Re: [xmca] Where and What Is A Boundary?

[MICHAEL W SMITH <mwsmith@temple.edu>]

I share David’s concern with understanding just what a boundary is.  I’d
like to add an additional question: How does one determine what boundaries
are relevant?  Put another way, how does the analytic help one identify the
activity systems in operation and hence the boundaries that one needs to
examine.  The authors posit two systems:  the DTE and the cooperating
schools.  They posit the existence of these systems but don’t appear to
derive them empirically.  That is, if the DTE and the schools are, in fact,
the systems that are germane, one would be able to find sufficient
similarities in the "general object,"  in the rules, in the tools, and in
the division of labor across cooperating schools, small groups, supervisors,
and so on.  As Peter pointed out in his initial post and as he has argued in
his own research (Smagorinsky & O’Donnell-Allen, 1998, for example), it
might be a mistake to assume those similarities.  The key system, then,  might
be much smaller--an idioculture and not a culture.  In such a circumstance,
investigating borders would not be investigating the spaces between the DTE
and the schools, say, but would be investigating the spaces between the
small groups in Extract 2 and the DTE (or a particular university class) or
investigating the spaces between the supervisor-student teacher-mentor group
and both the particular cooperating school and the DTE in Excerpt 4.  My
worry about positing the larger structures first is that doing so might keep
one from observing boundaries that are more important.


On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 9:40 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> First of all, many many thanks to Professor Peter Smagorinsky for his
> incisive but very fair summary of the study, and above all for opening up
> issues that really go far beyond the study itself.
>
> As we see! With all due respect to Professor Engestrom and the folks at the
> Change Lab, I think that the issue of profit, and salaries, and even
> critical peer review and publishing is much more interesting to the writers
> of a study than it is to its readers. So I think that Professor
> Smagorinsky's understanding reflects, accurately, the reader's point of
> view.
>
> It certainly reflects mine. Studies like the one that Professor Engestrom
> reports on in "Perspectives in Activity Theory" (CUP 1999: 377-404) as
> essentially examples of business consultancy discourse, in that they focus
> on enhancing collaborative production, often through negotiated
> consensus, and leave the underlying issues of class conflict in the
> background. Nevertheless, it seems to me that precisely these issues are the
> key to understanding the 'boundary" concept.
>
> I usually have a lot of trouble with articles like this. I am a deep
> breathing reader, and I can stay under water for a very long time without a
> good definition. But my imagination (and understanding) is too visual and
> concrete and I cannot really even begin to get a good picture of what the
> author is going on about unless I have a good example.
>
> And I find I don't really get a good example of the "boundary" concept
> until p. 223, where we get a pretty clear boundary between what the trainees
> have been told to do as trainees and what they will actually do as teachers.
> This comes up again near the end, where there is a boundary set between
> "goals" (as defined by the NC) and "work", as defined by the teachers.
>
> I found myself wondering, as I read the study, if this boundary is not a
> temporary mirage created by the fact that we are talking about PRE-SERVICE
> teacher education, a situation where the student teachers still have to jump
> through hoops to get their certification, and where, because the student
> teachers do not have the experienced teachers' source of authority, viz,
> their chalkface experience, they are more or less at the mercy of mentors,
> the professors, and of course the examiners.
>
> Pre-service programmes focus on what is teachable in preservice programmes.
> That is why they focus so much on lesson plans, which in real life are
> notorious unreliable guides to classroom interaction for the simple reason
> that they largely pre-empt it with "goals" and "targets" and "projected
> outcomes". They also focus on the kind of teaching knowledge that is
> statable and testable. But a great deal of this statable, plannable,
> rehearsable, and testable teaching knowledge is what Whitehead would call
> "inert" knowledge.
>
> For example: one of the really key problems that teachers face when they
> start teaching in English is being able to reduce questions to the point
> where they are manageable and then expand them again to the point where they
> are challenging to learners(who can be of widely varying degrees of
> proficiency, communicative capacity and even amiability). This was the point
> of the distinction our teacher Ms. Yi Minkyeong made between "nonverbal
> response wanted", "verbal response wanted", and  "verbal thinking wanted".
>
> This knowledge is not only largely unconscious, it is largely
> undescribable, because it includes (at least) three undescribed things:
> familiarity ("Have I said this before?"), structural complexity ("How long
> and complex is the question? What about the answer?"), conceptual complexity
> ("How concrete/visualizeable abstract/conceivable is the question? What
> about the answer?"). It's not the sort of thing we can teach in our
> pre-service programmes, although we are making some inroads with the
> in-service ones (where I am teaching this very afternoon).
>
> One of my grads is now studying the possibility of discarding the
> "artificial zone of proximal learning" of the pre-service programme
> altogether and going to the naturally occuring sort of "legitimate
> peripheral participation" that we find in apprenticeships, what we found in
> for centuries in the arts and even in teaching before colleges of education
> were invented. (I remember travelling on trucks in the Sudan and watching
> how young Sudanese boys learned to become "drivers" in this way.)
>
> Shin Jiyeong has already found a significant difference in one novice
> teacher in the use of visual prompts and also in what she calls
> "non-repetition questions", that is, questions which produce the target
> sentences (specified by the NC) without actually asking for "Listen and
> Repeat". This is interesting because Shin Jieun and Kellogg 2007 failed to
> find ANY improvement in another co-teacher in any part of the lesson  EXCEPT
> the greeting.
>
> What makes the difference? I think that Jinyeong's apprenticeship is NOT a
> mentorship, where the relations found between examiners and examinees
> invariably reproduce themselves, and change the focus from the kind of
> indescribable knowledge we are looking for to the more describable sort.
> It's also NOT the crazy situation I started her out on (silly me) where the
> two teachers had to teach the same thing at opposite ends of the classroom
> looking at each other teach.
>
> First of all, the two teachers have good reasons to take turns watching and
> teaching. One is an inexperienced native speaker of English and the other is
> a highly expert non-native speaker, so they both have (different) things to
> do and so different things to look at.
>
> Secondly, there is a clear cycle of "watch this" and "now you have a go"
> for both teachers. It seems to me where the actual teaching "work" is not
> statable, this is essential: there is literally no other way for the
> knowledge to be internalized except through imitation, and the way our short
> term memories work, there has to be a very short window between the
> observation and the imitation for the imitation to be accurate and useful.
>
> Finally, there is, actually, an emergent concept, which neither teacher was
> aware of at the beginning of Jiyeong's research, and it's not "goal" whether
> of "work" or of "lesson" or of the NC. We started out just looking at what
> kinds of behaviors produced long answers (more than one word) from the kids,
> and we found to our distress that "Listen and Repeat" were virtually the
> only ones that did. I think the idea of a "non-imitative" or "non-repetitive
> question" is still a bit of a broad brush. But I also think that when the
> research is really done, this is where the real source of improvement will
> come in, and I think, not coincidentally, that this is where pre-service
> programmes really have to butt out.
>
> I was reading the "Boundary" article, I set up a gedankenexperiment, which
> I think reflects pretty well the kind of class conflict underlying the
> "boundary" concept. Let us say that there is a fundamental dispute over a
> curricular issue. Imagine, for example, that a party comes to power that
> wishes to remove a fundamental concept from the curriculum (e.g. the welfare
> state, or Norway's membership in the NATO alliance, participation in the
> invasion of Iraq, and active involvement in the Afghan War).
>
> Do I, as a teacher, want the decision making in the hands of a CONSERVATIVE
> teacher (they do exist; I have quite a few as grad students) or in the hands
> of a LIBERAL, even a RADICAL Department of Teacher Education?
>
> Well, OK, it's a thought experiment. The idea of a radical DTE is really a
> little like one of Einstein's relativistic trains, or Schrodinger's cat;
> there are none such, and none likely. But I think that in actual fact the
> real curricular decisions are ENTIRELY in the hands of the teacher, for much
> the same reason that decisions over learning are in the final analysis in
> the hands and heads of learners. And I think that's where they should be
> too.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>



-- 
Michael W. Smith
Professor and Chair
Department of Curriculum, Instruction,
and Technology in Education
Temple University
1301 Cecil B.Moore Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19122
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca