RE: [xmca] scribner notes

["Vera John-Steiner" <vygotsky@unm.edu>]

Hi Peter,

Sylvia was a very special person who was able to synthesize her work for
unions in her earlier years with her scholarship after she returned
to graduate studies later in her life. Because of her history she did not
follow the usual high (quantitatively) productive  profile in scholarship
but carved out topics which she often pioneered. There is a special issue of
the LCHC Quarterly devoted to her writings. I don't have it in front of me,
but it should not be hard to find (I think it was published in the early
90s.) Her impact on her students at CUNY was considerable, you may be able
to get Joe Glick to share some of his memories of her contributions to the 
program and the students.
BTW, I just came from the eye doctor and am unable to read these comments,
but wanted to respond quickly.
Vera	

-----Original Message-----

From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Helena Worthen
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2012 2:02 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] scribner notes

Peter:

Thanks very much for doing this and posting it. It's got immediate relevance
for me. I am currently working my way through an extended argument about
workplace knowledge, drawing on garment and apparel shops, a regional mental
health center, a power plant, the whole range of public sector workplaces
(using scholarship application essays as data), construction and higher ed
institutions that employ contingent faculty to illustrate how people
produce, teach and use this knowledge. I focus on how they learn to make a
living, not just how they learn to do the jobs.  If anyone else is working
in this area, I'd be grateful if you'd contact me.

Helena Worthen
helena.worthen@berkeley.edu
21 San Mateo Road
Berkeley, CA 94707
Visiting Scholar, UCB Center for Labor Research and Education
510-828-2745

On Jun 4, 2012, at 12:22 PM, Peter Smagorinsky wrote:

> Hi, sorry if I'm in your mailbox excessively today, between xmca posts and
cultural-historical SIG archival recovery.
> 
> Anyhow, I mentioned earlier that I've been reading Sylvia Scribner's Mind
and Practice: Selected Writings of Sylvia Scribner. I'm attaching notes I
took, mainly from the latter part of the book which compiles her post-Vai
research in a dairy plant in the US. These notes may be of little interest
to most, but in case anyone wants to see a quote-driven summary, it's
attached. Keep in mind that I took these only for myself to help me think
about issues involved in a very different sort of workplace, a public school
(and interestingly, SS delineates schools and workplaces as separate sorts
of sites, which tells me about the state of teacher education/professional
development research in the 1980s, i.e., that it wasn't much of a field).
> 
> I originally hoped that the volume would help me understand more about
mental health issues, which was an early interest of hers and present
interest of mine. But she worked mostly at a very broad policy level, trying
to move mental health care more toward a state of personal dignity (also a
Vygotskian emphasis in his defectological writing), and out from the lunatic
asylum approach.
> 
> The middle section, broadly speaking, draws from the Scribner & Cole work
documented in The Psychology of Literacy, with which I was familiar.
> 
> The final section covers her dairy factory research, which was still under
way at the time of her death in 1991 (born 1925). My notes mainly cover
these chapters, given that they were new to me and relevant to what I'm
working on this summer.
> 
> Scribner had an interesting career, it seems, and I was barely in the
field when she left us (got my Ph.D. in 1989 largely with an information
processing framework, doing studies of high school writers in relation to
writing instruction in English classes). My reading of cultural-historical
work didn't get underway until I moved out into the field in the 1990s and
my grad school blinders began to fall away. I read Psychology of Literacy in
my early autodidactic education about CH research, and mainly knew of her
career through her the Vai study reported therein.
> 
> She was not a prolific writer, perhaps because her career was well under
way when word processing changed writing and publication, and also because
she spent a lot of her time in social activism rather than at the keyboard.
A lot of what's collected in this volume is conference presentations; she
didn't appear to publish a lot in journals, which I've always been taught is
the gold standard for social science scholarship. So she's the rare person
who, with a relatively small career output, nonetheless is regarded as a
major figure in her field.
> 
> I'd be interested in hearing from those who studied with her or were
around when she was in her prime to get a better understanding of the way in
which her reputation grew without her being a prolific writer. I assume that
she had unusual personal presence. She also had great ideas, and appears to
me to be a pioneer in seeing the workplace and everyday activity to be
significant research sites and practices; psychology was still (and is
still) a laboratory/clinic-based field, so it was quite a departure. She
also invigorated her perspective with real-world engagement, e.g., in the
field of mental health treatment, in the lives of Vai "ordinary" people, in
factory workers. (I thought of Mike Rose's workplace studies as I read her
workplace research.) I also learned some interesting tidbits, such as the
fact that King Beach was one of her students and did his dissertation on
bartenders-an interesting topic for a guy so immersed in Eastern religion,
but a logical workplace topic for someone studying with Scribner.
> 
> In my initial reading of this volume, I thought that Scribner might be
most important as a historical figure in studying everyday cognition among
"just plain folks," but in the end think that she's still worth reading for
what she can contribute to new inquiries. p
> <Scribner notes.docx>__________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
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