[xmca] Applicability of CHAT to US society

[Richard Beach <rbeach@umn.edu>]

In his review of The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky. Harry Daniels, Michael
Cole, and James V. Wertsch (Eds.), in the (2009, January/February/March)
issue of Reading Research Quarterly, 44(1), 85­95, Peter Smagorinsky argues
that while a CHAT research perspective may be relevant for analysis of
workplaces/schools in socialist countries like Finland, it may not be
relevant for analysis of schooling in America:
 
Engeström¹s chapter in CCV details his Change
Laboratory, an intervention used in Finnish workplaces
in which groups of employees use Engeström¹s activity
triangle among other artifacts as a means to improving
how they work together toward a common goal. This
triangle has become a ubiquitous slide or overhead at
countless conference presentations I have attended and
numerous articles published in U.S. and international
journals. And yet I do not see in U.S. research, for the
most part, its relevance to the issues under study, which
tend to lean more toward analyses of situated individuals
than investigations of group processes. In my view,
the activity triangle, much like the oft-trivialized ZPD of
recent years, has become for many a means of affiliation
with a fashionable theory rather than a conceptual tool
for conducting a rigorous activity analysis that follows
from Leontiev¹s move in focus from the individual to
the collective.
 
>From a cultural perspective, I see activity theory being
a much more productive heuristic for scholars working
in relatively socialistic societies, such as Engeström¹s
Finland, than in overtly competitive capitalist nations,
such as the United States. I seriously question the degree
to which activity theory, at least as advocated by
Engeström, genuinely frames the majority of studies for
which it is invoked in the United States. I have fallen
into this trap myself (sans the triangle) by claiming an
activity theory perspective for research that looks at individual
internalization and externalization rather than
collective action; my critique here applies to my own
work as much as it applies to anyone else¹s.  (p. 93)
 
This provocative critique raises all kinds of questions about the nature of
contemporary American political culture, and whether schooling in America
reflects an individualist versus collective culture perspective. The current
neo-conservative/neo-liberal political era since Reagen evident in casino
capitalism and application of a business-management discourse to schooling
(Fairclough) has collapsed, a collapse best portrayed in the dysfunctional
systems portrayed in the HBO series, The Wire.
 
Is it possible to generalize about the applicability of CHAT to all of
American society?  America clearly isn¹t Finland (it ranks near the bottom
of the top 25 advanced countries in terms of support for children).
 
However, there may be or may have been more ³socialist² pre-Reagen cultural
pockets in America.  When I moved to Minnesota in the 1970s, I experienced a
collective sense of community built around the Progressive political
movement, a Scandinavian culture, and strong labor unions.  (One of Peter¹s
studies of ³character education² found cultural differences between the
Upper Midwest and the Deep South in their attitudes towards the role of
schooling in society).
 
While Minnesota has moved away from these cultural traditions, we did
experience the rise of Paul Wellstone and his use of grass-roots political
organizing that built on these traditions, a system emulated in the Obama
campaign.  Whether that system?driven by the object of engaging voters to
achieve the outcome of winning can transfer/translate into governing or even
begin to move to a more ³socialist² society remains to be seen.
 
There are also signs of collective political activity/participatory critical
inquiry mediated by uses of digital communication tools well documented in a
chapter by Chip Bruce and Ann Bishop, ³New Literacies and Community
Inquiry,² in Corio, Leu, Knobel, & Lankshear¹s Handbook of New Literacies
Research. They identify various projects such as SisterNet in which African
American women in Champaign, Illinois share information online about issues
of health/poverty or a neighborhood organization in Chicago designed to
engage in political action.  Such projects certainly represent instances of
collective activity that could be examined using a CHAT perspective.
 
I¹d be curious as to other XMCA¹ers responses to Peter¹s very interesting
charge.
 
 
 
 
 

Richard Beach
Professor of English Education
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
359 Peik Hall, 159 Pillsbury Dr., S. E.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455
rbeach@umn.edu
612-625-3893 (voice messages only)
952-649-7289 
Teaching Literature to Adolescents website
<http://www.teachingliterature.org/teachingliterature/>
TeachingMediaLiteracy.Com book website
<http://teachingmedialiteracy.com>
Teaching Digital Writing website
<http://digitalwriting.pbwiki.com>



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