Re: [xmca] Finding common ground across sociocultural frameworks

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Larry--

Anna is a member of the editorial collective of MCA, one of the senior
people who has volunteered to help out in the brewing mentoring activities
(mea culpa for not pushing
them into flight), and a long valued colleague.

Did Anna really write that " she locates action and activity as ahistorical
development within a more inclusive sociocultural perspective which exists
at a more general level of analysis" ? More general than Vygotskian multiple
time scales that take us back
to newts?

Anyway, it would be REALLY help me to have some concrete examples of the
exemplary action research projects whose virtues, theoreticalness,
methodologicalness, and so on could be discussed. What are our shining
examples?
mike

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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