Geoff
My own unit of analysis dilemma (and emergent approach) is, I hope, informed
by CHAT but it feels different from Paul's. While it is much less thought
out, i'd be grateful for some guidance from the list. As you know from our
back-channel chat recently, Geoff, there isn't much CHAT here in the UK so
I'm rather dancing in the dark.
I work in the area of learning technologies in the higher ed curriculum. Two
colleagues and I recently developed a prototype metadata vocabulary for
describing learning technology innovations (or rather for describing case
studies, software, toolkits etc - any information objects relating to LT
use). This was based on our understanding of how learning technology use is
actually described by practitioners and researchers i.e. on what are the
currently accepted units of analysis. We found that there are four
vocabularies, used by four separate communities with very little reference
to one another: technical, subject/topic specific, pedagogical and
strategic. So a specific 'instructional unit', in Paul's sense, is described
by different communities in terms of: the technology/ies deployed; the
subject/topic area which is being 'covered'; the learning and teaching
approach (tho' this tends to be very loosely defined, using often
conflicting vocabularies, and by a community whose status is a contested one
within institutions); and the way in which use is embedded in the local
strategic context.
Analysing any of these in isolation presents real difficulties, of course. I
see activity as a way of articulating the first three as follows: a learning
event is a mediated activity, the object of which is the acquisition of
specific concepts, skills, cultural tools by the learner; the subjects of
which are learners and teachers (and sometimes other experts) adopting
specific contextually-defined roles; and the mediating artefacts of which
include texts, multimedia resources, technical tools, laboratory equipment,
etc. Different discipline communities and different institutions value
different modes of interaction under this broad definition, but there has
been little attempt to describe these in detail. For example, 'seminar'
refers to very different interactional events in the Physics teaching as
against the French teaching community, and at Oxford University as against a
vocational HE college. Similarly, 'using the world wide web' conveys very
little useful information about what happens in a technology-rich classroom.
Focusing on the activity as a three-way interactional event forces us to
adopt a finer level of description. For example, 'close reading of a text to
arrive at a shared understanding' (subjects = 3 to 8 learners; mediating
artefact = written text; object = recall and synthesis of key concepts,
enhancement of spoken communication skills, enhancement of information
handling skills etc; rules = read the text before class, speak in turn,
identify and attempt to resolve areas of doubt/conflict etc. The
intersecting communities of practice here are the discipline area, the
institution and the student cohort themselves, and the outcome of the
interaction will be influenced by how each participant sees her/his role wrt
to the relevant communities). Similar interactional units might be: 'writing
a linked hypertext to express the relationships among ideas'; 'carrying out
a laboratory test to confirm a hypothesis'; 'asking questions of the whole
class to test group understanding and recall'. Describing, categorising,
even noticing these activities presents a real challenge.
The fourth category, 'strategy', is one I've been investigating in UK HE
through a national audit of learning technology deployment in institutions.
Our audit tools look at issues of technical and administrative
infrastructure, division of labour (and staff roles), institutional culture,
and available expertise. As with Engstrom's triangles, it doesn't seem to me
necessary to give an account of exactly how these intersect at the point of
the learning interaction in order to say something useful about that learnin
g interaction (this would be a separate activity system for investigation,
and offering separate though related units of analysis). But it is necessary
to be aware of the two as intersecting.
Any comments on this approach would be very gratefully received. Would
Seattle be an appropriate forum for further exploration???
Helen
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul H.Dillon [mailto:illonph@pacbell.net]
Sent: 10 August 2000 3:38 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Instructional Units as Units of Analysis in Institutionalized
Education
Geoff,
Your problem goes precisely to the heart of a paper I have been working on
and which I have submitted to AERA for the 2001 meetings in Seattle, Section
J3 (Teaching, Learning, Assessment, and Evaluation). I propose that the
appropriate "unit of analysis" for institutionalized education is the
"instructional unit" which is the "object" of the teacher's "{teaching)
activity system but the "tool" of the student's (leaning) activity system.
In other words what we are dealing with is not one activity system but two
basic ones. Of course any educational institution involves multiple activity
systems ranging from building maintenance to ed materials provisioning to
extra-curricular activities such as inter-institutional sports leagues,
debating societies, etc. . . . well you name it. In general these
systems are part of the division of labor (a la Engestrom) of the teacher's
activity system and support the production of the "instructional unit". I'm
not sure whether the AERA proposals are available for viewing to the general
internet public or only to the authors and reviewers. If so you can check
it out at their web site, otherwise I'll send it to you.
I develop this model out of an analysis of the elementary teaching-learning
framework in Dewey and Vygotsky which I expand in recognition of the
fundamental modification brought about when the activity of the relationship
between teacher and learner is no longer the same. For example, in
apprenticeship situations the teacher and the learner are involved in the
same activity and their relationship really does seem to fit the "community
of practice" framework; a child learning to build a canoe, weave a blanket,
do whatever, is basically doing the same thing as the adult. Dewey, who
believed that education was part of all human activity, called this the
relationship one between "mature" and "immature" persons. Where the
activity is fundamentally the same, or the mature individual is "assisting"
as in your youth enterprise example. This structure of teaching-learning is
radically different from the one that exists in institutionalized education
where the learner and the teacher are clearly not participating with the aim
of producing a similar object. In the latter case we have rather what I
have called "the instructional unit" which I propose as the unit of analysis
for practical research for changing/understanding what is going on in the
classroom. The instructional unit has the dual structure given its
determinations as object/tool and I would argue also that it is a very good
example of a concrete universal in Ilyenkov's sense.
Genevieve Patthey-Chavez and I have been pursuing research for several years
and this model has emerged out of our work which involves extensive research
on "student pathways" on one hand, and action research involving community
college instructors in math and English on the other side.
Perhaps this approach will help you make sense out of the situations you
have described in your post. It's easy to explore the model: just draw two
activity triangles mediated by an instructional unit as the object of the
teacher's and the tool of the student's activity systems. Instructional
units, for students, usually make up parts of educational programs but can
also stand alone (e.g., job upgrade classes in a single subject, art classes
pursued as a pastime, etc.). When we explore the fact that there are often
all kinds of motives behind the production of the instructional unit that
are totally obscure to the student (eg, ideological functions) all kinds of
on the ground real world phenomena come into view -- e.g., "What do we have
to study this for anyway?". But then these motives are often also obscure
to the teachers :)
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Geoff.Hayward <geoff.hayward@educational-studies.oxford.ac.uk>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2000 1:47 AM
Subject: RE: one what?
> I have found the recent exchange about Unit of Analysis rather interesting
> and helpful, but alos a little confusing for a new comer to activity
theory.
> Let me try and explain my confusion and then perhaps someone can help me
out
> of it. I arrived at Activity Theory as a way of trying to make sense of
> learning within a variety of school based activities, ranging from the
> learning of science to the development of economic understanding. It
seemed
> to me that the constructivist "theories" of learning dominating science
> education took the inidividual as the unit -of-analysis but when I went
into
> classrooms what I saw was a whole series of individuals trying to make
sense
> of, say, photosynthesis through a range of different sorts of processes -
> including teacher exposition, small group discussion and practical work -
> using a range of devices ands artifacts, in joint activity with each other
> and their teacher (plus other adults in the classroom including me) -
though
> I think my use of the term of joint activity in this sentence is probably
a
> post hoc rationalisation of what I was seeing at the time. It seemed to me
> that in order to understand what was going on here, including the supposed
> learning that was going on, I needed to make sense of all of this
"activity"
> as well as what was happening to the individual child. Now, this seemed to
> require multiple levels of analysis and I was, at that time, unaware of
any
> way of dealing with this problem except that it involved thinking about
> context in a radically different way.
>
> My confusion grew even further when working with extracurricular
enterprise
> projects involving young people running their own small enterprises -
along
> the lines of Junior Achievement in the US - and trying to fathom out what
> the students were learning. What became obvious very early on in our year
> long study was that, whatever else was going on, the young people involved
> did not conceptualise the process as learning, but rather as "doing", and
> yet what I saw as an outside observer was learning in terms of changes in
> participation (again I am sure another post hoc rationalisation).
>
> At this point I happened upon Activity Theory via "Yrjo's triangles". What
I
> thought this allowed me was a variety of different viewpoints, possibly
> different levels of analysis, with which to explore the phenomena I was
> interested in. I think, possibly incorrectly in the light of the recent
> exchanges, that the activity system itself was the unit-of-analysis, but
> that I could look at the unit from different perspectives, say from the
> perspective of the rules as they developed through time, or at different
> levels, say the level of the individual or the level of the group. But I
am
> no longer sure that this is justified given Paul's comments about
Vygotsky's
> conception of the unit of analysis. Advice please.
>
> I think Paul is right in saying that we must not multiply
units-of-analysis
> otherwise the term loses its analytical power. Certainly, this seems to be
> happening in the UK with the concept of "community-of-practice" which has
> been appropriated by the business community and made synonymous with
group,
> so that any learning that takes place in a group is considered to be
> learning within a "community-of-practice". The concept of "legitimate
> peripheral participation" seems to get forgotten in these discourses. I
> wonder why?
>
>
>
> Geoff Hayward
> Lecturer in Educational Studies and SKOPE Research Fellow
> University of Oxford
> Department of Educational Studies
> 15 Norham Gardens
> Oxford
> OX2 6PY
>
> Phone: 01865 274007
> Fax: 01865 274024
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul H.Dillon [mailto:illonph@pacbell.net]
> Sent: 09 August 2000 21:18 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: one what?
>
> mike,
>
> i think my question goes back to the thread out of which Nate's original
> question emerged: that of objects that are mutually defining and their
> implicit dialectic. This was also the context within which the
dancer/dance
> image was brought up.
>
> Unless the term "unit analysis" has been broadened, I understand it in
> Vygotsky's sense of the minimal unit that still contains the properties of
> the whole phenomena. The important point is that the unit of
unit-analysis
> is not simply the phenomena itself. To say that word-meaning was simply
> used to analyze the relationship between language and thought seems
> circular. Following Bakhurst I understand Vygotsky's inquiry to be much
> broader, extending to the basic psychological processes such as learning,
> memory, internalization in general and other "higher order" psychological
> processes, .
>
> Does the zoped, on the other hand, have such characteristics? I don't
think
> so. What is the phenomena of which it is the minimal unit that resists
> further analysis without losing the properties of the totality of which it
> both contains and constitutes the genetic root? As I understand it,
> Vygotsky raises the zoped in relation to questions of development and
> specifically, "measuring" development. Thus he writes that a child with a
> "larger zone of proximal development will do much better in school." But
> the zone of proximal development does not contain the totality of the
> phenomena; i.e., development, which it serves to characterize since: (a)
it
> is relative and we have larger and smaller zopeds, something that is
rather
> incomprehensible with respect to "word-meaning" or "commodity"; and (b) it
> refers essentially to a framework of development that is not characterized
> within its very definition.
>
> This distinction has to do with theoretical concept formation and not
losing
> the power of a concept; i.e., unit of analysis, through applying it
> willy-nilly -- the Chesire cat using words to mean exactly what it wants
> them to mean. It's not simply a question of semantics but rather
something
> akin to identifying what is a syllogism and what isn't. If everything
and
> anything is a syllogism, then nothing is, and consequently we lose the
> possibility of a theory of syllogisms, or in this case a theory of unit
> analysis that might contribute to the formation of concepts as powerful as
> "word-meaning" or "commodity" as the unity of use and exchange value.
>
> So although I do agree that there are multiple units of analysis, not
> everything is one.
>
> Paul H. Dillon
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>
> To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2000 11:08 AM
> Subject: one what?
>
>
> >
> > Paul, I thought I was arguing for multiplicity of units of analysis
> > depending upon the object/ives of the activity in question. Word
> > meaning is presumably a unit of anlysis for understanding the relation
> > of language and thought. A Zoped is a particular structure of
interaction/
> > transaction; perhaps it could be a unit of analysis for understanding
> > the relation of learning and development?
> > mike
> >
>
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