From the beginning I sensed the creative mischief in the
question--that we have absorbed lsv into a variety of current socially
situated approaches without sufficient sorting out the implications and
strengthjs of different approaches. And also within LSV there is a very
strong sense of an individual self, of life trajectories and developing
forms of consciousness, of personal desire, needs, and vision that do not
necessarily integrate a person into immediate social circumstances the way
some contextualist approaches would.
As discussion on the list has made evident, there are many
varieties of contextualism, from an analytical and observational stance
that does not allow any explanation that is not immediately and
behaviorially visible in the embodied here and now, to an analytical
orientation to how people orient to the current circumstances as they
perceive them, to a developmental approach to understanding how people
learn within situations and socially organized activities, to an
ideloplogical intellectual history where people's commitments and beliefs
are seen as embedded in general climates of ideas and specific curretn
discourses, to indexing people's current situations and problems to large
historical developments. Plus many others.
LSV certainly sees people learning and developing within concrete
relations in learning the possibilities of acting within those specific
here and now action contexts. What is learned uses cultural tools, which
provide means and possibilities of action. The available tools as well as
repertoire of social actions and social action partners then provide
contexts for development, suggesting certain lines and challenges of
development.
Yet LSV regularly sees people bringing their own impulses,
perceptions and history to anly local context, so that there is developed
over life a consciousness that one carries around with one, and can refer
to (with difficulties of evanescent memory--I am thinking of the last
chapter of Thought and LAnguage) and which forms a kind of core of a self.
Once the consciousness has formed, it seems to carry for LSV a kind of
potential for integrity, that does seem to be something like a linguistic
construct of statements that one lives by). So while language may be
learned contextually in utterance, and rehearsed contextually in private
language, at some point in internalization, it can form a core of
consistent (though not propositionally logical) thoughts that one can look
inside oneself for, to obtain inner guidance. I am not even sure that LSV
says anything that can be construed to suggest that this consciousness
reframes and redirects itself in relation to local context. Nor that
context exists as construed by participants. These are both things that I
seem to me useful ideas from recent contextualist work, but LSV seens to
have a less fluid view of the organization of consciousness, perception of
local situation, knowledge of circumstances.
Further LSV seems to have a strong sense of the individual's
desire to fulfill personal needs and impulses for development. As I have
mentioned before, LSV's explicit interest in Adler is some of the
Defectology work, seems to carry over into general comments on
development. Whether talking about people with disabilities who are
impelled to overcome the social conditions and attitudes that limit their
life possibilities, or whether talking about a child trying to reach the
cookie jar, LSV sees striving individuals all around him. And these
striving individuals are potentially transformative of local situations,
at odds with their contexts, as in the quote nate uses as his email tag.
Vygotskian individuals can add to and transform not only immediate
contexts, but the stock of cultural tools that form the contexts of
development for future individuals, the patterns of social activity, and
even history in its larger scope. In doing these things, it seems that
one's inner consciousness can help provide creativity and guidance and
wisdom. So individuals in lsv's world, as they develop consciousness can
stand at some distance or look with some perspective at some of the
various kinds of contexts they find themselves ithin, and thus can act
upon their contexts.
That's it for now. I am interested in seeing how this discussion ripens
while I am away.
Chuck Bazerman