[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [xmca] Link to this month's article
This is a brief comment to Peter Smagorinsky's message, copied below.
Quixotian attacks on triangles have been a relatively common genre for
some years now. I usually do not get involved in those discussions
because I don't find them productive. However, I am slightly bothered
by the following sentence in Peter's message:
"Engeström, at least from what I've read, employs it [the 'triangle
framework'] as a consultant to business management to help construct
settings more conducive to collective productivity."
Since I have never done business management consulting, I would like
to know on what readings Peter might be basing his statement.
Cheers,
Yrjö Engeström
-----
smago kirjoitti 10.9.2010 kello 22.29:
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA
Mike Cole is heading out on vacation, and so asked me to start the
discussion of the MCA article "Construction of Boundaries in Teacher
Education: Analyzing Student Teachers' Accounts," which the
electorate identified as this issue's paper for us to consider on
the network. I didn't know that Mike actually took vacations. But I
did agree to help launch this discussion, and help to sustain it
once it gets going. I have done a number of studies with similar
populations to those featured in this article-that is, I've studied
the transition that teachers make when moving from their university
preparation through the first year of full-time teaching. I've also
been part of a university teacher education program in English
Education (which is the teaching of literature, writing, and
language; it is not ESOL) for the last two decades, and before that
regularly mentored student teachers in my jobs at secondary schools
in the US. So I do have some familiarity with the issues at stake in
this article.
One difference: Jahreie and Ottesen use what they call "Cultural-
Historical Activity Theory" to motivate their work, and I once did
too. But as CHAT has gravitated to Engeström's interpretation and
exposition via his Triangle, I have moved away from this orientation
and now only claim to use Vygotskian principles to formulate my
analyses. So if I were to pose an opening question that perhaps
might appeal to those who aren't interested in teacher education, it
would be: What is CHAT, and which version of it do we invoke when we
claim to use it? Cole's Cultural Psychology did include the famous
Triangle, yet seemed very ecumenical in drawing on a host of sources
so that it was not the centerpiece of his conception of CHAT.
Engeström's system seems more closed to me, involving a specific set
of terms and constructs all bound in The Triangle. Perhaps because I
entered this field through the writing of Vygotsky and Wertsch (and
Engeström is clear in the introductory chapter to Perspectives on
Activity Theory that Wertsch is not an activity theorist, nor are
Lave and Wenger), I don't equate Engeström with either Activity
Theory or CHAT, and have disavowed that nomenclature in my more
recent work. So what is it about the Triangle that has become so
alluring that it has squeezed out other compelling conceptions of
Leont'ev's reformulation of Vygotsky's work so that it shifts
attention from the individual-in-context to the collective itself? I
find this shift to be particularly troubling in U.S.-based
scholarship in which the Triangle is often thrown up on conference
screens but never put to any evident use in the research reported.
For Scandinavians and others from nations with more collectivist
orientations, the adoption of a wholeheartedly Marxist approach
makes better cultural sense. And with that I will move to the
article in question, authored by faculty members from the University
of Oslo.
Jahreie and Ottesen's article concerns the conflicting demands of
the different settings faced by student teachers-those who are at
the end of their university teacher education programs and beginning
to transition to school-based teaching positions by apprenticing
under the mentorship of a full-time teacher, ideally one who is a
"master" teacher (but as I know from experience, this is not always
the case). In my reading of the paper, I see an effort to use
Engeström's terminology to account for processes involved when
student teachers engage with established members of different
settings that inevitably provide different "objects" for activity:
the university with its effort to produce a particular kind of
teacher, and the schools with their efforts to produce a particular
kind of student. A second general question I would pose is: From
what I can tell, most countries have settled on a very similar model
for teacher education: general education coursework, specialized
disciplinary course work, education course work, field experiences,
student teaching, and then the first job. Given that this model
seems to occur worldwide-amidst nations of different emphasis,
orientation to learning, economic structure and process, history,
demographics, and so on-what broader activity setting seems to
suggest this approach as the most efficacious in the preparation of
new teachers, regardless of national character and culture? In the
U.S. there are presently moves afoot to provide alternative pathways
to teaching careers, but most university programs follow this
sequence. Apparently this process, with expected variation, is
universal. But why?
To return to a separate point emerging from this same general
observation: The authors say (p. 231) that "The object of the
activity for the [university Department of Teacher Education] is
student teachers' learning trajectories. The object of activity for
the schools, however, is pupils' learning." Actually I think it's
more complicated than that, at least in the schools, where a primary
problem facing educators is agreeing on the purpose of education.
Even "student learning" is a highly contested construct, one that
creates the sort of boundary problems elaborated in this article. In
schools, it's often the ability to perform on tests, while in the
"progressive" university environment, it might involve learning more
about the self and how to express or explore it. Or something else.
For some people, schools exist to socialize young people into adult
roles, often based on the economic circumstances of their families.
For others they should promote upward mobility. Or learn a trade, or
become better informed citizens, or learn to follow authority, or
learn to question authority, or learn how to memorize information,
or learn how to construct knowledge, or learn how to answer
questions, or learn how to pose questions, or do any of many other
things. I've referred to this problem as the "mixed motive" of the
setting of schools, one that can shift from teacher to teacher,
which complicates the idea that the "object of activity for the
schools is student learning." Another question thus might be, For
complex settings like schools, how do we know what the object of
activity is? (I'm using the authors' language here; I'm more
comfortable with Wertsch's use of "motive" [1985] to describe the
overriding teleological goal toward which activity in a setting is
directed.)
I'll pose one final question before inviting others to contribute to
the discussion: What are the perils involved in using The Triangle
as an a priori framework for studying activity? Engeström, at least
from what I've read, employs it as a consultant to business
management to help construct settings more conducive to collective
productivity. To what degree can it then be extrapolated to other
kinds of settings that do not share the business environment's
relatively closed-ended motive (to produce and sell widgets, etc.)?
When the objects/goals/motives are less amenable to agreement, how
appropriate is The Triangle as a template for understanding
activity, or promoting activity of a certain sort? When the transfer
of The Triangle involves a great leap, as from a post office to a
school, to what degree might it serve as a Procrustean Bed rather
than a useful heuristic for understanding activity? (Procrustes was
an Attican thief who laid his victims on his iron bed. If a victim
was shorter than the bed, he stretched the body to fit; if the
victim was too long, he cut off the legs to make the body fit. In
either case the victim died.)
OK, that's enough of a starter kit. Please join in and feel free to
ignore what I've written and launch something else, or help me
clarify my confusion regarding the questions I've raised.
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca