In Chap. 4, Wertsch argues that intermental and intramental
(interpsychological and intrapsychological) processes are the same. Both
involve mediated action in social space. Both are mediated by "texts"
that are at once univocal (derived from information transmission and
characterized by movement toward intersubjectivity) and dialogic
(characterized by multivoicedness/alterity and thereby generative of new
thought).
Per Wertsch, for Vygotsky, the intermental is the intramental transformed.
Wertsch argues that the transformation results from alterity, or in
Bakhtinian terms, the multivoiced nature of the socio-cultural texts with
which one is engaged and which provide one, as agent, with multiple
potential meanings from which to master and/or appropriate the text,
and by extension produce new texts.
Wertsch provides as an example of intermental and intramental processes as
the same process,a study of reciprocal teaching, which,
he argues, is an instance of the intramental (strategies used by good
readers to comprehend and remember text) made intermental (made explicit
and used in a group reading process) and both mastered and appropriated,
though unconsciously, as an intramental process by the participants in the
experience, who had previously been identified as poor readers. Wertsch
attributes the development of the reader's mastery and appropriation to
both the mediational means, i.e., the technique of reciprocal teacheing,
and a change in the participant structure of the reading action context
such that the students assumed new roles as active agents which allowed
them to master alterity--they were challenged to pose questions of and
about the text and this required them to see different perspectives, or
the mutlivocality of the text (and, by implication, their agency).
Wertsch compares the success of the reciprocal reading model to the lack
of development associated with a "locating information model" used without
changing the participation structure, or the reader's role from passive to
active consumption of the text and generator of meanings. Reciprocal
teaching was marked by rapidly diminishing levels of teacher interaction
and progressively greater student/reader control of the process. In
addition, Wertsch alludes to the time element involved in reciprocal
teaching in order for the students to achieve mastery.
"Cultural tools in and of themselves are relatively
meaningless in the absence of competent use by an agent. Some minimal
degree of mastery by an agent is required before these tools can really
begin to be part of mediated action on the intramental plane.(p. 131)"
This Wertsch relates to Cazden's notion of performance before
competence: "There seems to be something essential about handling, or
this case, 'mouthing,' a material form that provides the basis for
attaining future levels of intersubjectivity, alterity, and mastery.(p.
133)"
In this chapter, Wertsch emphasizes the "power of the mediational means"
as sociocultural production as well as the power of the agent as consumer,
linking the two in mediated action, which is always socio-cultural, but
not socio-culturally determined. This argument is extended in Chap. 5,
and the role of the individual agent as active and powerful consumer, and
by implication, transformer, of the products of the dominant social order
is reinvoked.
What I find myself wondering, and it is a question that I also am faced
with in using activity theory, is what is the role of other agents present
in the action context, and not only in the abstracted social order? Can we
talk about the mediational means, e.g., reciprocal teaching, and not talk
about the mediating roles of the teacher/guides who are present and
essential to the production of student mastery, even in an altered
participation structure? What about distribution of the mediational means
and the power relations at work even in very local social contexts, that
influence access within groups and between groups, elite and non-elite?
I understand that Wertsch is limiting his analysis to the subject/agent
and mediational means, but even with that restriction, are other humans
in the context not also powerful means to action, both enabling and
constraining that action?
Honorine Nocon,
Dept. of Communication
Laboratory of Camparative Human Cognition
University of California, San Diego