Judy, yes, I think I'm struggling with similar issues here. Your comments
below set me off looking for something I read in Wittgenstein that seems to
address these issues of signs and their use. Don't know if it helps, but
it is Philosophical Investigations #85:
"A rule stands there like a sign-post.__Does the sign-post leave no doubt
open about the way I have to go? Does it shew which direction I am to take
when I have passed it; whether along the road or the footpath or
cross-country? But where is it said which way I am to follow it: whether
in the direction of its finger or (e.g.) in the opposite one?--And if there
were, not a single sign-post, but a chain of adjacent ones or of chalk
marks on the ground--is there only *one* way of interpreting them?--So I
can say, the sign-post does after all leave no room for doubt. Or rather:
it sometimes leave room for doubt and sometimes not. And now this is no
longer a philosophical proposition, but an empirical one."
What I understand here is the distributedness of sign-following as a
practice, the partiality of the sign, that the sign may be useful or not,
may be better or worse for some sign-users, that it will include/exclude
sign-users, overall, that the sign and its effects is not a question that
can just be settled on priniciple, but one that needs to be studied and
restudied in practice.
Judy wrote:
>I'm not so sure that the rules are 'good' for those who know better, and NOT
>good for those who don't know at all. There may be no answer to the dilemma.
>Struggling readers/writers need scaffolds that no one yet has quite figured
>out, since for most of the history of schooling, anyone IN school after 5th
>grade didn't need them. There is the problem of signification -- the signs
>aren't stable. If the out-group learns the rules that the in-group has
>required, then the display of rules becomes a negative sign. Hyper-correct
>English, a sign of lower status. I suppose that's just another way of saying
>that it's not the rules that counts. Signaling membership means performing
>in situ, as you and Gordon noted. Thus, the importance of Hillocks' matrix:
>setting up the kinds of problems that engage the student in the critical
>procedures that count as getting some kind of thing done.
>
>SIGH.
>Judy
>
>
>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
Paul Prior
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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