Hi Mike and Joe,
Taffy Raphael, Kathy Au, and I were involved in establishing the
Sylvia Scribner Award, which is a career award for Division C (
Learning and Instruction). A bit of historical analysis is useful
here. The Scribner award committee that we established consisted of
12-15 committee members/reviewers, half of whom would rotate off each
year. We had a chair and and a co-chair (who would become chair the
following year). Overlapping persons and artifacts across the years,
and across divisional vice presidents (elected every two years) made
good sense from the perspective of continuity. We expected the
award to naturally broaden its scope over the years, but remain
associated with the general issues and quality of scholarship found
in Sylvia's work.
This brings us to the perils of only doing half of the activity
theory analysis. The half that we didn't do, had we done it, would
have indicated that by building in continuity at one level of the
social organization--the awards committee-- we created a
contradiction with another level--the power of the divisional vice
presidency. To shorten and soften the longer story, a new divisional
VP came into office, removed my former co-chair, by then chair, and
dismissed the entire Scribner awards committee. This was replaced
with an entirely new group of people who have done a far better job
of maintaining their continuity than we did, and in a rather more
top-down manner. This is, in short, why since the first two
recipients of the award (Barbara Rogoff and Jean Lave), there has
been a string of recipients whose work is in many ways antithetical
to Sylvia's. Maybe the Cultural-Historical SIG can recapture
Sylvia's name for an award?
--King
>Yes, Joe, it is the total disconnect that is so disorienting. I suggested
>maybe the committee that makes such decisions should be constrained by the
>criterion that in the entire corpus of the writing of whomever they choose
>there is at least one reference to the work Sylvia Scribner. Her work
>and her as a person certainly deserve remembering and honoring, but
>that does not appear to be what is happening.
>mike
-- ______________________________ King Beach Learning, Technology and Culture Michigan State University phone: 517-381-8884 fax: 517-381-8885 email: kdbeach@msu.edu
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