Agency & motive. I agree with Jesper who wrote,
" For those reasons I have increasingly come to think about motives or
intention as something which emerges and develops trough the activity.
The person might tell a story about his or her motives or intentions,
but in some sense it seems like an account which is produced after the
activity and not something which starts the activity. An interesting
example is for instance the classroom talk, where it is my experience
that when you ask people why they said something, they very often are
unable to answer and thinks it is a funny question to ask. The utterance
was more part of an ongoing activity in the classroom and not clearly
motivated."
I think that there is an oversimplification here. First, it is certainly
the case that goals change as an action proceeds and new goals emerge.
In this sense, a description of the goal of an action that corresponds to
the sequence of operations jointly and negotiatedly deployed is probably
more accurately specified, post hoc, from the perspective granted by the
outcome, than from the perspective of any participant as the action gets
going. So I agree in recognizing "motives or intention as something which
emerges and develops through the activity."
However, this does not mean that participants never embark on action with
an object in view. Nor does it mean that there are no situations in
which one can say why one made a particular contribution to an ongoing
discourse. I agree that, in most cases, the choice of words and even
the "point" of the contribution is formed in detail in the act of
speaking/writing, but that does not mean that one does not have a
strategic goal in view in contributing as one does at a particular point,
in order to try to develop the discussion in a partcular direction. Surely
this is what we each do when we contribute to this discussion.
Jesper cites the example of a classroom. Once a discussion is in
progress, most participants will contribute in relation to their
assessment of "where we are at this point" and will not consciously be
thinking of either a superordinate goal, or of the particular words and
syntactic structures they use in uttering. In that sense, the utterance
seems to fit Leont'ev's criteria for an operation. However, if
participants aren't at some level, and with some degree of jointness,
operating in terms of the "same" goal, the discussion will not be very
coherent or progressive.
To create such joint activity settings is one of the teacher's major
responsibilities and, as a teacher, many of my contributions to the
discussion will have the fairly deliberate purpose of optimizing these
conditions at each point. At the same time, I have more specific purposes
that are related to the advertised topic of the course and the session
within it. Thus, I know in general terms what my motive is in embarking
on a course with a group of students, and one of my action goals will be
to communicate it and try to develop it as a shared motive for our work
together, as we address the advertised topic.
In "planning" for individual class meetings, too, I have goals which I
try to make fairly explicit - and negotiable. So, for tomorrow morning's
class, for example, I could describe both motive and goal with some
specificity in advance of the actual meeting. And, unless something
totally unexected hapens, I shall, at various points in the meeting,
"delberately" make contributions that I judge, in the circumstances at
the time, will realize those prior goals in the light of those that have
emerged and are emerging in our jointly constructed discourse.
I can't imagine what "instructional conversation" (Tharp and Gallimore)
is about if the teacher doesn't engage in this form of goal-directed
strategic action. But maybe others see things differently?
Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
OISE, Toronto.