Yrjö, along with Peter I have also had the apparently false
impression that doing things like setting up a Change Lab in a
hospital is a form of business management consulting. The goal of
helping to "construct settings more conducive to collective
productivity" was explicit in articles I've read, and that seems
consistent with essential goals of business management consulting.
I've heard this conception of the Change Lab mentioned at least
verbally by many people, including myself. This description is not
meant to be anything but an objective description of essential
relationships. I worked in a factory for years, and if someone had
set up a Change Lab, it would have looked and acted exactly like
business management consultants interacting with people on the
floor. Such interactive projects did appear periodically, sometimes
led by Japanese "lean manufacturing" oriented consultants. I
suspect others besides myself have used the same reasoning to view
the Change Lab as a form of business management consulting. No one,
of course, wants to misrepresent anything. Would you please set
things straight? Other than methods of arriving at suggestions and
recommendations, what is the difference?
- Steve
On Sep 12, 2010, at 5:02 AM, Yrjö Engeström wrote:
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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