What Mike describes in Chapters 9 &10 in *Cultural Psychology* is not just
a field ethnography, but the creation of model activity systems -- The
=46ifth Dimension: after school activities for children, drawing on earlier
research into pedagogy-psychology of literacy etc. So one might say these
psychologists (and other -ists) enter a Zone of Proximal Development that
is both individual for all involved AND collective. I don't think MIke
expresses it like this. He uses Luria's *romantic science* in Chapter 11, a
science that combines experimental/generalizing psychology with
descriptive/particularizing by application to the life circumstances of
actual persons. Luria applied his romantic (neuro)psychology to people like
the Mnemonist and the Man With a Shattered World. So The Fifth Dimension
could be described as romantic educational psychology.
When Mike observed how the discussions of last summer stopped before they
arrived at
>the idea that
>a psychology would really start from analysis of everyday activities,
>so that claim never got worked over, nor the implications I drew
>from it.
he made me wonder what PSYCHOLOGY would become under these circumstances.
I still wonder.
And, of course, Rachel the next question is: will that be convincing to the
research psychologists?
I don't know, I wasn't trained as a psychologist... although I read back a
lot in the history of cognitive psychology when preparing for the chapter
of my dissertation that tries to understand why phenomenography (hi Phil)
is so often presented as NOT being a psychology (why not NOT a sociology or
NOT an anthropology?)
So what becomes of psychology in a model activity system?
Eva