I'm sorry I wasn't there.
Judy
At 06:00 PM 2/25/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Like a number of others that participate on this list, I just returned from
an interesting conference on sociocultural theory and literacy (NCTE
Research Assembly). I thought this might be a good forum to continue
discussions that were begun there. In particular, I wanted to point to a
few issues in Allan Luke's talk.
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>To give some sense of the talk, Luke was challenging research and
theory-building in literacy study to consider the State and political
economies, to think about classrooms, for instance, in relation to corporate
capitalism (rather than "fetishizing" them), to problematize the term
"community" as applied to classrooms and other places, and to think about
school culture as a site of power and struggle, in terms of the types of
capital that are being exchanged. These issues will sound familiar to
many--Luke was drawing upon Bourdieu, Foucault and others in addition to the
critical literacy work that he and Freebody and others have been developing
in Australia.
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>Part of what I found so engaging in the talk, and what I think of as a
point of departure for more conversation, are the actual and potential
points of contact between critical and sociocultural theories.
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>Luke had an interesting double-stance in this regard in his talk: on the
one hand he positioned himself in contrast to "you who work on zo-peds and
other things," yet on the other, he suggested conceiving of policy
development as a kind of zo-ped. On the one hand, he posited that a
sociology of literacy is *not interested in how students learn speaking
(writing, etc.) but on the other, he is engaged in curriculum development
work that indexes a specific set of critical practices (e.g., students
thinking about texts with the question, "What is this text trying to do to
me?") as well as particular theor(ies) about learning, including the value
of studying Hallidayan linguistics. Luke's talk suggests that "you who work
on zo-peds and other things" are always also (intentionally or not) working
from/on critical theory, just as critical theorists have more or less
embedded ideas about mind/learning/participation. Yet what are the points
of convergence or contact--through re-cognizing early and present work, and
the future development of theory and curricula?
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>A few thoughts:
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>Luke's critique of theory that views discourses as inherently coherent,
rather than exploring the multiple contraditions within them, is a nicely
suggestive connection between activity systems as theorized by Engestrom and
others and critical discourse work.
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>Another connection is between concerns with the sustainability of
educational innovations (as expressed in Mike Cole's talk) with careful
analyses of current political economies as historically developed and
affording particular reforms and practices.
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>Another general move is to not make big categories like "political
economy" too big, but to understand/trace their situatedness and
development, just as we're developing understandings of situated practices
in classrooms and other settings.
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>Kevin
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>Kevin Leander
>Doctoral Student, Curriculum & Instruction
>(217) 333-6604
>http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/k-leand/homepage/index.html
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Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183