Mike is quite right of course that it is in one sense a lot easier to
discuss issues of emergence and cross-level connection in concrete cases,
but it is also much harder, because, as we know "rising to the concrete"
requires a great deal of work! Specific cases do not simply illustrate
general principles, once we move away from a universalizing notion of
principles and toward seeing them as tools. We have to do the work with
these tools again and again in each case. This does not make tools useless,
but it also means that the relationship between specific analyses and the
improvement or usefulness of tools is not the same as it is in disciplines
where the differences among instances are much less important than their
similarities (as in micro-physics, for example.)
I also was much impressed by Thelen's analysis of how we learn to walk,
particularly seeing walking not as a property or inherent skill intrinsic
to the organism as the unit of analysis, but seeing it instead as a feature
of the organism-surface system, where the surface is what we walk on. We do
not simply learn to walk, as we do not simply learn to read. We learn to
walk on firm, hard, slightly flexible surfaces ... as you know if you have
ever tried to walk on a waterbed! that takes considerable new learning. And
we may find it easier to walk on the sorts of surfaces with which we have
long co-evolved -- though I do not know that this is empirically
established. The very young seem plastic enough to learn a lot of
variations, but as we do learn one or one range, we acquire something like
a habitus, an embodied disposition that makes some kinds of performance
'second nature' but also make other kinds of performance harder to learn
(requiring unlearning, breaking of habits, maybe breakdown of complexes of
habits that involve many other sorts of performances, etc.)
Walking, however, is unlike reading and many other activities in that the
semiotic component seems minimal, at least at the level that Thelen is
talking about. (We can express meaning by how we walk, or how we locomote,
so there is a very social and semiotic system which develops later, or
perhaps is already developing, but differently expressed and with different
sorts of, or precusor, sorts of differentiations, i.e. what kinds of
differences in locomotion are meaningful not just as being different, but
as connoting something else, i.e. functioning as signs of something
further, something beyond walking, crawling, skipping, etc.)
Clearly learning to walk is often assisted in a zoped in our culture, and
the modes of scaffolding differ from culture to culture. So we in a further
sense do not simply learn to walk as a motor skill of the organism, or even
learn to walk-on-ground as a mode of interaction within the organism-ground
system, but we engage in
culture-specific-social-scaffolding-of-learning-to-walk-on-ground as a mode
of activity or practice within an organism-conspecific/elder-ground
system/complex at one level (timescale of the doing of the scaffolding
activity on one occasion), and within a larger embedding ecosocial system
at longer timescales that includes the processes by which: the
scaffolding/practice is repeated with variations until some criterion point
or zone of recognized competence is achieved, the specific mode of
scaffolding is learned by the helper and transmitted within the cultural
lineage or even is re-created out of the habitus of the helper which is in
turn a product of long residence and interaction in the
community-with-a-culture.
So while we may be a bit unsure of the semiotic dimensions of
learning-to-walk or walking-practice on the part of the child, we do know
how culturally meaningful such things are for the helper/elder, and we can
even look within a community at variations in the scaffolding practices,
and at how even much younger helpers (say an older but not too much older
sibling) might produce an approximation of canonical scaffolding for that
culture, etc. We also know that the scaffolding practice has many meanings
in terms of, say, parental identity, and that the walking itself has many
cultural meanings as well ... and therefore that these are parts of
semiotics systems which connect them by similarity and difference and
contrasts of various kinds to other recognized practices and activities
(other sorts of motor performance teaching, other sorts of locomotion,
other ways of being-a-parent, other ways of being in a physical
parent-child interaction, etc. etc.).
So the "top-down" elements are strongly present. There is the cultural
habitus of the helper in purely motor terms (how to support the child's
body, allowing self-balance without risk of falling, or other variations)
as well as in terms of more explicit models of 'how to do it'. There is
community discussion about how to do it, about the value of doing it. There
are discourses of these scaffolding processes (normative, descriptive,
narratives of accomplishment for child and parent). There are in short a
lot of ongoing practices in the community that persist over much longer
timescales than those on which any particular child learns to walk, and
certainly that of any particular occasion of scaffolding. These both
constrain what is done and how in the scaffolding and also enable it. They
are as present and as significant as the many complex motor-level
coordinations which have to come together in the walking-practice even as a
purely motor skill, and which are in turn as they are quite specifically to
walking-on-ground. For each scale of embeddedness in the multi-scale
ecosocial system there are more elements that play a role in the emergence
of the walking-on-ground-child. In general at the smaller scales (e.g.
neuro-motor coordinations) changes happen faster; at the larger scales
(child-rearing practices), slower. But the emergence of a new level of
organization in the system, even the recapitulation of such an emergence
along a specific ontogenetic trajectory (_this_ child-walking), involves
the cross-level coordination of broadly speaking three levels (really three
timescales typically ranging across 4-6 orders of magnitude): here roughly
the neuromotor processes, the scaffolding activity on one occasion, the
whole extended learning-to-walk process, and the longer-term cultural
inputs to the latter.
What particularly interests me is how those cultural inputs get mediated to
the levels of practicing-to-walk-once and
scaffolding-walking-over-many-occasions. Some of these I've already alluded
to, such as habitus, child-rearing discourses, community activities in
which future helpers observe and peripherally participate in scaffolding,
etc. But I think there is more than this. Why do children WANT to learn to
walk? what makes them think it's possible? Considering that we are the only
bipedal species in our lineage it's not persuasive that our bipedalism _as
a fact_ is inherited (only that the affordances for it as a possibility are
inherited, along with a lot of what makes the rest of what I'm describing
possible, including our presence in a world with a ground, in a community
with helpers, etc.). So I suggest that any individual's actually learning
to walk is (almost) necessarily also a function of the child's
participation in a community where walking is visibly (not necessarily
deliberately) modeled, where walking has meaning and status (to whatever
extent this is accessible to a child of that age, not necessarily the same
sense as for adults), where there is a motive to learn to learn to walk in
terms of ways of participating in other activities in that community, etc.
Ron Scollon recently wrote a whole book on one child's learning the process
of "handing" something to someone else. In his analysis I think one can
also see many of the sorts of higher-level embeddedness of the acquisition
of a child by a social practice.
I'm not about to write a book (aren't you thankful!) ... but I think that
even in this case of learning to walk it is possible to see at least in
principle how emergence must always be analyzed both bottom-up and
top-down, even if its mediation is more heterochronous in the case of
ecosocial systems than in the cases of the simpler natural sciences where
the paradigm developed over the last 30 years. I also think it might start
to be clear why timescales help in initially organizing our sense of what
operates on the "same" level. There is a lot more of course to the
emergence appoach; many of those other features are illustrated in Thelen's
analysis, which is focussed just a bit lower down in timescale than what
I've done, and perhaps does not place as much emphasis on scaffolding as I
have done to make the connection to higher sociocultural levels. Scollon's
analysis shifts the level in focus a bit higher still. I've responded here
to Mike's query to try to sketch focussing still higher up, but really what
one wants is the whole up-and-down, which I really don't think is anymore
out of our reach.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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