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Re: [xmca] scribner notes
Helena--
Although I am not an educator and I
have never attended AERA before, I would certainly consider participating
in a symposium or round-table discussion about Sylvia's work organized
by the CHAT SIG if you think my perspective would enhance the discussion.
As I see it, the really serious issue
that Sylvia was pursuing in her dairy research was the relationship between
knowledge acquired through practical (on-the-job) experience and knowledge
acquired through schooling. Her understanding of this topic was light-years
ahead of mine, but as I probe deeper into Vygotsky's theory of speaking
and thinking, I am beginning to recognize that people's understanding of
their native language is initially implicit and unconscious--a form of
"working" knowledge--whereas their understanding of it after
they have received some instruction in it is explicit and conscious--a
form of "academic" knowledge. Funny thing is, these are two completely
different ways of knowing the very same reality! My thoughts on this
issue are still in formation, so I could not speak intelligently about
it. But if what you want is personal anecdotal information about Sylvia
and her work from the perspective of one of her students, that I could
do--and would do so happily.
Peter F.
From:
Helena Worthen <helena.worthen@berkeley.edu>
To:
"eXtended Mind,
Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date:
06/07/2012 01:42 PM
Subject:
Re: [xmca] scribner
notes
Sent by:
xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
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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