RE: [xmca] lave in mca

[Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>]

Well, that was a starter, not a whole effort to characterize Lave's article. Thanks to Mike for adding a more rounded perspective. I don't know Lave, so have nothing available to help me fill in the blanks.

Peter Smagorinsky 
Distinguished Research Professor of English Education 
Department of Language and Literacy Education 
The University of Georgia 
309 Aderhold Hall 
Athens, GA 30602 

Advisor, Journal of Language and Literacy Education                                                       

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2012 12:54 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Cc: Jean Lave
Subject: Re: [xmca] lave in mca

Lave: Changing Practices



I think it would be a pity if xmca-ites settled for Peter's characterization of Jean Lave's article as a call to activism, and as pitting writing against activism. I did not interpret Jean's comments as a call to march in anti-war-de-jour activities, or join an occupy protest to slow down corporate greed.



Peter commented, in part:

 *Scribner took it to the streets, marching in the marches and such, and bully for her. I've got to weigh things differently, I suspect. If I go protest la guerre-du-jour, holding my sign at the campus gates, is this a cost-effective action? Or is getting my writing done more important, especially the public pieces that are read widely, if not terribly influentially, at least in terms of current policies? (but then, standing at the campus gates with a sign protesting wars or monied interests probably has limited payoff as well.) And in my very conservative area, I'd no doubt pay an additional cost, such as the outcry against my activism for causes that go against the grain of popular opinion.*



Firstly, the general silence she identified (correctly or not, people who were there should comment, but it rings true enough to me) was the absence of  "historical specificity and political analysis."  She then linked her ideas to those of Gramsci in the following way:



*Gramsci's political account of learning and education (and everything
else) grew out of*

*his analysis of the "absolute historicism" of philosophy of praxis. He pointed to the central engagement of state and private institutions of education in inculcating and defending dominant hegemonic relations of consent. That is not all that is going on in our complex contradictory world, of course. But because virtually all ISCAR participants do the work of these institutions, we also need to carry out the political analysis that our positions call for.*

* *

None of Jean's examples of the kind of changes in practice that she advocates focused on marching in the streets or challenging the guerre (S!) du jour. They did, however, focus on a number of examples (Drier, Ingold, Gomes, Holland, and her own) all of which involve the scholar, as scholar, engaging in critical analyses of current research practices within the professions of which they are a part.



Overall, the message that I took from the talk/essay was that those who adopt what locally we refer to as a CHAT perspective have commitments to grounding theory in practices that are supposed to put our theories to the test. Her recommendation that we worry about educating the educators, whose practice is education, seems to me completely uncontroversial. Her positive cases seem uncontroversial as recognizable lines of scholarly research some of which has been discussed in this forum (we should "take  seriously the understanding of research as craft, and of both learning and changing identity as aspects of craftsmanship" for example).



I do not know nearly enough about most of the examples that Jean holds up as potential models to follow. It seems that remedying my ignorance about those examples would be a productive place to start. For sure, the serious problems facing all forms of education, but in the case of most of us, institutionally, the problems facing higher education, are acute and getting worse very rapidly. Jean's summary of that situation seems to line up with my own knowledge of events, but perhaps that is because we are both present for the dismantling of what was once a great public university.
Much less clear are lines of theory/practice research that would/could make a difference.


Anyway, there is a serious call here for a fundamental, critical, theory/practice orientation to our work. Answering this call IS a political as well as an academic act. It may also be a warning that the privileged lifeworlds of academics that those of us over 30 years of age have experienced may be in danger of disappearing faster than the ozone layer.

mike

(Ps- sorry for the funny font gyrations. Cut and pasted from a word doc.)

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 6:00 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> I'm going to assume my unappointed role as discussion-launcher for the 
> Lave article in MCA that was voted as the feature discussion article 
> on xmca. I may not be able to stick around for long, as we're going on 
> vacation Saturday in hopes that somewhere on this earth we can find a 
> place that's not as hot as Georgia, USA.
>
> Lave's paper is based on her plenary closing talk at ISCAR in Rome, an 
> even I did not attend. As an aside, as long as it's held in 
> mid-September, shortly after our fall academic semester begins, I and 
> others like me probably won't attend. It's just too ill-timed to miss 
> 1-2 weeks of classes, depending on location, right after getting the 
> semester off the ground.
>
> Lave references several ISCAR talks she found compelling, so it's nice 
> for us non-attenders to get a sense of what she found valuable in Rome.
>
> If there's an overriding theme to her paper, it might be that 
> cultural-historical researchers ought to be more involved in social 
> activism. I was struck while reading the paper by how she could easily 
> have used Silvia Scribner as her role model for the talk, even though 
> SS goes unmentioned. A month or so when I wrote to the list about my 
> reading of her collected papers, I noted that her activism on the 
> labor front probably cut into her writing time, although perhaps her 
> career was conducted before electronic media made expectations for 
> writing much greater-there were fewer journals and fewer book 
> publishers, and writing itself was much more laborious (a point 
> related to the recent discussion of writing) in that it was often 
> undertaken by pen, then retyped, and ultimately less amenable to revision than it is these days.
>
> She urges social activism, although the paper is general enough to 
> allow for individuals to take that appeal up in their own ways. 
> Academics are, to some, "above" ideology, and so should avoid the 
> fray; yet most of us here would agree with her point that all thinking 
> is ideological, and so being an activist on important social issues is a natural extension of our work.
> If we are all ideological in our thinking, research, and writing, and 
> if social issues are shaped by ideology, should we not then contribute 
> to the shape of  social issues through what we know via scholarship? 
> (and how's that for a Western logical syllogism.)
>
> Scribner took it to the streets, marching in the marches and such, and 
> bully for her. I've got to weigh things differently, I suspect. If I 
> go protest la guerre-du-jour, holding my sign at the campus gates, is 
> this a cost-effective action? Or is getting my writing done more 
> important, especially the public pieces that are read widely, if not 
> terribly influentially, at least in terms of current policies? (but 
> then, standing at the campus gates with a sign protesting wars or 
> monied interests probably has limited payoff as well.) And in my very 
> conservative area, I'd no doubt pay an additional cost, such as the 
> outcry against my activism for causes that go against the grain of popular opinion.
>
> I hope these concerns are not too concrete for Lave's fairly abstract 
> call-to-peaceful-arms about social activism. For those of us in fairly 
> conventional academic positions (Lave's seems to allow for much more 
> travel than mine), activism has to be balanced against other 
> considerations and demands on our time and local reputations. At this 
> point, I'm more persuaded by the general thrust of her views than of 
> possibilities for real-world activism whose consequences are greater 
> than I can produce through my writing.
>
> OK, there you go, your turn.
>
>
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