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RE: [xmca] scribner notes
Sorry to be late to the discussion, but
I was away at professional meetings until now. As one of Sylvia's
students, I can tell you that she was a very independent thinker whose
choice of topics and method of investigating them were very much informed
by her political understanding and her penetrating grasp of the social
and psychological significance to workers themselves of the topics she
pursued. Although we worked together most closely on the topic of private
speech development (she was one of the three members of my dissertation
advisory committee), it was through the courses she taught on literacy
and language use among the Vai that first revealed to me the power of the
political perspective that helped shape her research work. (That, and marching
with her on several occasions at mass demonstrations in support of peace
and economic justice.)
Later in our relationship, when I had
occasion to talk with her about the dairy research, what struck me most
in her recounting of the work was the effect of her findings on the workers
she studied. Yes, she fed back to her research subjects her discovery of
the creative intellectual efforts they exhibited, and they were astonished
to learn about this! According to Sylvia, this information came as
a spiritually uplifting surprise to them. It had never occurred to the
workers that they were being creative and "smart" about their
otherwise dull jobs! That anecdote reinforced my sense that her perspective
on psychological development was powerfully influenced by her earlier work
with the United Electrical Workers Union. My intuition was confirmed a
few years later at a memorial celebration for Sylvia at the CUNY Graduate
Center, where I had the good fortune to sit next to the late Ralph Fasanella,
a devoted member of the UEW who had achieved fame as an artist. (Years
earlier, when he was in his mid-sixties, Ralph--who used to doodle at union
meetings--was introduced to the techniques of drawing and painting by a
close family friend of mine who is an artist and union activist, which
led to the discovery (by Ralph and the rest of the world) that he was a
very talented painter). His determination to attend the memorial celebration
and honor Sylvia demonstrated to me that her commitment to bettering the
lives of working people was not only professional, but also quite personal.
I believe her success as a researcher can be partially explained by her
grasp of the personal experiences of the people she studied. Ralph was
there to honor her because he admired and respected her as a person--a
person who shared his devotion to the union and to the vision of a better
world for working people.
As for her research publications, I
view them as evidence that, in science, quality is more important than
quantity.
Thanks for the opportunity to share,
Peter.
Peter F.
Peter Feigenbaum, Ph.D.
Associate Director of Institutional Research
Fordham University
Thebaud Hall-202
Bronx, NY 10458
Phone: (718) 817-2243
Fax: (718) 817-3203
e-mail: pfeigenbaum@fordham.edu
From:
Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>
To:
"vygotsky@unm.edu"
<vygotsky@unm.edu>, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date:
06/04/2012 04:56 PM
Subject:
RE: [xmca] scribner
notes
Sent by:
xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
Thanks Vera. The LCHC Newsletter archive at the XMCA
site has all the back issues, including that one.
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of Vera John-Steiner
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2012 4:21 PM
To: 'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'
Subject: RE: [xmca] scribner notes
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>__________________________________________
> _____
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> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
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