive our pedagogical interests.

Let me give a quick example to illustrate the distinction between skills and dispositions before attempting to characterize it analytically. For the past 3 decades, mathematics educators have been interested in promoting an agenda of non-routine problem solving competence in K-12 math students. Back in the 1930s and 1940s a distinguished Hungarian mathematician, George Pólya, had undertaken to explicate problem solving expertise and arrived at a set of heuristic questions that mathematicians tend to ask themselves to enrich their exploration and solution of difficult problems. What's important about these heuristics is that they are rules-of-thumb rather than algorithmic rules. Pólya recognized the context sensitive nature of these rules, and his own pedagogy always sought to engage students in the context of working on actual non-routine problems. Observing students, he would ask himself aloud the kinds of heuristic questions native to actual
 mathematical practice that would usefully arise at the point in problem solving that the student had reached. In this way, he was very successful in inculcating these powerful practices of self questioning.

Unfortunately, the enculturationist character of this pedagogical practice escaped most mathematics educators taking up Polya's heuristics in the 1980s. Textbooks were written that listed out Polya's heuristics and provided exercises in which each heuristic could be practiced over and over, one at a time. In this way, Polya's teaching of heuristics as cultural practices was replaced by a decontextualized pedagogy of skill development, one that failed to promote anything resembling the sought after expertise in non-routine problem solving.

Despite having many such examples that differentiate skills from dispositions, making an analytic distinction remains a daunting challenge. This is because none of the traditions of inquiry in psychology that address learning in these distinct senses cares to participate in the drawing of strong analytic boundaries. Rather, I argue from a Kuhnian perspective, the trajectory for research in the various subfields of psychology is always outward from locally coherent intuitions and instances toward embracing varied phenomena of learning being explored by theorists in other camps. It is only along this trajectory that psychology ever can hope to become paradigmatic, that is unified around a single perspective. In this respect, the work I do in attempting to establish firm analytic boundaries between notions of learning as "habituation of skills," "construction of concepts," and "enculturation of dispositions" is a kind of guerilla research--I call it
 crossdisciplinary research--that draws on psychological theory, but at the same time resists its integrative tendencies.

I draw on two theoretical traditions to help understand how skills are learned, and each can provide some guidance toward demarcating skills from dispositions. Behaviorism is one such tradition, and it is distinguished by its claims of scientific objectivity: a restriction of its interests to stimuli and responses that are objectively characterized and measurable. However, criticisms of the putative objectivity of behavioral theory go back to the early days for associationist psychology. For example Meiklejohn (1908) complained that the objectivity of stimuli is misleading: “Think of learning to drive a nail with a yellow hammer, and realize your helplessness if, in time of need, you should borrow your neighbor’s hammer and find it is painted red” (p. 126). The point, here, is that even as "objective" a stimulus as a hammer can be ambiguous with respect to how it is mentally represented. 

Despite such criticisms, over the next 50 years behaviorist rhetoric increasingly extolled the importance of scientific "objectivity" even as behaviorists ventured further and further from the "natural" domain of habituationist learning to address behavior that is not simply constrained by environmental factors. The culmination was Skinner’s (1958) efforts to extend the analysis of behaviorism to verbal behavior famously beaten back in Chomsky’s (1959) book review. Skinner claimed, for example, that the response "beautiful" elicited by the stimulus of seeing a painting must be under "stimulus control." However, Chomsky convincingly argued that Skinner's analysis was entirely post hoc, without any explanatory or predictive value.

This sets the stage for localizing the domain of habituation learning to instances in which specific response repertoires can be seen as elicited by specific stimuli. Still, how one characterizes "specific" remains much in need of clarification. I turn to the Implicit Learning paradigm of cognitive psychology for further guidance. Study of implicit learning was initiated by Arthur Reber (1967) who demonstrated that when one organizes a set of stimuli according to a complex grammar, subjects will acquire competencies related to the grammar despite being unaware, consciously, of any organizational structure to the data they are observing. A particularly nice example comes from Lewicki, Czyzewski, & Hoffman (1987) who asked subjects to find the single instance of a particular alphanumeric character from among a large array of other characters. In repeated trials in which the target character is randomly repositioned in the array, subjects quickly achieve
 their minimum average rate of retrieval, r. This has to do with the average time it takes to scan the whole array, given the random placement of the target. Next, unbeknownst to subjects, Lewicki and his team manipulated the location of the target character, placing it in a specific quadrant of the display according to a bizarrely complex rule: For the first trial, the placement was random. For the second trial, the placement was again random, but excluding the quadrant of the first trial. Based on these first two randomly located choices, the next three were precisely determined. For example, if the first two were in quadrants I and IV, respectively, this would determine the placement of the next 3 as say in quadrants II, II, and IV in that order. However, if the initial two random placements were in quadrants III and II, respectively, then a different placement would occur for the next 3, say in quadrants IV, II, and I in that order. After the first
 five trials, the pattern would repeat, starting with a new first and second random placement, determining the following 3 placements according to the rule. Over hundreds of trials in which the location of the target was determined by this rule, Lewicki et al. found that r, the best rate that can be achieved if the location of the target character is truly random began to decrease for items 3, 4, and 5 in the sequences of 5 items. In other words, subjects were coming to anticipate the location of these items. In debriefing after the study, subjects indicated no awareness that the placement of the target was anything but random, or that their performance regularly was better on some items than on others.

The implicit learning studies indicate something for us about the nature of habituated learning, and the preconditions needed to elicit it. Habituated learning is the forging of unconscious connections between input stimuli and output responses through repetition. In terms of cognitive mechanisms, we don't really need to regard the learning of dispositions as inherently different from the learning of skills. Rather, the distinction rests on an educational question: What kinds of competencies can be facilitated by setting up regimes of practice; what kind require actual cultural context to acquire the needed experiences. As an example, let's take the quintessential American skill of hitting a baseball with a bat. The first precondition for being able to classify this as a skill rather than a disposition is the unproblematic character of the stimulus set. Having a baseball coming toward one while holding a bat over one's shoulder is unproblematically a
 distinct and identifiable experience. What is more, we can establish regimes of practice for this experience in a batting cage with a pitching machine. One doesn't need to acquire the experiences in the context of an authentic baseball game. Note that the key point here is not that the stimulus set is "objectively definable." Rather it is subjectively experienced as a distinct phenomenological situation. 

What is it that actually constitutes the skill of hitting a baseball with a bat? This is murky territory. Presumably pitches coming in at different speeds, from different angles, and in different parts of the strike zone require a somewhat different configuration of motor responses. To set up regimes of practice, we don't have to figure all of this out explicitly. However, we do have to meet a second precondition in order for skills to develop through repetitive experience: a reliable feedback system in the form of a metric of the success of one's response. For example, in the case of hitting a baseball, whether one has or has not hit the ball is immediately apparent. As well, when one does hit the ball, one experiences the success of the hit in the organization of various percepts including the sound produced by the hit, the angle the ball takes after being hit, and the feel of the bat when the ball is well hit versus poorly hit. Putting this all
 together, we can classify hitting a baseball as a skill that can be practiced rather than a disposition that needs to be acquired in cultural context.

Let's run some of our other examples through this system of evaluation. The Lewicki experiment for the development of competence in scanning for a target letter on a screen laden with distracters is a skill. The stimulus set is cordoned off from other experience because it only occurs in the setting of Lewicki's lab when one is sitting down at a computer and presented with an array. What is more, the response latency--how long it takes to respond--is an automatically monitored variable that we humans--for whatever reason--are spontaneously interested in minimizing. Thus the two conditions are met. Note that if we wanted to train a pigeon to acquire this skill, we would have a problem with the second condition, the pigeon might not monitor response latency, and/or might not be independently motivated to optimize it. In this case, we would likely set up a reward system, say food pellets, that accrues to (what we see as) desired performance. Much of the
 behaviorist shaping of behavior is creation of artificial feedback systems designed to keep the subject attending to the right feedback variables.

Next let's turn to the example of Pólya's heuristics as related to competence in solving non-routine problems. First, the condition of being an unproblematic category of experience is met. We have no difficulty distinguishing when we are working on a non-routine math problem. However, problems do arise in the feedback system. Different situations of problem solving call for different heuristic questions. In this respect, problem solving is no different than hitting a baseball, different pitches call for different swing responses. The difference is that whereas the feedback in hitting the ball is instantaneous and reliable, the efficacy of selecting one heuristic question over another is delayed and unreliable. Not all problems are solvable, so missing doesn't give good feedback. And the efficacy of solution approaches includes much more than whether or not one has made a good choice of heuristic questions. In short, the whole dynamic of problem solving
 is too open-ended to yield to habituationist methods.

We're now in a position to analyze the effectiveness of Pólya's enculturationist approach against the failure of habituationist approaches presented by many textbook authors who provided repetitive practice in the various heuristics. As noted above, Pólya's method involved asking himself aloud heuristic questions useful at the point in the solution reached thus far by the student. Deploying these questions, herself, the student comes to experience success in the solving process sufficiently often for the feedback loop to have effect and needed connections established between problem-situation and heuristic question. The reason habituationist repetitive practice was ineffective is because there's no way to codify the subtle connections among problem types and heuristic questions as would be needed for successful habituationist instruction. Returning to the opening challenge, David, it is in this sense that competencies need to be "precisely defined" in
 order to yield to habituationist methods. I think a very similar analysis could be given for the example of politeness we were discussing. In general, politeness is too context sensitive to yield to habituationist learning methods, yet one can certainly pull out specific practices, such as correct wedding protocols, and teach them in a habituationist fashion. 

This probably is enough said for now on the topic of skills versus dispositions. But I do want to reiterate the renegade nature of this kind of psychological theorizing. Examining the Implicit Learning literature, one finds the simple explanation I've offered here of the non-conscious character of the learning process to be largely discredited. After Reber introduced his first startling and compelling studies beginning in 1967, it took nearly 20 years before other psychologists paid any attention to it (Berry, 1997). When psychologists finally decide to pay attention, it was with a remarkable degree of resistance to the idea that implicit learning could be completely segregated from explicit knowledge. Berry’s (1997) edited volume, How Implicit Is Implicit Learning, and Frensch & Cleereman’s (2002) Implicit Learning and Consciousness show the range of opinion on the matter. Critics of the fully implicit character of implicit learning have gone to
 extraordinary lengths to document trace aspects of conscious awareness connected with implicit learning studies. In fact, this complexity of explanation is now embraced by Reber himself:

"As for the disputes about how implicit implicit knowledge is, you make the same mistake that almost everyone else makes. We do not and should not insist that all the apparent knowledge in these experiments is unconscious. Only that there is more that is 'known' implicitly than can be articulated --- and that this knowledge results in behaviors that cannot be understood purely by examination of consciously held representations." (Reber, September 17 2008, personal communication)

I do wonder if this resistance reflects preparadigmatic angst at the possibility of separate constructions of learning. 

David Kirshner


-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 6:14 PM
To: lchcmike@gmail.com; Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] Ways With Words

Well, yes and no. That is, David Kirshner's post does clarify a lot of my misunderstandings of his work. But it also produces some new puzzles, at least for me.
 
For example, David says that A, perhaps even THE, main difference between a domain which is well framed for a skills teaching genre and one which is framed for enculturation/acculturation has to do with the way in which the domain is defined in words.

An "undefined" domain is conducive to enculturation. He gives the example of politeness. But of course there are far more (and even far better) definitions of politeness (e.g. wedding procedures) then there are of pecan-shelling processes, at least here in China.
 
It's not clear to me what it means to define a domain. You would think that marching together in unison is an almost perfect example of a skill. But when we actually try to "define" it, we don't end up giving recipes (e.g. "First everybody puts there right foot forward at exactly the same time"). That kind of thing might help you get the ball rolling but it in no way helps with the difficult part, which is what you do when you begin to march out of step.
 
In fact, the "definitions" we give are almost always tautological: they are not procedures so much as what Harris calls "constitutive rules"; they are descriptions of what it means to walk in unison. "When you begin to march out of step you have to look at the kid next to you and adjust your gait to his or hers by either slowing down or speeding up." That looks much more like conceptual knowledge, rather than procedural knowledge, so it belongs to the knowledge-as-concepts genre rather than the knowledge-as-skills genre.
 
But of course nobody actually teaches this way. For one thing, it presupposes a kind of descriptive knowledge that usually follows rather than precedes performance. If you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know. For another, it assumes that the kid next to you is marching in step. Suppose he or she isn't?
 
So iInstead, we "just do it". You get a bunch of kids together and you get them to march more or less in unison, and they create a kind of culture-of-marching-in-step, using something like good old "Watch this" and "Follow me". That, of course, sounds like an acculturation genre followed by an enculturation genre. And of course it begs Salman Rushdie's question: How does newness come into the world?
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
PS: Did anyone else feel that Fred Newman and Lisa Fulani's article was PIAGETIAN--that is, it separates development and learning, and places the former absolutely and logically prior to the latter? I did, and perhaps for that reason found it really VERY depressing.
 
dk 

--- On Mon, 1/31/11, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:


From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Ways With Words
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, January 31, 2011, 7:42 AM


Both of you messages D&D, are helpful.
David Ki, do you have a manuscript on the en-ac-ulturation distinction and
the genre approach?
mike

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 6:56 PM, David H Kirshner <dkirsh@lsu.edu> wrote:

> David,
>
> Thanks for the lovely wedding anecdote, and also the example of your
> mother-in-law inducting you into practices of pecan cracking through her
> verbal instructions. The model of enculturation that most of us have to go
> by comes from the situated cognition literature grounded in examples of
> craft apprenticeship. In this model, identity development (from peripheral
> to central participation) as well as the production of skills and concepts
> are incorporated into a complex integrative model of learning. This seems to
> be the frame that you are bringing to bear in understanding my enculturation
> genre.
>
> It is precisely this integrative assumption that the genres approach
> resists. The sculpted genres of teaching enable a parsing of the discrete
> elements interacting even within complex settings. For instance, the
> shelling of pecans, though certainly a cultural practice, is precisely
> defined and hence subject to being learned as a skill, outside of cultural
> context. (Contrast this with open-ended cultural practices like politeness
> or approaches to solving of non-routine problems which cannot be precisely
> specified and hence must be learned in cultural context.) Indeed, though
> your pecan-shelling lesson did transpire in an authentic cultural locale, I
> would want to argue that the structure of the learning support for your
> pecan-shelling prowess is from habituation instruction, not from
> enculturation.
>
> The key to habituated learning is unconscious (subcognitive) association of
> perceptual stimuli and motor responses. Your mother-in-law's directions for
> how you should hold and operate the apparatus served to make perceptually
> salient certain aspects of the stimulus and response domains, and your
> practice served to establish the requisite subcognitive linkages between
> them. I think we can probably rule out concept teaching, as presumably your
> mother-in-law was telling you what to do, rather than explaining principles
> to you (not discounting the possibility that you, independently, chose to
> "make sense" of what you were being asked to do). From a genres perspective,
> habituation would be a sufficient explanation to account for your newfound
> skill in pecan shelling. In fact, the requirements for enculturational
> learning of this "practice" probably were not present.
>
> Let me take a moment to unpack the two enculturation-related pedagogies in
> order to be able to continue the genres analysis of your pecan-shelling
> learning episode. One of the difficulties, given the prior model of situated
> cognition theory and craft apprenticeship, is to imagine how enculturational
> learning could be separated from identity development. However, in the
> genres analysis, identity becomes a salient concern in the case of
> alternative identity possibilities. For instance, in entering a craft
> apprenticeship, one makes a decision to "become" a craftsperson (of a
> certain sort). Thus one is actively seeking to acculturate oneself to the
> practices of the culture.
>
> This dynamic helps structure the "acculturation pedagogy" genre that I will
> soon distinguish from the "enculturation pedagogy." In acculturation
> pedagogy, a bona-fide member of the culture models mature cultural practices
> in order that novices seeking to acculturate themselves to the culture can
> emulate those practices. In your case, David, it doesn't seem that you
> considered this to be a Chinese cultural practice, or even that you expected
> your mother-in-law to be proficient in it. If anything, what you most
> admired about her was her ability to transfer from her prior experience with
> cracking peanuts and pumpkin seeds to new nuts and new devices. However, the
> ability to transfer was NOT what you were learning. You were learning to
> shell pecans.
>
> Enculturation is an even worse fit than acculturation to your
> pecan-shelling episode. Enculturation is the process of cultural absorption
> that comes about when one is immersed in a unitary cultural milieu, for
> instance a child within the national culture adopting the characteristic
> practices of the culture. This kind of learning is accomplished without
> conscious intention or awareness. The associated pedagogical genre has the
> teacher work surreptitiously to develop the classroom microculture so that
> it gradually comes to resemble the reference culture with respect to valued
> practices. Students learn not because of an intention to assume a new
> identity, but because they're immersed in a classroom culture that they
> gradually become enculturated to, even as it continues to evolve. For
> instance, a math teacher might seek to shape the culture of argumentation in
> the classroom so that it comes to more closely resemble the kinds of logical
> chains of reasoning that characterize mathematical proof. This is a gradual
> process over a long period of time--not a good fit for your pecan-shelling
> experience.
>
> Thanks for engaging with the genres approach. I hope this helps clarify
> some of the genres, and the way the genres framework is used to analyze
> situations of learning and teaching.
>
> David
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of David Kellogg
> Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2011 6:20 PM
> To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
> Subject: [xmca] Ways With Words
>
>
>
> David (Kirshner) is of course quite correct to point out that narrative is
> not a necessary or sufficient element in his “enculturation” educational
> genre. But it does seem to me that the “enculturation” educational genre is
> distinguished by greater discursivity; it’s a much talkier model, and I
> think it is for this reason we often find it in traditional, more oral
> cultures. Unfortunately (I think) we also find it in foreign language
> classrooms, where I think it is fundamentally inappropriate.
>
> First of all, it seems to me that enculturation almost necessarily involves
> some kind of legitimate peripheral participation, non-essential but
> nevertheless participatory roles in an activity that can in theory be taken
> by children and outsiders. This clearly suggests a very hierarchical set of
> roles, which, since they are not set by skills or by knowledge must be set
> by some other criterion (e.g. being a so-called “native speaker”)
>
> Secondly, it seems to me that enculturation models place a premium on doing
> fairly simple, general, everyday things with great adroitness, creativity,
> and confidence. An obvious example of this would be cooking, something which
> everybody has to do but which can be done either with routinism, or with
> verve and inspiration, or with the consummate mastery that is born of
> endless routines illuminated by flashes of inspiration.
>
> Thirdly (and as David says, this is where narrative “kicks in”)
> enculturation means learning what Shirley Brice Heath calls “ways with
> words”. If it were simply a matter of “Watch this” “Now you try it”, then
> there would be no difference between the discursive model and the skills
> model. Even if we add “Now, what was the difference?” we only get a skills
> model plus explicit knowledge, and that is not what the enculturation model
> is really about.
>
> That’s really all I have to say here. The rest of this post is just two
> anecdotes to illustrate. and if I had any sense I would just shut up at this
> point. I am sure that many readers will stop reading at this point, if not
> long before. But of course in the enculturation model, ways with words are
> very important, and sometimes anecdotes and illustrations are more important
> than the actual skills and concepts imparted.
>
> The other day I was sitting here at this very table cracking newly imported
> American pecans for my mother-in-law, who has had a stroke and can barely
> speak. She was watching me intently, having never seen either pecans or the
> jar-opening device I was using to crack them, and began to make speaking
> sounds. I leaned over to listen and suddenly realized she was giving very
> precise instructions about how to use the device so that the meat would not
> be shattered.
>
> Her body no longer obeys her brain, and she has reacquired the skills that
> an infant must have in getting others to obey it instead. But in normal
> times this simply involves laughing or crying, not “ways with words”. The
> unusual thing about this was the objectivity, the precision, and efficiency
> of her instructions: as soon as I held the jar-opening device the way she
> told me to, my speed doubled, my efficiency tripled, and not a single
> nut-meat was broken.
>
> I realized that cracking peanuts and pumpkin seeds with immense precision
> is something she has spent a large stretch of her non-working life doing
> (she retired from the textile mill where she worked at forty years of age)
> and she obviously had very developed views, transferable to entirely new
> products and even completely new tools, about how it should be done. In
> normal times (when we were both twenty years younger) she would have simply
> shoved me out of the way and done it herself. But in this situation,
> absolutely no other way of transferring her knowledge than a slurred mixture
> of Shaanxi and Henan dialects, to which I am normally fairly impervious.
>
> This circumstance is probably not unique; over thousands of years of human
> history there were probably many situations where knowledge had to be
> transferred in this highly imperfect way from disabled elders to not yet
> able juniors. And so ways with words turn out to be as important as skilled
> performances.
>
> But unskilled performances also have to be included, first of all, to
> provide the contrast that we have in skills models (“Watch this” “Now you
> try it”) and the explicit knowledge we have in conceptual models (“See the
> difference”), secondly to allow the elders to show the mastery on which
> their authority must ultimately be based (we cannot always live off of the
> capital of social position), and thirdly to allow some means by which
> outsiders can teach insiders, as well as insiders teach outsiders, making
> the enculturation model not entirely a closed system and allowing the whole
> to develop new forms of knowing.
>
> Yesterday my brother-in-law and I went to a wedding in a nearby village
> where he is doing some business with the local village head, whose friend
> had a son getting married. Village weddings in China are what I would call
> loosely scripted: certain things must be done, but they are not done to
> schedule; they happen when all the principals are accounted for and there is
> enough of an audience to make it worthwhile. In order to make sure that the
> audience shows up and stays, a huge tub of “saozi mian” (noodles) is kept on
> the boil all day, and anyone can eat as much as they like, whether they are
> related to the bride and groom or not.
>
> There are lots of roles that call for little skill, but there are also
> roles which can be fulfilled very skillfully. For example, when we first
> arrived at the wedding, they were carrying the bride’s gifts to her new
> inlaws into a room where the inlaws sat before portraits of their ancestors
> to receive them.
>
> My brother-in-law and I, along with some neighborhood children, took some
> of them in (I took a large, purple plastic thermos bottle) and in return the
> male adults were given cigarettes and the children were given milk sweets.
>
> While my brother-in-law was smoking his cigarette (I stuck mind behind my
> ear because I don’t smoke and I didn’t want another pressed upon me), the
> bride herself arrived. The groom’s sister barred and locked the door, and
> then the spy-hole was prized out so that negotiations could begin.
>
> The bride had to knock, of course. The groom’s sister, as per tradition,
> eyeballed the spy hole (she had to stand on tippy-toe) and then, in standard
> Chinese, told the bride’s family that the door was barred, and if the
> bride’s family really wanted to cross the threshold, they had to give a
> “hongbao” (a red envelope, with money).
>
> An envelope was produced, but when it the groom’s sister opened it she
> found it only had a light greenish one yuan note in it (I think that’s about
> twelve cents at current exchange rates). She complained that the bride’s
> family was “xiaochi” (stingy) and began to open the door.
>
> My brother-in-law finished his cigarette and sprang to his feet. He barred
> the door with is wiry frame and let out a torrent of choice insults in the
> local dialect. Egged on by hilarious laughter (from both sides of the door),
> he finished with a rhetorical flourish based on slightly different
> emphases—he wants a BIG red envelope, and big RED one (one hundred yuan
> notes are red).
>
> Another envelope was produced (with a blue five yuan note) and my brother
> in law relented. The bride came in and bowed to the ancestors, and they went
> off to enjoy their new marital status, their sumptuous (by peasant
> standards) new lodgings and the spiffy new plastic purple thermos I had
> carried up the stairs.
>
> As we left, we noticed that another wedding being held nearby. On closer
> inspection, this turned out to be wedding we had really been invited to—we
> had peripherally participated in the wrong wedding, and nobody cared or even
> noticed. And so the concept of party crashers was introduced to a remote
> village in Northwest China.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
> --- On Sat, 1/29/11, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Folk Psychology from a narrative perspective
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Saturday, January 29, 2011, 9:38 AM
>
>
> Children with older siblings observe the way they manage indignant parents
> and can quickly work out what works and when (back in the 1980s Judy Dunn
> found plenty of evidence of 2 year olds - who had older siblings - appealing
> to parents for support but not when they 'knew' that they were responsible
> for a conflict). They don't need to know HOW or WHY a particular appeal
> works before they start to use it and they 'join in' well before they
> develop this sort of understanding (a particularly clear example of the
> general genetic law). Only children have a tougher job to work out how to
> manage their parents but they at least have the advantage of plenty of
> practice.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of Robert Lake
> Sent: 29 January 2011 17:23
> To: lchcmike@gmail.com; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Folk Psychology from a narrative perspective
>
> Yes, I appreciate your comments as well Greg.
>
> I only have one thing to add and LSV might appreciate this.
>
> My grand daughter was saying "It was an accident" when she was 3.  :-)
>
> Robert
>
> On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 11:17 AM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > An interesting elaboration of the idea of the retrospective construction
> of
> > meaning, Greg. I had not thought about it in these terms before.
> > mike
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 11:55 PM, Gregory Allan Thompson <
> > gathomps@uchicago.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > Yes, and the insistence on ascribing motive to practice starts early.
> My
> > > favorite is the parent that looks at his two year old who has just torn
> > half
> > > the pages out of a cherished book of his (substitute lipstick all over
> > the
> > > dining room table or paint on the new carpet) and chastises the child
> > "Why
> > > did you do that?" or better "What were you thinking?"
> > >
> > > As if the child has some complex motivation and thought behind what
> they
> > > did. The child can only stare back in shock wondering what is
> happening.
> > >
> > > But there is important work being done in those ridiculous questions.
> Put
> > > together enough of these moments and by the time they are 7 or so, they
> > get
> > > it - "It was an accident" and "I didn't mean to do it" become stock
> > > responses regardless of what happened. And by 12 they have become
> nearly
> > > fully competent at manipulating the situation, intentions and all, e.g.
> > "I
> > > was trying to help my sister... and...". For each event, they are able
> to
> > > reconstruct a philosophy of the act, so to speak.
> > >
> > > -greg
> > >
> > > >
> > > >------------------------------
> > > >
> > > >Message: 2
> > > >Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:53:27 -0600
> > > >From: "David H Kirshner" <dkirsh@lsu.edu>
> > > >Subject: RE: [xmca] Folk Psychology from a narrative perspective
> > > >To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > > >Message-ID:
> > > >       <731CECC23FB8CA4E9127BD399744D1EC02E0CDFD@email001.lsu.edu>
> > > >Content-Type: text/plain;      charset="us-ascii"
> > > >
> > > >As with Tollefsen, who reviewed Hutto's book, I'm not quite sure what
> > > >kinds of specialized narrative practices are supposed to be needed to
> > > >establish our folk psychology's rational ascriptions. The ascription
> of
> > > >motive to behavior is ubiquitous. Admittedly, it may take one a long
> > > >time to get good at ascribing particular motives to particular
> actions.
> > > >But our social/cultural frame demands such ascription, so presumably
> we
> > > >all are going to get a lot of practice.
> > > >
> > > >It is one thing to look to narrative as a site for development of a
> > > >particular cultural practice--the folk psychology ascription of
> > > >motives--quite another to associate narrative with the fundamental
> > > >process of enculturation, itself. My approach to enculturation does
> not
> > > >take narrativization of one's identity as fundamental. That only kicks
> > > >in in the specialized process of "acculturation"--intentional
> emulation
> > > >of cultural practices to fulfill goals of cultural membership. But
> > > >enculturation functions more fundamentally as a spontaneous adaption
> to
> > > >the culture in which one is enmeshed.
> > > >
> > > >David
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >-----Original Message-----
> > > >From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
> ]
> > > >On Behalf Of Larry Purss
> > > >Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 7:21 PM
> > > >To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > > >Subject: Re: [xmca] Folk Psychology from a narrative perspective
> > > >
> > > >Hi David Ke
> > > >
> > > >David
> > > >Your distinction between history and narrative is interesting.  Do you
> > > >think
> > > >Bruner collapses the distinction. Hutto's framework on narratives is
> > > >that
> > > >they are forms of story-telling that give "reasons for actions" in
> terms
> > > >of
> > > >beliefs and desires which are the folk psychological frameworks that
> are
> > > >culturally grounded frames of reference.  He suggests this form of
> > > >explanation is socioculturally grounded.  My recollection of Bruner's
> > > >work
> > > >is he suggests it is one of the two basic forms of constructing
> meaning.
> > > >Therefore, for Bruner, history would be a particular form of
> narrative.
> > > >
> > > >David, if Hutto's work interests you, I would also google his edited
> > > >book
> > > >"Folk Psychology Reassessed" which gives alternative theoretical
> > > >approaches
> > > >which are challenging the "theory theory" model and "simulation" model
> > > >of
> > > >folk psychology.  The edited volume situates Hutto's work in a larger
> > > >stream
> > > >of thought.
> > > >
> > > >On this topic of folk psycholgy I'm currently reading a book
> "Philosophy
> > > >in
> > > >the Flesh" by Lakoff & Johnson that posits BASIC or PRIMARY forms of
> > > >cognition as fundamentally metaphorical. We imaginally compare a
> source
> > > >concept to a target concept.   The SOURCE concept of these primary
> > > >cognitive
> > > >structures are ALWAYS based in our physical bodies. Lakoff & Johnson
> > > >suggest
> > > >from these primary metaphors more complex metaphorical meanings
> develop.
> > > >If
> > > >this perspective is accurate, then language is not the SOURCE of our
> > > >most
> > > >basic metaphors. The source is in the sensory-motor or somatic
> embodied
> > > >cognition. Language expresses these basic metaphors.  If there is some
> > > >merit
> > > >in this position then education and developmental science should
> engage
> > > >with
> > > >basic primary metaphors as foundational in the emergence of cognitive
> > > >capacity and in how these basic metaphors IMPLICITLY structure our
> folk
> > > >psychology.
> > > >
> > > >>From this perspective of primary metaphor as embodied  it is not too
> > > >big a
> > > >step  to reflect on primary intersubjectivity as a precursor to
> > > >secondary
> > > >intersubjectivity.  I have a hunch these 2 constructs are intimately
> > > >related.
> > > >
> > > >Larry
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 4:14 PM, David Kellogg
> > > ><vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> Wow--I have to get that book! Thanks, Larry.
> > > >>
> > > >> The way I understand David Kirshner's work is this: there is really
> > > >only
> > > >> ONE of the three meta-discourses in education that is narrative, at
> > > >least
> > > >> narrative in the sense of oriented towards the action of a hero in a
> > > >problem
> > > >> space who evaluates and achieves some kind of resolution.
> > > >>
> > > >> That's his THIRD meta-discourse, the one which sees education as a
> > > >process
> > > >> of becoming a participant, a member, a practioner and as mastering a
> > > >> particular set of discourses that accompany membership.
> > > >>
> > > >> It seems to me that his first meta-discourse, which sees education
> as
> > > >a
> > > >> process of mastering skills, is not narrativist, because it focuses
> on
> > > >> problem solutions and pretty much ignores the hero and the
> evaluation
> > > >of the
> > > >> problem space.
> > > >>
> > > >> His second meta-discourse, which sees education as a process of
> > > >acquiring
> > > >> conceptual knowledge, is not narrativist either, because it sees
> this
> > > >> knowledge as being not embodied in a particular hero and because it
> > > >sees the
> > > >> knowledge as being quite separable from the solution of problems.
> > > >>
> > > >> I don't think this means that DHK would consider the third
> > > >meta-discourse
> > > >> the most complete. I think it's only the most complete if we view it
> > > >from a
> > > >> narrativist point of view, and that is no coincidence, since it
> > > >co-evolved
> > > >> with a lot of Bruner's work.
> > > >>
> > > >> I have a question about the difference between narrative and history
> > > >(as in
> > > >> "cultural historical"). It seems to me that everything we say about
> > > >> narrative (its structure, it's "I-ness" and even its past-to-present
> > > >> orientation) is radically UNTRUE of history (because history is not
> > > >> structured around heroes in problem spaces, it is not "I" shaped,
> and
> > > >it is
> > > >> oriented present-to-past). Why, then, do people of our peculiar
> > > >historical
> > > >> epoch treat the two as synonymous?
> > > >>
> > > >> David Kellogg
> > > >> Seoul National University of Education
> > > >>
> > > >> --- On Wed, 1/26/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >>
> > > >>
> > > >> From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
> > > >> Subject: [xmca] Folk Psychology from a narrative perspective
> > > >> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > > >> Date: Wednesday, January 26, 2011, 2:38 PM
> > > >>
> > > >>
> > > >> I have attached a book review for others interested in a perspective
> > > >on
> > > >> folk
> > > >> psychology that assumes a perspective inspired by Jerome Bruner's
> work
> > > >on
> > > >> narrative practices,  Hutto is positing a 2nd person dialogical
> > > >grounding
> > > >> for understanding "reasons for actions"  He suggests this mode of
> > > >> understanding is most pronounced when actions are unpredictable.
> > > >Hutto
> > > >> suggests there are other more direct embodied forms of recognition
> and
> > > >> engagement that are not narrative based.
> > > >>
> > > >> I see some affinity in this perspective to David Kirschner's
> approach
> > > >to
> > > >> learning theory as narrative based genres.
> > > >>
> > > >> Larry
>
> --
> *Robert Lake  Ed.D.
> *Assistant Professor
> Social Foundations of Education
> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
> Georgia Southern University
> P. O. Box 8144
> Phone: (912) 478-5125
> Fax: (912) 478-5382
> Statesboro, GA  30460
>
> *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
> midwife.*
> *-*John Dewey.


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