Just catching up on reading xmca - have been busy putting a new roof, floor
and windows in my barn, and writing a proposal, reflecting on personal
trajectories, practicing skills I learned in vivo, in apprenticeship. My
mind is spinning from reading, as usual. There is the distributed
cognition/affectation I experienced at a recent Jethro Tull concert,
immediately following the superfluidity posting. Wow. Tull concluded with a
Living in the Past encore which echoed his performance there at Hampton Beach
26 years ago and, in perfect J.T. fashion, mocked his now middle aged
audience. I understood the selection without any explicit reference. Then
there was the mini-project in which I tried (and failed) to engage an
initially motivated student in an email-mediated zpd to solve a puzzle
available on the internet. But I won't take up space with those.
Jay's and Eva's postings w.r.t. imitation and emulation are something that I
am trying to make sense of in a protoPCT. Just blundering around again.
Here it seems are similar means enacted with different objects, possibly
engaging the same artifacts, as Jay points out with play. My PCT questions
is: How does Collin's Cognitive Apprenticeship (which includes modeling,
coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, exploration) fit in activity
theory? In particular, can we examine modeling? What I'd like to do here is
more of a 'retrodictive' PCT than a predictive theory - can we account for a
learning strategy that is already out there?
I'll work from notes by Heidi Goodrich, which she created for AFT. "The
purpose of modeling in cognitive apprenticeship is to show students the
thought processes that a more expert person goes through when carrying out an
activity [in lay terms], in order that they may learn to do the same. When
modeling is done well, students get to hear and see how an expert thinks and
feels about an activity-how they identify and solve problems, how they make
decisions, why they make changes and revisions, their enthusiasm for their
work, and so on. By making these usually invisible processes visible,
modeling helps students learn to approximate expert performance in a given
field."
Cognitive Apprenticeship (CA) is an attempt to import from traditional
apprenticeship the essential elements that can facilitate learning those
processes that the apprentice cannot otherwise or necessarily see to imitate.
Yet a measure of success for CA is whether students imitate (or emulate?)
the instructor. CA as joint activity does not seem to develop a completely
shared goal - the instructors goal is to recreate the cognitive task to
instruct, the students' goal is to participate to learn how to accomplish the
task.
Imitation vs. Emulation? Let's say that the cognitive task is creating a
budget. Insofar as the students won't solve the same budget problem - it may
have been solved already through modeling - will their repetition with a new
task be ends-focus (emulation) or a means-focus (imitation)? Perhaps if the
modeling is successful, then the students perceive the new task to be
isomorphic to the original and will emulate. If not, then perhaps they will
imitate. In Jay's terms, 'the integration into the whole activity' is
something the imitator cannot grasp, yet the emulator does and it seems that
one difference may be whether or not the subject recognizes the object of the
whole.
Is CA modeling play? According to Mike :"early forms of play provide
opportunities to acquire abilities that will become important later". By
the definition, simply, student peripheral participation in CA modeling is
play, but there is an expert scaffolding to modeling that nags at me, which I
don't consider part of play. But I'm willing to change my mind.
To digress completely, "Cole&Cole argue that early behavior IS
functional--for example, early movement of chick wings is essential for the
paring of excess nerve connections that would otherwise form leaving the more
mature bird unable to move." Is there a connection to play? I would argue
not, based upon a view of evolution as a process without motive (even though
I question whether play is proleptic - does prolepsis certainly require those
involved in play to realize the future benefits, hence provide
object/motive?) Those chicks that enacted early movement due to genetic
disposition were able to survive as adults because they were mobile, and
hence pass that genetic makeup to their offspring. The offspring, in this
view, have no goal in reproducing the early movement, it is just part of
their genetically code.
Bill Barowy