I'm assuming that people are still finding the time needed to read through
Kevin Leander's paper, but since I am going off for a week and will not be
writing online, I wanted to add a few notes. Maybe they will flag some
points as others read.
At the end of the theoretical framing (p 122), just before getting to the
details of the cabin-building activity and its encounters with multiple
social spaces (and times), Kevin raises the question of scales and
paths. Many of you by now know my interest in scales, and I've mentioned
my notion of "traversal" which is much like a cross-contextual path.
The typical spatial scale of building a full-size cabin differs in so many
ways from those of most ordinary school activities (at least instructional
ones for students). The difference highlights for us how limited and narrow
(and disempowering) the scales, the chronotopes (space-and-time regimes,
time-and-place conventions) of schooling are. Schooled activities tend to
be brief and self-contained (i.e. isolated, disconnected), on the order of
5-20 minutes. None that are really coherent over the scale of weeks and
months, much less years. Yet I think we know that development, which
defines the most important dimension of learning (i.e. learning that
lasts), only takes places over these longer scales. (I have argued
elsewhere that short-term "breakthroughs" make long-term learning possible,
but it is only retrospectively that you can say that any event was the
precursor of longterm learning or change. In each actual instance, there
may well be no long-term follow to such an event.) And as Kevin notes near
the end of his paper, some of my work, and a lot of experience in other
disciplines, suggests that normally processes on short time-scales and
those on much longer ones just do not directly influence one another (some
forms of material-semiotic mediation can create important exceptions). In
any case, I have serious doubts that much of anything learned in school on
short timescales contributes significantly to longterm learning in most
people's lives.
What Kevin emphasizes in the paragraphs I've noted is the role of
material-spatial scale in setting the timescales of activities. Little
tools like paper and pencil, worksheet, one-page handout, a few test-tubes
or "manipulables" ... these are the tools of activities on the minutes
timescale, and the tools of individual activity as material action (as
opposed to lifting a large piece of timber, requiring cooperative effort of
several people). There is something fundamentally different about building
a house vs. doing a 20-minute science lab. Creating a neighborhood park or
garden vs. completing a worksheet. And the differences are not just in the
symbolic content or knowledge/information, though these are linked in scale
to the complexity and duration and spatial extension of the project.
Spatial scale however can be tricky to define. When we follow workpaths
from place to place (classroom to cabin-site, for example, or work to home)
as part of what is functionally a single extended activity (also tricky to
define, of course), what is the scale of the work-space: the total size of
the two sites, the average size of the two sites, or the total distance
covered in going between sites? When we use a tool, the scale of the
work-done may be approximately that of the tool itself, or not. A small
tool (hammer) may be used over an extensive project. A bicycle is a couple
meters in size but its normal scale of use is kilometers. When we move
through multiple spaces, engaging in multiple activities that may or may
not function in a nested way (e.g. a component activity that enables a
larger activity), we need to know just what basis we are using for defining
the spatial scale of our overall practice.
The notion of paths is a good one, as Kevin notes, for bringing space and
time together, for seeing how we move through various spaces, and create
them as places by our activity, in time and on some specific timescales.
But to get further into these matters, it will help to look at specific
examples, and I will wait on that.
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 01 2003 - 01:00:08 PDT