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.
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