[xmca] Finding common ground across sociocultural frameworks

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Mike, you asked us to reflect on our understanding about questions of values
and agency in the discussion of action research and CHAT.  In searching for
common ground, between various forms of action research I want to continue
to bring Anna Stetsenko into the conversation.  The reason why I am
referring to her work is because she locates action and activity as
ahistorical development within a more inclusive sociocultural perspective
which exists at a more general level of analysis.

She suggests that in our contemporary psychological perspectives there are
three big frameworks or meta-theories to explain or understand development
and learning. The majority of teachers, psychologists, policy makers and
others in the educational arena are mostly operating implicitly within the
first two meta theoretical perspectives  and the third sociocultural
framework is less represented in psychological and educational discourse.
The 3 BIG frameworks are:

1)The traditional empiricist one according to which humans know the world
through the input generated by information passing from the environment into
the brain via sense organs.
2) The Kantian framework of rationalist metaphysics that posits knowledge is
generated through processes in which the mind imposes its pre-existing
structures on the sensorial input rather than merely detecting or recording
incoming external input.
3) The sociocultural or socio-historical framework which posits a relational
ontology as the ground within which knowledge is produced.

Anna is suggesting that the first two frameworks are much more united in
articulating and presenting a coherent framework which results in the
dominance of the current testing and control framework within the public
school systems. [as a result of the dominance of the first 2 frameworks
highlighted.

Anna believes if we are to challenge the 2  big meta theoretical frameworks
currently controlling how we organize our school practices we need to find
common cause within the third sociocultural framework. She suggests the way
to find this common ground is to understand what all the various
sociocultural approaches (phenomenology, poststructuralism, hermeneutics,
American pragmatism, Marxism) share in common.  Her answer is they share a
relational ontology.  One way Anna suggests we capitalize on and strengthen
this relational ontology is to recognize that the 3 major frameworks of the
20th century, by Piaget, Dewey, and Vygotsky, all embodied strong relational
thinking.  At THIS level of analysis relational ontology offers a shared
perspective and common ground among the various sociocultural turns in
psychology.

At the next level of analysis the common ground of a shared relational
ontology has a dialectical tension within the shared relational ontology.
This tension is expressed as a tension between the passive spectator stance
and the agentive activist stance [within the shared relational ontology as
common ground].  According to the spectator stance, the world, though being
profoundly relational is also essentially passive with phenomena and
processes co-occuring and BEING together with no agency posited at the
fundamental level of existence.  Co-being comes about through co-presence
but existence is passive.  In contrast  the activist stance posits human
action as agentive and constitutive of the RELATIONS between persons and the
world.  Development and learning as co-being and co-presence is
dialectically superseded by the agentive stance of acting in or engaging the
world.  What is central to this dialectical perspective is that the emphasis
on acting agentively DOES NOT and is not meant to eliminate the
relationality of co-being and action which is always and irrevocably
relational. The activist stance posits the relational becoming is  always
crossing and eliminating the boundaries between the knower and the known.
Relationality is not eliminated but instead entailed in activity that now
becomes the supreme ontological principle.  Anna suggests this NOVEL form of
the activist stance is a moment in development that transforms the
biological and posits the coming into being of subjectivity and agentive
activity as BI-directional. Learning becomes an active endeavor and actors
learn by doing by acting in and on their world. In this novel form of
becoming activities are not complementary to development and learning but
instead are the very realm that development and learning belong to and are
carried out in.  Activities are the very "matter" development and learning
are made of.

Anna suggests the collaborative activist stance is the "matter" of the human
sciences in a way similar to "adaptation" is the central organizing idea
within the biological realm.

What I appreciate about Anna's project is her attempt to embrace the
sociocultural [sociohistorical] turn in education and psychology which
posits development and teaching/learning as ontologically relational [and
therefore attempts to share common ground and posits CHAT as a further
elaboration within this common ground.  It is this spirit of searching for
common ground which I believe is essential to talk back to the first 2
perspectives mentioned above.

What I find so radical in Anna's writings is how she is attempting to
connect ontology, epistemology, agency, subjectivity as a single unity
{gestalt, whole] with NO GAPS.  Her writings in this area is helping be to
understand the concept of "bi-directionality" within this unity.  The
concrete & abstract, cases & types are a single process or unity with NO
GAPS and it is only one's stance [perspective] which raises to awareness the
concrete or abstract.  From her perspectives "examples" "events"  or "cases"
if explored deeply lead to the abstract while the abstract is grounded in
examples, events, and cases.

I've summarized what I currently understand of Anna's project and I believe
it has been very helpful for my development/learning.

Larry
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