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Re: [xmca] scribner notes
Peter, this is great information and news.
Can you be part of what we're proposing for AERA next April?
Helena
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 7, 2012, at 9:57 AM, Peter Feigenbaum wrote:
> 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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