Date: Sun, 15 Oct 95
From: Rolfe Windward (IBALWIN@mvs.oac.ucla.edu)
Subject: Contexts: Serpell's Commentary

Serpell, R. (1993). "Commentary: Interface between Sociocultural and Psychological Aspects of Cognition".
In E. A. Forman, N. Minick, & C. A. Stone (Eds.), _Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children's Development_ (pp. 357-368). New York: Oxford University Press.

Summary by Rolfe Windward

In an overview of the later chapters in this book, the author observes that the socially constructed nature of human self-understanding has proved difficult to reconcile with the objectivist philosophical premises upon which the physical, biological, and to a marked degree, psychological sciences are built. One of the attractions of Vygotsky's theoretical perspective could be said to be it's provision for a repertoire of two-sided constructs, such as the zone of proximal development, designed to bridge and even nullify the analytic gap between individual psychology and ecosocial context(s). Each of the authors in their respective chapters attempt to extend the "neo -Vygotskian" interface along continua of interest to them, demonstrating in their diversity both the fertility and unresolved dilemmas of the sociocultural approach.

I.(A) The author addresses the problem of embeddedness by asking, "what is embedded in what?" The position perhaps least in potential conflict with an objectivist position would be to posit the individual as embedded in an (ecocultural) niche. However, citing Bronfenbrenner's formulation, the author points out that the interactive nature of the ecocultural embeddedness of human development may be better captured by positing the child as a member of a system with the basic unit of analysis becoming the dyad (microsystem of mother-child for e.g.); this facilitates the assumption of isomorphism between scalar system levels but also theoretically ignores the individual, a very counterintuitive notion for most psychologists.

A conception of niche defined as activity and constructed as an activity setting in which individuals, dyads, and social groups are embedded (operationalized by Gallimore & Goldenberg along the dimensions of personal present, cultural values, task demands, scripts, and purposes or motives of actors) could handle this difficulty and provides the necessary double-sided frame: "facing inward, 'children's activity settings are the architecture of their daily life;' facing outward, they are 'a perceptible instantiation of the social system.'." However, it may be difficult to attribute individual responsibility for separate elements in such a model especially if cognition is considered as a socially distributed phenomenon.

Clearly the concept of embeddedness has multiple variants. The metaphor of the niche suggests a basic image of location and timing to which Nicolopoulu and Cole add a definition of structure-of-participation in which clients or officers of a "host institution" play roles in the activity. Participation also appears in perspectives on children's socialization and authors such as Jean Lave add another dimension of embeddedness, regulation. The rules governing legitimate peripheral participation may be experienced by the agent as constricting but are, in the double-sided analysis: a source of structured guidance when facing inward to the individual; constitutive when facing outward to society. The constitutive rules are eventually internalized (or perhaps embodied) and, when violated, raise another embedding dimension, that of accountability although this could be considered as subsumed under the concept of regulation.

Another measure of embeddedness discussed by Wertch, Tulviste, and Hagstrom, and variously termed membership or ownership, establishes the development of "cognitive authority" which simultaneously establishes group membership and individual confidence and competence to act autonomously. Here perhaps the two-sided perspective is more subjective, the sense of simultaneously belonging or being in control and that of being owned or more deeply embedded.

I.(B) All these dimensions of embeddedness raise the question of fit; that is, "given that the context in which a psychological process is embedded has its own sociocultural properties," how well do the two fit? For example, the Fifth Dimension play-world described by Nicolopoulu and Cole can be inserted in a number of host settings but the two ecocultural niches (activity settings) into which it was embedded provided rather dissonant results in the larger research context; e.g., the library was more supportive of the learning outcomes of interest to the researchers but the host organization viewed the library as an inappropriate venue for the game. The "real world" outcome (sociocultural decision making) of the planned intervention did not seem to fit well with theoretical concerns. The author cites another example of this apparent paradox in which African American parents resisted the introduction of Black English vernacular forms into an elementary school curriculum. The nominal recipients of this innovation, the parents, rather clearly judged it to be a strategy to "keep their children back" since Standard English was a key survival skill in the competitive market for jobs.

The author offers some interpretations for the apparent lack of fit between psychological process and sociocultural context: 1) differences in time frame over which the adequacy of the fit is judged; 2) conflict among vested interests that systematically distort the judgments of observers; or 3) different configurations of essentially the same set of variables. For example, in reference to the first issue, giving pupils the kind of cognitive authority suggested by reciprocal teaching might challenge the existing institutional order. However, Tharp (this volume) notes that institutional timeframes are distinctly slower than individual time frames. The second possibility, that estimates are biased by vested interests intrinsic to the central purpose of the project, could articulate itself in a number of ways: teachers might view it as an additional burden or threat to employability; parents might view certain reforms as intrusion into domestic privacy; researchers or administrators might advocate innovation to promote their own careers.

The third possibility raises more theoretically challenging questions. Divergent estimates may be based on different configurations of dimensions equally and immediately relevant to the project in question. For example, to the librarian in the Fifth Dimension project, it was likely an instance of the category "opportunities for learning to read" but to the researcher it may be an instance of the category "sites for collaborative learning." As the author points out, the relationship between these views is theoretically complex and requires an analysis "not only of the dynamics of cognitive development but also of the ecocultural patterning of literacy events." Further, collaborative reading may not represent the literacy practices of all groups and, when combined with psychological considerations of learning transfer, would significantly affect decisions as to how the library setting might best be configured.

II.(A) When considering the interactional complexities among structural levels, the author comments that the double-sided nature of much of the neo -Vygotskian terminology can lead to exaggeration of analogies. Using Tharp's account as an example, he notes that treating administrative practices as isomorphic "qua" activity settings with the activity setting of the classroom does not bear up well to close scrutiny. For example, the accountability of a school system to a legislature "is an institutional relationship quite different from the negotiated, interpersonal accountability some schoolteachers feel toward the parents of their pupils." In turn, Wertch, Tulviste, and Hagstrom's repeated assertion that the form of intramental cognitive processes is structured by their intermental, social precursors does not clarify what in the interactional aspect of discourse makes this work; why does the interactional form allow some to appropriate the tools and not others?

The author posits that "the processes of change in sociocultural arrangements are controlled by a different set of variables from those that impinge directly on psychological change in the context of instruction or ontogenetic development" (p.365) and further that the differentiation of language varieties within a speech community has social and political dynamics distinct from an individuals bilingual repertoire. "What children internalize is not a fixed set of context-bound behavioral routines but, rather, a differentiated set of semantic resources whose connotations are defined by their location within the web of associations. We can think of these resources as tools but they are constantly being deployed in new ways."

II.(B) The author acknowledges that understanding the behavior of a schoolchild requires that analytic priority be given to definition of activity but that "task demands and scripts are only seldom fully determined in advance of the activity itself" (p366). The motives and purposes of actors appear most salient to him, at least initially, and largely account for the behaviors that occur. These in turn create the web of meaning that informs (not determines) the interpretations of each participant and, as interaction proceeds, the task demands and script become defined by negotiation. The open -ended creativity of individual behavior within a set of constitutive rules assures cultural change and the mutual interdependence of individual mind and sociocultural system pose two complementary paradoxes of cognitive development:

"1. As the individual's mind develops, it becomes increasingly powerful by virtue of a growing stock of cognitive resources. Yet ipso facto it also becomes increasingly committed to that particular way of thinking which is shared among members of the sociocultural group from which those resources were learned.

"2. As the child develops toward adulthood, the sociocultural group that takes responsibility for her socialization and enculturation strengthens its claims on her as a member through an increasingly internalized awareness of her obligations to conform with social and cultural norms. Yet this shift of emphasis toward internal self-control is precisely what enables the individual to legitimate her nonconformity." (p.366)

The author's resolution of these paradoxes is centered first upon the assertion that society values its innovative members most highly and therefore psychological empowerment through cultural commitment is possible. As well, the need for society to tolerate nonconformity in the young arises from the fact that assigning the young responsibility for participation is also the most effective device for recruiting them.

Comment:
Robert Serpell raises I number of points, some of which I am not competent to address, but he seems generally pleased with the symmetry breaking possibilities inherent in the sociocultural approach. He also expresses a number of reservations, some of which seem to be: a) the degree to which views of the "two-sides" of the interface may simply be incommensurate; b) the degree to which embeddedness in its multiple incarnations may connote degree of coupling and, by extension, the degree to which sociocultural systems could be said to be deterministic (or perhaps lacking in an explanation of individual variance); c) the rather shaky basis for the assumption of isomorphism across organizational levels.

Rolfe Windward
UCLA GSE&IS