RE: [xmca] Socio-Cultural Theory Interest Group Seminar Series

From: bb (xmca-whoever@comcast.net)
Date: Thu Sep 28 2006 - 10:07:21 PDT


Interesting notes, especially around storytelling and the zpd, the latter ever so elusive in our last x-discussion of it. I'm really wondering about the relationships between and among concepts, explanation, language, theories and their constructions. What do we mean by "learning a concept' in activity theory and how is that different from "learning language" or "learning to speak"?

I could not access the ochs paper, but at least found the abstract:

The present study examines the activity of storytelling at dinnertime in English-speaking, Caucasian-American families. Our findings demonstrate that, through the process of story co-narration, family members draw upon and stimulate critical social , cognitive, and linguistic skills that underlie scientific and other scholarly discourse as they jointly construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct theories of everyday events. Each story is potentially a theory of a set of events in that it contains an ex planation, which may then be overtly challenged and reworked by co-narrators. Our data suggest that complex theory-building through storytelling is promoted by (and constitutive of) interlocutors' familiarity with one another and/or the narrative events. As such, long before children enter a classroom, everyday storytelling among familiars constitutes a commonplace medium for socializing perspective-taking, critical thinking, and other intellectual skills that have been viewed as o
 utcome
s of formal scho oling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

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