The question I asked about tools was posed to help me with my development
of the paper I gave at ISCRAT in which I (with coauthors Leslie Cook and
Tara Johnson) challenge that theory vs. practice dichotomy often found in
discussions of learning to teach, with the goal of replacing
theory/practice with Vygotsky's notion of the concept, which requires
interplay between abstraction and experience (usually dichotomized as
theory and practice).
I'll paste in the introduction to the part of the paper in which we try to
provide a richer notion of practice than that typically found in
theory/practice bifurcations. Generally, no surprises in this outline for
xmca readers. My question concerns a claim at the end of what follows,
which is that Scribner and Cole's terms "technology" and "systems of
knowledge" correspond to what others have called "tools" and
"genres." Mike C agrees that tools can substitute (though is not
synonymous with) for technology, but that "systems of knowledge" and
"genres" don't correspond as well. My question is, if genre provides a
poor substitution, what might work better? (perhaps nothing?)
Also: In an effort to find out the three types of tools identified by
someone I can't put my finger on, I've looked to Wertsch's Mind as Action,
where he argues that all tools (mediational means in his parlance) are
material; he identifies psychological and technical (his pole vault
example). Brad Belbas (through backchannel) has suggested that Kozulin
offers human beings as a third type of mediator, which is now how I've
phrased it below.
Any help on these questions is greatly appreciated! thanks,Peter
OK, here's the section of the draft in question:
Thus far we have focused on concepts and the types of generalizations that
approximate them, complexes and pseudoconcepts. We next turn to the kind
of activity central to the development of spontaneous concepts and
implicated in the development of scientific concepts. We refer to this
activity as practice. The notion of practice outlined in the Vygotskian
tradition is conceptually richer than that typically found in the
theory/practice dichotomy, grounded more in culture and necessarily tied to
community work, what Lave and Wenger (1992) and others call a community of
practice.
Lave (1996) argues that "Theories of situated activity do not
separate action, thought, feeling, and value and their collective,
cultural-historical forms of located, interested, conflictual, meaningful
activity. Traditional cognitive theory is 'distanced from experience' and
divides the learning mind from the world" (p. 7). This traditional
distancing of theory from experience characterizes the ways in which we
have described the theory and practice dichotomy often assumed by
educators. Here, Lave argues for the unification of various human beliefs
and experiences in a theory of activity. To see how this unification might
be accomplished, we turn to Scribner and Cole's (1981) definition of
practice, which they outline in their study of situated literacy. They
describe practice as "a recurrent, goal-directed sequence of activities
using a particular technology and particular systems of knowledge. We use
the term 'skills' to refer to the coordinated sets of actions involved in
applying this knowledge in particular settings. A practice, then, consists
of three components: technology, knowledge, and skills" (p. 236). These
particular technologies and systems of knowledge correspond roughly to what
others (e.g., Wertsch, 1991) now call tools and genres (M. Cole, personal
communication, July 2002); that is, technical, psychological, and/or human
mediators for acting on the environment (tools) and the recurring social
forms and practices through which tools enable one to act meaningfully
(genres) Kozulin, 1998; Wertsch, 1998).
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