Re: [xmca] lave in mca

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Lave: Changing Practices



I think it would be a pity if xmca-ites settled for Peter’s
characterization of Jean Lave’s article as a call to activism, and as
pitting writing against activism. I did not interpret Jean’s comments as a
call to march in anti-war-de-jour activities, or join an occupy protest to
slow down corporate greed.



Peter commented, in part:

 *Scribner took it to the streets, marching in the marches and such, and
bully for her. I've got to weigh things differently, I suspect. If I go
protest la guerre-du-jour, holding my sign at the campus gates, is this a
cost-effective action? Or is getting my writing done more important,
especially the public pieces that are read widely, if not terribly
influentially, at least in terms of current policies? (but then, standing
at the campus gates with a sign protesting wars or monied interests
probably has limited payoff as well.) And in my very conservative area, I'd
no doubt pay an additional cost, such as the outcry against my activism for
causes that go against the grain of popular opinion.*



Firstly, the general silence she identified (correctly or not, people who
were there should comment, but it rings true enough to me) was the absence
of  “historical specificity and political analysis.”  She then linked her
ideas to those of Gramsci in the following way:



*Gramsci’s political account of learning and education (and everything
else) grew out of*

*his analysis of the “absolute historicism” of philosophy of praxis. He
pointed to the central engagement of state and private institutions of
education in inculcating and defending dominant hegemonic relations of
consent. That is not all that is going on in our complex contradictory
world, of course. But because virtually all ISCAR participants do the work
of these institutions, we also need to carry out the political analysis
that our positions call for.*

* *

None of Jean’s examples of the kind of changes in practice that she
advocates focused on marching in the streets or challenging the guerre (S!)
du jour. They did, however, focus on a number of examples (Drier, Ingold,
Gomes, Holland, and her own) all of which involve the scholar, as scholar,
engaging in critical analyses of current research practices within the
professions of which they are a part.



Overall, the message that I took from the talk/essay was that those who
adopt what locally we refer to as a CHAT perspective have commitments to
grounding theory in practices that are supposed to put our theories to the
test. Her recommendation that we worry about educating the educators, whose
practice is education, seems to me completely uncontroversial. Her positive
cases seem uncontroversial as recognizable lines of scholarly research some
of which has been discussed in this forum (we should “take  seriously the
understanding of research as craft, and of both learning and changing
identity as aspects of craftsmanship" for example).



I do not know nearly enough about most of the examples that Jean holds up
as potential models to follow. It seems that remedying my ignorance about
those examples would be a productive place to start. For sure, the serious
problems facing all forms of education, but in the case of most of us,
institutionally, the problems facing higher education, are acute and
getting worse very rapidly. Jean’s summary of that situation seems to line
up with my own knowledge of events, but perhaps that is because we are both
present for the dismantling of what was once a great public university.
Much less clear are lines of theory/practice research that would/could make
a difference.


Anyway, there is a serious call here for a fundamental, critical,
theory/practice orientation to our work. Answering this call IS a political
as well as an academic act. It may also be a warning that the privileged
lifeworlds of academics that those of us over 30 years of age have
experienced may be in danger of disappearing faster than the ozone layer.

mike

(Ps- sorry for the funny font gyrations. Cut and pasted from a word doc.)

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 6:00 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> I'm going to assume my unappointed role as discussion-launcher for the
> Lave article in MCA that was voted as the feature discussion article on
> xmca. I may not be able to stick around for long, as we're going on
> vacation Saturday in hopes that somewhere on this earth we can find a place
> that's not as hot as Georgia, USA.
>
> Lave's paper is based on her plenary closing talk at ISCAR in Rome, an
> even I did not attend. As an aside, as long as it's held in mid-September,
> shortly after our fall academic semester begins, I and others like me
> probably won't attend. It's just too ill-timed to miss 1-2 weeks of
> classes, depending on location, right after getting the semester off the
> ground.
>
> Lave references several ISCAR talks she found compelling, so it's nice for
> us non-attenders to get a sense of what she found valuable in Rome.
>
> If there's an overriding theme to her paper, it might be that
> cultural-historical researchers ought to be more involved in social
> activism. I was struck while reading the paper by how she could easily have
> used Silvia Scribner as her role model for the talk, even though SS goes
> unmentioned. A month or so when I wrote to the list about my reading of her
> collected papers, I noted that her activism on the labor front probably cut
> into her writing time, although perhaps her career was conducted before
> electronic media made expectations for writing much greater-there were
> fewer journals and fewer book publishers, and writing itself was much more
> laborious (a point related to the recent discussion of writing) in that it
> was often undertaken by pen, then retyped, and ultimately less amenable to
> revision than it is these days.
>
> She urges social activism, although the paper is general enough to allow
> for individuals to take that appeal up in their own ways. Academics are, to
> some, "above" ideology, and so should avoid the fray; yet most of us here
> would agree with her point that all thinking is ideological, and so being
> an activist on important social issues is a natural extension of our work.
> If we are all ideological in our thinking, research, and writing, and if
> social issues are shaped by ideology, should we not then contribute to the
> shape of  social issues through what we know via scholarship? (and how's
> that for a Western logical syllogism.)
>
> Scribner took it to the streets, marching in the marches and such, and
> bully for her. I've got to weigh things differently, I suspect. If I go
> protest la guerre-du-jour, holding my sign at the campus gates, is this a
> cost-effective action? Or is getting my writing done more important,
> especially the public pieces that are read widely, if not terribly
> influentially, at least in terms of current policies? (but then, standing
> at the campus gates with a sign protesting wars or monied interests
> probably has limited payoff as well.) And in my very conservative area, I'd
> no doubt pay an additional cost, such as the outcry against my activism for
> causes that go against the grain of popular opinion.
>
> I hope these concerns are not too concrete for Lave's fairly abstract
> call-to-peaceful-arms about social activism. For those of us in fairly
> conventional academic positions (Lave's seems to allow for much more travel
> than mine), activism has to be balanced against other considerations and
> demands on our time and local reputations. At this point, I'm more
> persuaded by the general thrust of her views than of possibilities for
> real-world activism whose consequences are greater than I can produce
> through my writing.
>
> OK, there you go, your turn.
>
>
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