Re: [xmca] The 'activity' concept in CHAT

[Tony Whitson <twhitson@UDel.Edu>]

I am a big fan of Lave and Wenger, but I don't see them as representing 
the mainstream of CHAT. There certainly are commonalities between CHAT and 
their Communities of Practice (CoP) approach, but I don't think they're 
the same.

For one thing, while CHAT focuses on Activities and Activity Systems, CoP 
focuses on Practices and Communities of Practice.

I don't know whether it would fit in your seminar, but you could certainly 
explore disciplinary perspectives on practices, as well as perspectives on 
activities. Bourdieu is just one source who comes to mind on practices.

This could be interesting b/c I think it would reveal different kinds of 
problematics motivating the alternative discourses. In Bourdieu's case, at 
least (which Lave has been quite attentive to), the dialectic between 
structure and agency has been a key problematic, in a way that I think has 
not been the same for CHAT.

I'm tempted to venture suggestions for what might be the counterpart in 
CHAT, put I'd better leave that for those here (pretty much everybody else 
here, in fact) who know more than I do about CHAT.

On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, Nathaniel Dumas wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I hope all is well. I am currently designing a syllabus for an anthropology 
> seminar, ?Activities as Ethnographic and Analytical Foci,? and one of the 
> first questions we ask in the seminar is ?What is an activity?? from 
> different disciplinary perspectives (including anthropology, psychology, and 
> sociology). That said, could anyone recommend a few titles from CHAT that 
> deal particularly with this question? The classics that come to my mind is 
> the Lave and Wenger's works in addition to Leont'ev's essay on the activity. 
> Thus, I'm curious if there are any other contemporary writings on this 
> concept. Feel free to reply to me offline at ndumas@linguistics.ucsb.edu, if 
> you prefer.
> Best,
>
>
> Nathaniel Dumas
> UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
> Department of Linguistics
> University of California, Santa Barbara
> http://ucsb.academia.edu/NathanielDumas/About
>
>
>
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Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
 are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                  -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)

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