Hi Bill, Renee, and everybody--
Bill asked about development:
> Does any of this make sense? How do you think of development?
I'm very sympathetic to your position. I think that development is a
sociocultural construction. It is often a case that people in power are
those who define what is desirable in individual changes. Developmental
directionality is defined by personal, social, and cultural values. Of
course, as any sociocultural construction is not arbitrary but rooted in
social relations in communities. I think we need to develop a better concept
of development than a traditional idea of individual passing some benchmarks
on a schedule as a train passing stations.
On a different issue. Renee described an interesting example of resistance,
> Then, as the expectations raised (rather suddenly, I think, because as
soon as she could speak conversationally
> her teachers assumed she understood everything in the class.) Her teacher
reported that she seemed distracted
> and unattentive in class, and she reported to me that she was ashamed to
participate in class because of her lack
> of fluency, and that she really didn't understand the lecture and was
afraid to reveal that. Then she told me that her
> teacher seemed not to like her, and she became angry with him, which only
caused her to withdraw more. I think
> for her it was better to seem bored and uninterested than to seem
inadequate.
I wonder if we are not overusing the concept of resistance. It seems to me
that our use is going something like that, "If something is not going our
way, it means that somebody resists." I remember that when I was 5-year old,
I was punishing my skis for "resistance" (for lack of my control of them).
When, let say, a French thief stole money from a bank during the Nazi German
WWII occupation, would it be considered as resistance? Can this thief be put
to the same category as "French Resistance" (people who risked and gave
their lives for liberation of France and the rest of Europe from German
Nazis) only because they both disrupted work of the Nazi Germany war
machine? In the Soviet Union, many people participated in a black market
undermining the Soviet economy (although the relationship between the black
market and official Soviet economy was much more complex) not because they
wanted to resist but because they wanted to survive or get rich. Should they
be considered as dissidents?
In my view, the concept of resistance should involve participants'
intentionality rather than just doing things not in ways that the authority
intended them to do. Granted, this intentionality may not be clear-cut and
may have an emergent nature: a student who cheats a test may develop
intentionality to resist to testing, but the very fact of a student's
cheating is not evidence of resistance by itself. The boundary between
resistance and, let say, survival maybe blurry and fuzzy in some cases but,
in my view, it is a good idea to keep them conceptually separate.
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Barowy [mailto:wbarowy@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2001 9:40 AM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: failure, resistance, development
>
>
> Bowles and Gintis does put exit and voice in opposition, with
> the claim that
> the market economy and liberal democratic state favor the former, hence
> limiting development of the individual. And so I see reason for your
> suspicion. Let me write out what sense I can make and see where
> you take it.
> I choose voice. Hopefully I will also respond to your (Judy's) previous
> question regarding what is the lesson for chat.
>
> A lot of clarity is needed here -- first, to take Mike's definition of
> development as the physiological and psychological changes in a
> person over
> time, you and i recognize that these changes are shaped by a person's
> social-and-technological environments. Within these environments, i.e.
> ensembles of systems in which a person participates, changes are
> value laden.
> Some changes are preferred over others. Within a family, a child
> is shaped by
> the expectations of the parents, and Mikes description of
> prolepsis in CP gives
> us one process by which cultural propagation of values occur, and which
> sustains things like class distinctions. For those of us who are
> educators, we
> teach classes, and we look for evidence that the 'material' of
> the class is
> taken up by the students, and we are judgemental about how extensive that
> uptake has been, and some of us assign grades accordingly.
> Education in the
> U.S. is, I think, an ensemble of value laden systems in which, in
> the division
> of labor, it is the role of teachers to be judgemental of the changes in
> students.
>
> Lets get to the claims about development part. To do that, I'd
> like to shift
> the analysis to the research/education systems. You and I, and
> others, also
> participating in the same or similar systems, and also in disparate ones,
> appropriate sets of values in a manner as best as I can describe as a
> dialectical process of assimilation and accomodation -- new
> values are taken up
> shaped by, and shaping, old ones. While Mike's definition is not
> value laden,
> possibly because it comes from a view in recognition of culture,
> I find I have
> to be careful when I am taking off my education hat and putting on my
> researcher's hat, especially since I have participated in many
> funded projects
> that promoted particular strategies for learning sciences and
> maths. When I
> use the word 'development' for individuals, it is in the manner that Mike
> defines it, and similarly for institutions.
>
> But with both kinds of development, there are value traps
> everywhere. Perhaps
> 'suspicion' is more appropriately substituted with 'caution', and
> it is useful
> for us to follow Garfinkels advice and expose ourselves and what
> we take for
> granted as researchers. Perhaps this is a lesson for chat -- my
> interpretation/extension of bowles and gintis is that cognitive
> theorists bring
> meritocratic assumptions to their work -- that it is what is in
> the head of the
> individual that determines his/her academic merits. Similarly
> with activity
> theory, a researcher can be judgemental about changes in a system, being
> positive, negative, and neutral, based upon personal values built
> by a lifetime
> of experience in same, similar and otherwise systems.
>
> Does any of this make sense? How do you think of development?
>
> bb
>
> --- Judith Diamondstone <diamonju@rci.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> > Hi, Bill,
> >
> > you quoted:
> > >"...personal development is in general best served through an
> interaction
> > of two stratetgies: exercising one's freedom to choose independently of
> > collective sentiment, and entering into mutual, reciprocal, and
> > participatory action with others to achieve commonly defined
> goals. These
> > two strategies are precisely Albert Hirschman's twin notion of
> 'exit' and
> > 'voice'." (p. 229)
> >
> > Is freedom to choose "independently of collective sentiment" an "exit"
> > strategy? And thus in contradiction with "voice"?
> >
> > Claims about development make me immediately suspicious -
> paranoia NOT the
> > issue here.... CHAT has heads up on in-the-head psych. models,
> but bottom
> > line, we all end up judging others in terms of what we believe,
> out of our
> > own social histories, development SHOULD be. That strikes romantic me as
> > anti-developmental.
> >
> > judy
> >
>
>
>
> =====
> "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from
> yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something
> beautiful."
> [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 01 2001 - 01:01:38 PDT