Re: [xmca] RE: CHAT/SCT - A voice from the past

[Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns <jlarream@uniandes.edu.co>]

Eugene, 
Do you see any other similarities between Vygotskian approaches and behaviorist ones besides being functionalists? I wonder. 

Jorge

 
Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns, Ph.D.
Profesor Asociado y Director
Departamento de Psicología
Universidad de los Andes







On Nov 25, 2010, at 2:38 PM, Eugene Matusov wrote:

> Dear Mike and everybody-
> 
> 
> 
> Here is my two cents on this interesting topic besides minor correction that
> the Sociocultural conference in Madrid was I think in 1992, not in 1994 (I
> think):
> 
> 
> 
> 1)      You seem suggest that the differences between CHAT and SCT as they
> have emerged in the "West" (i.e., outside of former Soviet Union) have been
> historically rooted in the Soviet debates. Am I right in understanding of
> your point? If so, I'm not sure that it is true or fully true. I want to
> hear more from you about your reasoning connecting these two debates.
> 
> 2)      I think in your original message, you were alluding that, at least,
> in part the disagreements among the Soviet scholars were caused by their
> political squabbles within the "Stalinist science" (the term that was coined
> by Krementsov, I think) or in the "post-Stalinist science". In any case,
> what makes you think that way? Also, do you think that there was any
> "substance" in these debates or not? For example, you wrote, "At the same
> time, they criticized Leont'ev for placing too much emphasis on activity as
> external conditions, likening him to a behaviorist (Abulkhanova-Slavskaya,
> 1980)." It can be a fluke, but I have noticed that some former behaviorists
> became Vygotskians. Mike, can you, yourself, be an example of this pattern?
> If my observation is correct, it can suggest some interesting affinity
> between behaviorism and Vygotskian family of approaches (e.g., both are
> functional approaches).
> 
> 3)      I have noticed, and I can be wrong, that you want to diminish
> differences in Vygotskian family of approaches rather than explore possible
> differences and differentiations among them. For me, even this posting goes
> along with this tendency. Am I right about that? If so, can you elaborate on
> that? Basically, I want to ask you if you PREFER that there are no
> differences rather than you do simply do not see any differences but would
> be EQUALLY HAPPY if the differences really exist.
> 
> 
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> 
> 
> Eugene
> 
> ---------------------
> 
> Eugene Matusov, Ph.D.
> 
> Professor of Education
> 
> School of Education
> 
> University of Delaware
> 
> 16 W Main st.
> 
> Newark, DE 19716, USA
> 
> 
> 
> email: ematusov@udel.edu
> 
> fax: 1-(302)-831-4110
> 
> website: http://ematusov.soe.udel.edu <http://ematusov.soe.udel.edu/> 
> 
> publications: http://ematusov.soe.udel.edu/vita/publications.htm
> 
> 
> 
> Dialogic Pedagogy Forum: http://diaped.soe.udel.edu
> <http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/> 
> 
> <https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=8893>
> Description: Journey into dialogic pedagogy Matusov, E. (2009). Journey into
> dialogic pedagogy
> <https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=8893> .
> Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers.
> 
> ---------------------
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From: mike cole [mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 2:37 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity
> Cc: Luis Moll; Eugene Matusov
> Subject: CHAT/SCT - A voice from the past
> 
> 
> 
> I know some people who care a lot to distinguish CHAT and SCT. I wonder if
> there is any consensus on what the critical differences
> are between them. Here is what I wrote at the Sociocultural Conference in
> Madrid about 1994 where Jim Wertsch, who edited the 1981
> book on Soviet activity theory,  as a major player and lead editor on the
> subsequent volume - socicultural theories of mind.
> 
> More than 15 years have passed since this was written. I may have been dead
> wrong then and making the same argument now
> may seem really mistaken. You will see traces of this same discussion in
> various messages being posted around the P&L article.
> 
> How should I proceed to find out?? Where are all the L2 people here to help
> us out here? Other than publishers in applied linguistics preferring SCT,
> what's in those names that makes people get irritated with each other? Who
> are the bad people? What are the
> special virtues of the good people?
> 
> mike
> ------------------------------
> 
> For the past several years I have been striving, with rather limited
> success, to understand the intellectual issues that divide the Vygotskian
> and activity theory approaches, as well as the division between activity
> 
> theorists who follow Leont'ev and those who follow Rubinshtein. This task is
> complicated because, insofar as I can understand, contemporary followers of
> Leont'ev continue to adhere to the major principles articulated by Vygotsky,
> Luria, and Leont'ev in the 1920s and early 1930s, arguing in effect that
> Vygotsky was an activity theorist, although he focused less on issues of the
> object-oriented nature of activity than on processes of mediation in his own
> work (Engestrorn, 1987; Hyden, 1984). Followers ofRubinshtein, on the other
> hand, deny that Vygotsky was an activity theorist and tax him with
> "signocentricisrn," which in the overheated debates of the last decade of
> Soviet power seemed to
> 
> be roughly equivalent to "idealist," a sin at that time (Brushlinsky, 1968).
> At the same time, they criticized Leont'ev for placing too much emphasis on
> activity as external conditions, likening him to a behaviorist
> (Abulkhanova-Slavskaya, 1980).
> 
> I do not want to minimize the possible scientific benefits to be derived
> from attempting to understand these disagreements more thoroughly, although
> I am not certain how productive such attempts will
> 
> be for non-Russian psychologists. From existing historiographical evidence,
> debates among Russian adherents of these various positions appear to have
> been tightly bound up with the wrenching political
> 
> upheavals that racked the Soviet Union repeatedly between 1917 and 1991 (and
> which arc by no means over) (Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). What I am
> almost positive of, however, is that it would not be
> 
> productive for adherents of the various positions to carry those battles
> into the international sphere except insofar as they have international
> intellectual merit.
> 
> What most concerns me is that for whatever combination of reasons, there has
> not yet been close cooperation on an international scale among psychologists
> who work under the banner of activity theory and those who use some version
> of the concept of sociocultural psychology as
> 
> their conceptual icon. At the first Activity Theory Congress in Berlin in
> 1986, there was only one major address that took the work of Vygotsky and
> Luria to be coequally relevant to the proceedings with that
> 
> of Leont'ev, and individual talks that proceeded from a more or less
> Vygotskian perspective were relatively rare. At the second Activity Theory
> Congress in 1990, there was a far richer mix of viewpoints, but many of the
> people prominent in organizing the current meeting in Madrid were
> preoccupied with preparatory work for the current meeting and did not
> contribute.
> 
> It would be most unfortunate if adherents of the various streams of
> psychological thinking whose history I have sketched were to continue their
> work in isolation from each other. The common intellectual issues facing
> different streams of cultural-historical, sociocultural, activity based
> conceptions of human nature are too difficult to yield to piecemeal efforts.
> It is time for those who have come to questions about the
> socio-cultural-historical constitution of human nature to join in a
> cooperative search for their common past and to initiate cooperative efforts
> to address the difficult intellectual issues and staggering national and
> international problems facing humanity in the post-Cold War era.
> 
> 
> 
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