Re: [xmca] 1982 paper on schooling

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Cool summary of the article, Steve.
A variety of issues ensue, but which are of interest to people?

mike

On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com> wrote:

> I like this article Mike just posted - Focus on Women's Empowerment in
> Latin America Maternal Schooling and Health-Related Language and Literacy
> Skills in Rural Mexico
> by EMILY R. DEXTER, SARAH E. LEVINE, AND PATRICIA M. VELASCO.
>
> Here are some extracts that stand out for me.  <Bracketed comments> are
> mine, the rest is quoted from the article.  Interesting connections to
> recent discussions.  I find doing this kind of summary helpful for me to
> absorb this kind of writing, so here goes.
>
>
> ***********
> <1. One of the measurements used in this study of rural Mexican women
> regarding how they responded to health interviews and information was to
> measure how they defined the meanings of common nouns in a noun definition
> task.>
>
> Following Snow in her research with schoolchildren, we employed a noun
> definition task to assess women's decontextualized language skills. Women
> were asked the meaning of 10 simple nouns such as "knife," "thief," and
> "dog" with the question, "What is a ?" Their responses are scored on a
> continuum from highly contextualized to highly decontextualized. A
> contextualized definition of "thief" would be "One stole my television,"
> while a decontextualized response would refer to abstract properties: "A
> person who steals from others." A highly contextualized description of "cat"
> might be to point to a cat in the room, while a decontextualized description
> would describe it in terms of its superordinate category membership ("a cat
> is an animal...") and specific properties ("that is domesticated, nocturnal,
> and has fur and whiskers").
>
>
> <2. The noun definition task employed in this study is similar to aspects
> of Luria's study.>
>
> The noun definition is the verbal equivalent of the object classification
> task that A. R. Luria used when investigating the reasoning strategies of
> Soviet peasants.  Luria found that nonliterates with no schooling were more
> likely to classify objects according to function rather than superordinate
> category: a scythe would be grouped with wheat rather than with other tools,
> for example. Luria proposed that schooling and literacy promote
> classification systems that are abstracted from everyday life.
>
>
> <3. Socioeconomic status tends to predict the length of answers to
> questions in a health interview.>
>
> While the noun definition, listening comprehension, and reading
> comprehension scores were predicted by length of schooling, adult
> socioeconomic status is the only variable that predicts how much a woman
> speaks in an interview. Women with more socioeconomic resources, on average,
> gave longer responses than women with fewer resources, regardless of
> education level. We have not found evidence, then, that women learned this
> skill in school. It should be noted, however, that adult socioeconomic
> status explains only 25 percent of the variance in this measure, showing
> that at each level of socioeconomic status considerable variation exists in
> the length of responses.
>
>
> <4. Schooling and literacy help women understand oral public health
> messages.>
>
> The oral language skills effective for local, face-to-face communication,
> we argue, are not a sufficient foundation for the bureaucratic literacy
> required to understand public-health messages. In our study, the women able
> to provide the most decontextualized, impersonal definitions of common words
> were also, on average, the most skilled at understanding spoken health
> messages, and those with the greatest listening comprehension skills were
> best able to understand printed health information.
>
> ... we argue that the ability to understand public, bureaucratic language -
> spoken and written - requires an orientation to language emphasized in
> schools but not necessarily in other family and community settings.
>
>
> <5.  Women's literacy classes should expand oral language abilities, not
> just reading skills.  This point seems relevant to some of Shirley's remarks
> the other day.>
>
> ... a major goal of women's literacy classes should be to expand oral
> language abilities. Not only will these skills serve as a foundation for
> literacy, but they also will give women greater access to the information
> provided by the increasingly ubiquitous radio and television.
>
>
> <6. Just as this study relied, in part, on correlating the ability to
> define nouns in decontextualized ways with the ability to interact with
> public health systems, the ability to articulate and challenge the
> definitions of words is important in general, including in feminist
> consciousness.>
>
> The act of defining words, however, is also a fundamental and powerful way
> of participating in the public sphere of meaning-making. A formal definition
> is an assertion that a word has a standardized-or shared-meaning that
> conveys not only one's own experience but also the experience of a
> collective, or an implied "we." Definitions are agreements about what words
> mean, and those agreements can be challenged. It is through the act of
> redefining words that new meanings can be created in the public sphere, and
> social change for women occurs, in part, when they successfully challenge
> the public definitions of words such as "marriage," "motherhood," "home,"
> "work," "economy," "sexuality," "politics," and "equality."  A critical
> feminist consciousness requires an ability to understand the way the world
> is currently defined and an ability to become an active participant in
> defining the public world.
>
> *******
> - Steve
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 27, 2010, at 3:10 PM, mike cole wrote:
>
>  Attached is a paper on years of schooling and the formality of definitions
>> given by Mexican women. Part of a much larger set of papers but directly
>> related to earlier paper by Snow and ulvi's dissertation topic. Not sure
>> where/how best to respond to Andy's note because i am unsure if people
>> regard it as peripheral or central to Vygotskian and other theories of
>> culture and development.
>>
>> I see this "nouns" test as well as the paper with D'Andrade as relevant,
>> but
>> also as leaving plenty of room for a study that uses the "everyday/
>> scientific" distinction and studies it as a function of years of
>> schooling.
>>
>> mike
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 9:02 AM, ulvi icil <ulvi.icil@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  I am interested on the effect of schooling on concept formation, the
>>> relationswhip between everyday and scientific concetps as a candidate
>>> research topic for my master thesis that I will start to work October
>>> 2010
>>> onwards !
>>>
>>> Ulvi
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 2010/6/26, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> That article connects to several ongoing threads, Andy. But lets see if
>>>> others are interested before I directly comment.
>>>>
>>>> Instead, I think that the cover of the current issue of the New Yorker
>>>> magazine provides interesting food for thought one concepts and their
>>>> representations. It is accessible from www.newyorker.com.  Try to click
>>>> on
>>>> the cover and than use control+ (on a pc) to get a larger and larger
>>>> imaged.
>>>> The different layers of meaning appear to move between the syntagmatic
>>>> and
>>>> paradigmatic dimensions of meaning making. Besides,
>>>> its clever.
>>>> mike
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 6:38 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  I just had a read of Mike's 1982 paper with Roy D'Andrade on the
>>>>>
>>>> influence
>>>>
>>>>> of schooling on concept formation:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://lchc.ucsd.edu/Histarch/ap82v4n2.PDF
>>>>>
>>>>> Great paper!
>>>>>
>>>>> It occurred to me that Luria is in agreement with many others that a
>>>>> hierarchical system of categories,  a taxonomy, is the archetype of the
>>>>> "abstract" concept. Luria's conception of how this relates to prior
>>>>>
>>>> forms of
>>>>
>>>>> concept (affective and concrete) is the main point of interest in the
>>>>> article, but I would like to question whether this taxonomical idea is
>>>>>
>>>> valid
>>>>
>>>>> as the archetype of the "true" concept. The article claims that
>>>>>
>>>> taxonomical
>>>>
>>>>> practices ("true" or not) are archetypal school practices, and this is
>>>>>
>>>> an
>>>>
>>>>> interesting and different question.
>>>>>
>>>>> An interesting counterpoint to this is Hegel's classification of 3
>>>>> different components which he thinks must *all* be present in the
>>>>>
>>>> formation
>>>>
>>>>> of a true concept:
>>>>>
>>>>> The subject is (a) ascribed certain qualities; (b) seen as having
>>>>> having
>>>>>
>>>> a
>>>>
>>>>> certain place in a system of social practice; and (c) taken under its
>>>>>
>>>> genus,
>>>>
>>>>> as belonging to a certain living whole.
>>>>>
>>>>> Further, I think (c) does not actually amount to the kind of Linnaean
>>>>> hierarchical family tree, but could also be interpreted like genre and
>>>>> archetype without the implied underlying totality. Also, there is all
>>>>>
>>>> too
>>>>
>>>>> much room for subsuming (c) under (a) as almost all of present-day
>>>>> philosophy and natural science are wont to do.
>>>>>
>>>>> Mike, you have done a lot of work on the role of this "taxonomical
>>>>> activity" in and out of school. Davydov on the other hand, emphasises
>>>>>
>>>> (b) as
>>>>
>>>>> opposed to (a). It would be interesting to investigate
>>>>> concept-formation
>>>>>
>>>> on
>>>>
>>>>> this wider frame.
>>>>>
>>>>> Andy
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>>
>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> *Andy Blunden*
>>>>> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/><
>>>>> http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/><
>>>>>
>>>> http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
>>>>
>>>>  Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
>>>>> Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss
>>>>>
>>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>  <Velasco.Schooling.pdf>_______________________________________________
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