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RE: [xmca] concepts

This is exactly what I thought, Jay. 

The student writing that I am analyzing is a reflection of a
service-learning project in which the students worked with a variety of
activities and concrete materials (ie. Planting native and non-native
plants, building a bench using logs and wooden pegs). The written
reflections are just one set of artifacts in the data which includes
pre-writing, illustration, and video interview and tour of the site. Another
great piece of the project was a student documentary. Multiple degrees of
generalization by multiple participants. It is a very rich data set which
contrasts to many of the measures available to analyze or score student
writing.

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Jay Lemke
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 9:22 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] concepts

Thanks, Monica, for these thoughts and questions. It's been a busy week and
I am just working my way through more xmca postings.

One possible suggestion for getting at some of your questions about how much
authentic meaning-making is going on in kids writing is to broaden the
mediating means -- what happens if they try to connect their written texts
with drawing pictures? or enacting a playlet? or building something? While
there are some aspects of meaning-making that are bound to particular sign
systems, in general I think the sort of flexible meaning-making we associate
with conceptual understanding crosses over from one to another, or more
subtly, it flows through and among them. When we restrict our meaning-making
artificially to just one medium (or one genre, or one topic) it becomes much
harder to tell the difference between rote and living meanings.

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Senior Research Scientist
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
University of California - San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0506

Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
School of Education
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke 

Professor Emeritus
City University of New York








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