Re: [xmca] Finding common ground across sociocultural frameworks

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Valerie-- Are your comments about articulation and loose coupling a response
to Larry account of Anna's ideas about NO GAPS?

Larry-- I worry about the account of spectators. Are spectators really
passive? In a relational ontology? Relatedly, so to speak, I have this
gnawing idea that teoria in Greek referred to spectators at a civic event,
like a play.

How should we be mapping the activist stance on to the concerns about whose
interests are being served in AR research?

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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