Thanks so much for your detailed information about the symposium that you
organized. It was really exciting! I hope folks in psychology in Hong
Kong would do something along the line that you're doing... as far as I
know, they're still rather "individual"-oriented, e.g., human
participants treated as aggregates of biological and cognitive
variables... When and how did you come into contact with socio-cultural
theory? What is the response of other psychologists in Japan to your
moving away from "individualism" towards a more socially and culturally
situated approach to psychological studies?
I'm excited about your colleague's ethnomethodological approach to
psychological research, too; you know, my dissertation supervisor is an
ethnomethodologist and a conversation analyst; my approach to data is
very similar to your colleague's, I believe: i.e., we treat the
reseacher as constitutive of her/his data.
And as a conversation analyst, we
look at the sequential organization of discourse and members' (i.e.,
conversation participants) methods of negotiating meaning and organizing
activities... yes, we talk a lot about members' practices, especially
discourse practices. If you're interested in any of these, the Lectures
on Conversation, Vol. 1 & 2, by Havey Sacks, Edited by Gail Jefferson, 1992,
Cambridge: Basil blackwell, is highly recommended! Sacks is the father
of Conversation Analysis, a very bright and original scholar
(unfortunately he died young in a traffic accident)...
So much for now... thanks again for sharing with us your work!
And yes, I know a little Japanese, and my best friends at OISE (where I'm
studying for my doctoral degree in education) are Japanese.
Do keep us informed about your work, would you?
Best wishes,
Angel
*****************************************************************
Angel M.Y. Lin
Doctoral Candidate
Modern Language Centre
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada
E-Mail: MYLIN who-is-at OISE.ON.CA
*******************************************************************
On Wed, 20 Sep 1995, Hiroaki Ishiguro wrote:
> Hello! Angel
> Thank you for response and sorry for my late reply.
>
> At 9:29 AM 95.9.14 -0400, Angel M.Y. Lin wrote:
>
> >I'm interested in your work on "anti-individualism" in psychology, and
> >your methodology in video analysis of anaual psychological meetings in
> >Japan; could you tell us more about them? I do a lot of analysis of
> >classroom lessons using video-recordings, too; and that's why I'm
> >interested in knowing how other people do it as well. My thesis supervisor
> >is a conversation analyst and I've been trained in that methodology, but I'm
> >also interested in learning about other ways of approaching video data!
> >
>
> I held one symposium about a new approach to practice(that is, socio
> historical activity) in the annual meeting in Japanese Developmental
> psychological association this year. The title was ' Reconsider
> development -Beyond individualism -'. I was a directer of the
> symposium and invited three speakers from three research domains. Yutaka
> Sayeki who is a cognitive scientist on education, Kozue Saito who is a
> developmental psychologist,
> especially on language development and Yoshitaka Seiya who is a
> sociologist on education, each of them told his or her methodology to
> analize the practice.
> There were much interesting points in their talks. But one of main topic
> was the position
> of the researcher. For example, Kozue Saito told her research experience
> in a nursery school. She often observed nursery school children and
> teachers, and got the data about them. But recently she got an idea about
> a research as communication among participants which include children,
> teachers, parents and researchers. All of the participants make the
> nursery community together. In traditional way, a researcher
> objectifies each child as an isolated object and occasionally reduce
> him/her into his/her mental elements. However, a child lives not as a
> biological living thing but as one of the specific nursery school child in
> the nursery community. That is our foundamental plane to discuss. Sayeki
> discussed the development in community by his theory related with LPP.
> Seiya explained an ethnomethodological standpoint to analyse a practice and
> emphasized that data are not in an opposite side of a researcher but it
> includes a researcher's interpretation.
> In this plane, where is the position of the researcher in the
> community? This is an open question for us. After this symposium, we
> have discontinuous serial workshops titled ' Description of practice'.
> Description is a theoretical act as Ochs, E described.
> Psychology have many tool to grasp individual elements but few for
> participants' activity
> in community. First of all, we choiced to take a video analysis. About
> ten members analyse same video tape about one of a nursery school
> acivities recorded by me. The difference give us an information that the
> data are related with researcher's research goal, intention, theory and so
> on. Now we finished three reports. We discussed the way of
> transcription, the treatment of social information( social structure,
> parents' situation, institutional constraints, etc.) out of video tape
> ,etc. We seek the valuable questions for each of members through this
> workshop. It is difficult to explain in detail the way of analysis
> without data. I hope we will report our idea after the workshop.
> I would like to know your way of analysis and any problems related with a
> video analysis.
> Thanks for your collaboration.
>
> >P.S. Does your name mean broad, generous, light?
>
> Yes. Do you know Japanese characters?
>
> =============================================================
>
> H I R O A K I I S H I G U R O
>
> Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education,
> Miyagi University of Education
> Aramaki Aza Aoba, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980 Japan
> Phone/Fax:022-214-3523 E-mail :h-ishi who-is-at ipc.miyakyo-u.ac.jp
> =============================================================
>
>