Among many topics you cover - (and I didn't find the review too long, I found it too short!) - your critical comments on activity theory of course are especially interesting, as Richard emphasizes. I think you and Richard do have a valid point - activity theory does have the challenge of learning how to both theorize and apply itself to high- conflict, highly competitive situations, such as we seem to be increasingly finding across the US, and in truth, everywhere, including Finland. Can cultural-historical activity theory meet this challenge?
Yrjo deals with a number of questions about and criticisms of activity theory in the paper that he presented at ISCAR 2008, "THE FUTURE OF ACTIVITY THEORY: A ROUGH DRAFT", attached below.
Would you be willing to provide some critical commentary on his thoughts?
- Steve
Attachment:
ISCAR_keynote-Engestro_m.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
On Jan 13, 2009, at 1:56 PM, Richard Beach wrote:
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), 85–95, Peter Smagorinsky arguesthat 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: Engeström’s chapter in CCV details his Change Laboratory, an intervention used in Finnish workplaces in which groups of employees use Engeström’s 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 Leontiev’s move in focus from the individual to the collective.From a cultural perspective, I see activity theory beinga much more productive heuristic for scholars working in relatively socialistic societies, such as Engeström’s 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 else’s. (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 dysfunctionalsystems portrayed in the HBO series, The Wire. Is it possible to generalize about the applicability of CHAT to all ofAmerican society? America clearly isn’t Finland (it ranks near the bottomof the top 25 advanced countries in terms of support for children).However, there may be or may have been more “socialist” pre-Reagen cultural pockets in America. When I moved to Minnesota in the 1970s, I experienced acollective sense of community built around the Progressive politicalmovement, a Scandinavian culture, and strong labor unions. (One of Peter’s studies of “character education” found cultural differences between the Upper Midwest and the Deep South in their attitudes towards the role ofschooling in society). While Minnesota has moved away from these cultural traditions, we didexperience 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 evenbegin to move to a more “socialist” 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 achapter by Chip Bruce and Ann Bishop, “New Literacies and CommunityInquiry,” in Corio, Leu, Knobel, & Lankshear’s 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 ofcollective activity that could be examined using a CHAT perspective.I’d be curious as to other XMCA’ers responses to Peter’s very interestingcharge. 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> _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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