Helena Worthen hworthen@uic.edu
hworthen@igc.org
Activity
Theory and Labor Education
This is a
working draft of a paper with a very specific purpose -- namely, to engage
others in my field of labor education, which is often sited in departments or
institutes of industrial relations, in activity theory.
It is directed at practitioners here in the US who may have no
familiarity with activity theory. I
am posting it on xmca in the hopes that I can find like-minded persons who are
interested in talking about this application of activity theory but I am also
anxious about getting it right. I
don’t want to be out there advocating for a theoretical framework if I have
missed some of the main points or got it wrong.
So I welcome comments of all sorts from xmca participants. Thanks very
much to all.
Mike Cole
The Illusion of
Culture-free Intelligence Testing
In this chapter, I will argue that
the notion of culture-free intelligence is a contradiction in terms. I begin by
reviewing the historical background of efforts to understand the relation
between culture and thought that formed the scholarly background against which
IQ testing came into being. After summarizing briefly the strategy developed by
the pioneers of IQ testing, I will present a "thought experiment" to help
clarify the issues and some empirical evidence from research which has sought to
approximate the conditions of the thought experiment. I close by offering some
comments on how to think about culture and IQ testing given the impossibility of
a culture-free test of intellectual ability.
Reijo Miettinen, (1997):
The Concept of
Activity in the Analysis of Hetereogenuous Networks in Innovation
Process
Reijo Miettinen, from an activity theoretical (AT) approach,
attempts find common methodological endeavors with Actor network theory (ANT).
They include avoidance of monocausal explanations, an attempt to find a
non-dualist account of society and nature, taking seriously the significance of
material artifacts and studying the concrete networks of actors instead of
interrelationships between macro- and micro-phenomena.
Katie
Vann: kvann@weber.ucsd.edu
What
Contexts are Learners Learning For?
Katie Vann review the book
Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children's Development
(1993). The paper links to corresponding discussions on XCMA in which the book
was discussed in 1995. Katie Vann's review focuses on the "robust" way "context"
was used both in the XCMA discussions and the book.
Yrjö Engeström, (1996): engestro@cc.helsinki.fi
Development as
Breaking Away and Opening Up: A Challenge to Vygotsky and Piaget
Yrjö
Engeström using Peter Høeg's autobiographical novel Borderliners (Høeg, 1994),
points toward three major challenges to the developmental theories of Vygotsky
and Piaget:
Vera John-Steiner and Holbrook Mahn: vygotsky@unm.edu
Sociocultural
Approaches to Learning and Development: A Vygotskian Framework
Vera
John-Steiner and Holbrook Mahn offer a good overview of sociocultural approaches
to teaching and learning. The paper is divided into three sections; introdyction
to sociocultural theory, Vygotsky's methodology, and educational research and
practice. The authors introduce the concepts of co-construction and
cognitive pluralism in which to re-think contemporary educational
practice.
Aksel Mortensen, (1990):
Culture
and Microcosmos of Individuals: The Idiosyncratic Room of the
Person
Aksel Mortensen looks at psychological ways of functioning in
different embedded cultures and subcultures with an empasis on children with
learning disabilities in school. He begins by mentioning some cross-cultural
paradoxes that arise from the neglect of context in the study of psychological
functioning (Griffin, Cole, Diaz, & King 1987).