By Katie Vann¹

Graduate Student, Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego
kvann@weber.ucsd.edu

Preface: "Contexts for Learning" was published in 1993. In late 1995, it was reviewed by participants of the electronic discussion group called XMCA. At that time it was suggested that those reviews should be worked up toward a collective review. Reading both the book and the reviews called my attention to a particularly robust way in which the notion of "context" was used; a way that called my attention to a new question. It is that question that I take up in this review. I was unable to devise feasible ways of including all the XMCA reviews in the main text of this review. Detailed and by chapter, they were crucial to my understanding of the book and interest in addressing a certain issue, however, and I recommend that they be consulted for clarification, as I do not deal with chapters independently here. I refer to the particular XMCA review when its chapter is referenced. The reviews are accessible on the Web at: http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/reviews/cfl.html

Introduction
The significance of this collection of chapters by a variety of socio-cultural educational researchers is perhaps best appreciated in light of a historical fact dug from the annals of educational research. In a 1918 Monograph dedicated to Educational Measurement, Professor Thorndike celebrated the advances of the burgeoning practice.

"Whatever exists at all exists in some amount. To know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity as well as its quality. Education is concerned with changes in human beings; each of these conditions is known to us only by the products produced by it - things made, words spoken, acts performed, and the like...To measure a product well means so to define its amount that competent persons will know how large it is, with some precision, and that this knowledge may be conveniently recorded and used. This is the general Credo of those who, in the last decade, have been busy trying to extend and improve measurements of educational products (...) We have faith also that the objective products produced, rather than the inner condition of the person whence they spring, are the proper point of attack for the measurer, at least in our day and generation." (Thorndike 1918, p. 16)

We should notice the assumed relationship between quantitative measurement and the products of educational labor, for it points to a fundamental aspect of the political-economic context of Thorndike's enterprise. In the scenario envisioned by the Credo, local pedagogic practice is legitimated by quantitative representation of its products. Why is measurement seen to be more viable than "merely descriptive words"? (Ayers 1918, p. 14) The answer to this question is not explicated in the Monograph, but I will venture to suggest one: measurement is more viable because it involves a flattening out or concealment of difference via the representation of "products" in a language of pure abstraction. It constitutes a qualitative sameness, and thus a language of comparison. The parallels between such "educational products" and the commodities of capitalist markets are of interest; and I note them now for discussion below. The importance of this relation between products and quantitative measurement for the Credo's project cannot be overstated. Thus, Ayers, in the same Monograph, suggested what they gleaned from it: "The center of interest has become the child, rather than the teacher, and efforts to improve the quality of instruction begin by finding out what the children can do, rather than by discussing methods by which the teacher proceeds." (Ayers, p. 14, my emphasis) Only "the child", qua bounded educational product, can be quantified. Thus it must stand in for teaching methods as an object of educational research, because the methods themselves cannot be so bounded.² Though the Monograph repeatedly stressed that product measurement would be a means of quality assurance in teaching, we ought to consider its usefulness in accommodating structures of capitalist labor markets. Because the Credo became very powerful. Crossing thresholds of resistance, with cajoling of every stripe and loads of collective work,³ it spread throughout the land and into our report-cards and opportunities for finding work and wage.

This matters. It indicates the power of the Credo's collective energy. And it throws into relief the importance of the fact that Contexts for Learning represents work by groups of scholars committed to re-affirming and understanding the importance of the local circumstances and processes of learning. This contemporary work, un-folding "the child"-entity to understand its qualitative dimensions, is difficult; not only because such questions largely were forbidden by the Credo and its subsequent tradition, but also because the very assumptions on the basis of which the Credo made sense must be un-made. The chapters thus represent a variety of painstaking and necessary efforts, along socio-cultural lines, to un-think the learner as a lone entity.

At once theoretical and prescriptive, the book is organized into three parts, Discourse and Learning in Classroom Practice; Interpersonal Relations in Formal and Informal Education; and Sociocultural Institutions of Formal and Informal Education. A Commentary accompanies each of these sections, and a final Afterward closes the book. Developing and applying a notion of context drawn from Vygotskian theory, a prominent two-fold direction characterizes many of the chapters: an attempt to (re)articulate a Vygotskian framework for the analysis of learning processes, away from an empiricist/transmissionist pole toward a constructivist one; and an attempt to broaden the notion of 'context' beyond its formulation in Vygotskian theory.

Analytical Contributions and Limits of 'Learning' and 'Context' as Epistemological Categories
A central Vygotskian proposition about what human learners are and do goes something like this:
"The internalization of cultural forms of behavior involves the reconstruction of psychological activity on the basis of sign operations. Psychological processes as they appear in animals actually cease to exist; they are incorporated into this system of behavior and are culturally reconstituted and developed to form a new psychological entity. The use of external signs is also radically reconstructed. The developmental changes in sign operation are akin to those that occur in language. Aspects of external or communicative speech as well as egocentric speech turn 'inward' to become the basis of inner speech. The internalization of socially rooted and historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology, the basis of the qualitative leap from animal to human psychology." (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 57)

In statements such as this, Vygotsky was attempting to articulate the social nature of human psychology. Mind, which conventionally had been understood as property of the individual thinker, was now able to be construed as an instantiation of relations among people and the worlds in which or through which they developed. But Vygotskian theory as such also has been recently inspected for its limits. (1) One of these limits is the sense in which Vygotsky's sociogenetics, and the metaphor of internalization, suggest a rather one-way, deterministic (society toward individual) relation between the learner and its others. (2) Another of these limits is the sense in which Vygotsky's characterization of 'society' tends to be somewhat restricted both in that it emphasizes the power of close relations such as student/teacher dyads and in that it considers language as a generalized semiotic system (rather than "a multitude of speech genres and semiotic devices that are tightly linked with particular social institutions andÉsocial practices." (Minick, Stone, & Forman, p. 6) Taken together, the chapters represent attempts to appreciate the socio-cultural logic of Vygotskian theory, with an aim to broaden or expand the two aforementioned types of limit.

The attempts manifest in Part I as attention to, for example, classroom life as discursive sociocultural system (Moll & Whitmore); joint problem-solving in reciprocal teaching (Palincsar, Brown & Campione)⁴; discursive dynamics in processes of meaning construction by students (Chang-Wells & Wells)⁵; the re-negotiation and constitution of mathematical meanings by classroom participants (Cobb, Wood, & Yackel)⁶; and the implications of the existence of the programmer's "voice" embodied in computer programs used in educational environments (Griffin, Belyaeva, Soldatova & the Velikov-Hamburg Collective).⁷

In Part II, we find attention to the role of implicature and prolepsis, and interpersonal relations in scaffolding (Stone)⁸; the role of student resistance in processes of skill mastery (Litowitz)⁹; expropriation of "voice" (Bakhtin) in students' construction of communicative competence (Cazden)¹⁰; peer collaboration as instructional resource in students negotiation of task definitions and goals (Forman & McPhail)¹¹; and variant structures of guided participation and associated varieties of skill development (Rogoff, Mosier, Mistry, & Goncu).¹² In Part III, these manifest as attention to conservatism of the school system with respect to teaching practice (Tharp)¹³; differences in cognitive success and cultures of collaborative learning embedded in two educational institutions, a school and a library (Nicolopoulou & Cole)¹⁴; how cultural experiences of children at home and at school shape their cognitive and communicative development (Gallimore & Goldenburg)¹⁵; and the role of students' appropriation of others' mediational means in the construction of cognitive authority. (Wertsch, Tulviste & Hagstrom).¹⁶

Rightly so, these chapters utilize broadened notions of context and attention to the constructive nature of knowing, in order to understand processes through which learners develop their mastery over subject matters or tasks. These are questions about how students come to know and think about things, make decisions, and perform on cognitive tasks.

As Hatano remarks in his Commentary¹⁷ on Part I, many of the chapter authors draw on available "constructivist" assumptions, because it is clear that even Vygotskian theory is subject to empiricistic interpretation. These assumptions are, for example:
(1) Learners are active...humans are active agents of information processing and action. Humans often explore tasks beyond the demands or requirements of problem solving, and environments that do not permit active exploration are viewed as unpleasant (...)
(2) Learners almost always seek and often achieve understanding. (...) Our conversation is nearly impossible if participants do not try to interpret given utterances or are satisfied with an interpretation at a shallow level. It is well known from experimental studies that people generate and enriched representation of the presented information and try to interpret a given set of information coherently(...)
(3) Learners' construction of knowledge is facilitated by horizontal as well as vertical interactions. Contributions of horizontal interaction to knowledge acquisition can be substantial, as during peer interaction(...)
(4) Availability of multiple sources of information enhances knowledge construction. As understanding is to find coherence among pieces of information, and the construction of conceptual knowledge is often based on understanding, availability of multiple sources of information is expected to enhance the construction. (Hatano, pp. 156:2-157:2)

I really appreciated this analysis. It accentuates the sense in which Contexts for Learning is largely a collective epistemological project. This may be illustrated by considering the ways in which "context" and its relation to learning have been framed throughout the chapters. In both micro- and macro-social analyses, the impact of "context" is taken to matter at the moment when the young learner engages a process of constructing knowledge and/or cognitive competence.

There is a two-fold character to the strategies the chapter authors generally utilize in formulating expanded notions of context: 1) they reach out beyond the learner herself, to the classroom, the family, to name constituents of 'context'; 2) these "larger" systems have educational efficacy largely and in some cases exclusively in that a) they are and further constitute discursive practices; and b) they have consequences for what people think and know about, and how they express such knowledge. We might think of this two-fold strategy in terms of an insight documented by Cole (1996). He notes, "Pepper (1942) suggests that the root metaphor underlying contextualist world views is the 'historical event.' By this, he says, 'the contextualist does not mean primarily a past event, one that is, so to speak, dead and has to be exhumed. He means the event alive in its present...'"(Cole 1996 p. 136, citing Pepper 1942)

Just as the contextualist historian in this scenario seeks to explain how past events are alive in their present, the contextualism most predominant in Contexts for Learning is one that names systems beyond the learner and shows how they are alive in the more immediate circumstances of the learning. Cole suggests that attempts to get beyond the concentric circles view of context as that which surrounds (a strategy traced to Broffenbrenner), more recent work on context tries to think of it as " a qualitative relation between a minimum of two analytical entities (threads), which are two moments in a single process." (Cole, 1996, p. 135) We might think of these two moments as that which is alive in its present and that which makes alive (or instantiates) that which is alive in its present. Articulating the terms of such making alive/present constitute much of the analytical task of contextualist accounts. The contextualist approach at work in the current volume frames these moments as discursive in character. Discourses originating beyond the immediate learning processes are instantiated and efficacious within the learner's construction of knowledge or understanding.

In references to macro-sociological forces (for example, class, and 'broad cultural belief systems') micro-social instantiations of such forces are manifest as the variable cultural qua discursive locations of learning participants; when mentioned, federal and state power (manifest as the board of education), stands in the way of changing or relinquishing assessment measures, for example, because of their ideological 'arch-conservatism.' (Tharp) The characterization of regulation in this way seems to suggest that it too is belief systems which could be relinquished because they are at root discursive. In this formulation, changing 'arch-conservatism' is contingent upon changing minds. This is epistemic context, framed as the context of the learning subject.

Understanding of the power of discourses to shape learning processes is critical to thoroughgoing understanding of how and what people learn. Discursive 'context' enables researchers to identify difference and qualitative dimensions of learning processes. I am interested, however, in questioning the extent to which a thoroughgoing analysis of 'contexts for learning' today can restrict itself in this manner. Such formulations of 'context', though necessary, still may be too circumscribed to anticipate political-economic realities to which Thorndike's Credo, unfortunately, was in its way able to speak. While discourses are fundamental aspects of social structure in our society, aspects which provide profound pressures and resources on human activity and learning, they by no means run the gamut of tools for thinking structure through.

There are areas in the book in which context is framed as rule systems embodied in the institutions in which learning cultures are embedded (Nicolopulou & Cole). Rogoff and associates' chapter suggests that variations in the goals of learning vis-a-vis the political-economic structures of an educational-cultural formation are important factors in the structuring of micro-social educational contexts. These tendencies get closer to my line of questioning.

Committed study of the openings and limits to the constructive character of the human process of coming to know is perhaps one of the most important intellectual enterprises of our time. But those of us concerned to advance this effort should remain ever vigilant of the fact that such processes of coming to know do, in our day, occur always within the fold of the political economy of our circumstances, as suggested by Marx. What contexts are learners learning for? Both rhetorical and genuine, this question indicates what I believe is, on the one hand, and important irony of Contexts for Learning's methodologies, and, more important, a topic worthy of continual questioning by socio-cultural educational research.

In particular, what are the relationships between what the Credo called 'educational products' and the political-economic context or practices in and through which learners in the United States must learn today? Contexts for Learning seems to contain a kind of silence on the issues of assessment and the articulation of how to implement standard evaluative criteria in the face of sociocultural constructivist pedagogy.

With a stress on "context" (conceived as, systems of meaning, individual's learning histories, learning cultures, mediational resources and means of expressing knowledge, etc.) it becomes extremely difficult to distinguish between the contents of knowledge and the means through which knowledge is expressed or made visible to others. In situated or context based theories of learning, there is a significant stress on the particularities of ways and means of knowing, and ways and means of enacting and sharing knowledge. In this sense, standardized assessment measures are deemed problematic; for they conceal the accomplishments and contributions of learners because they rely on normative systems of abstraction. Traditional means of assessing students (though commensurate perhaps with empiricist/transmissionist pedagogies) do not appear to fit comfortably in the best possible pedagogical world of epistemological constructivism.

Lunt (1993) describes the problems associated with standardized assessment along the following lines.
1. Traditional assessments deal only with the products of learning, disregarding learning processes.
2. Traditional assessments do not address the responsiveness of the child to instruction.
3. Traditional assessments do not provide prescriptive information regarding potentially effective intervention techniques. (Lunt, citing Bransford et. al., 1987)

In response to "static assessment", many have been developing "dynamic assessment" strategies.¹⁸ Lunt notes further that there are two categories of dynamic assessment, standardized and clinical.¹⁹

Explicit or implicit uses of the two categories of dynamic assessment are offered in the chapters by Moll & Whitmore(1) Palincsar, Brown & Campione (2), Cobb, Wood & Yackel (4), and Forman & McPhail (9). These authors (and others in this volume) have written elsewhere on the subject of assessment; the book might best be read in conjunction with such other analyses. In terms of the two categories of dynamic assessment noted by Lunt, however, each type ultimately must be/is re-presented via a system of codification and comparison of learners accomplishments in the classroom. This process of codification constructs products from processes (the foci of dynamic assessment) precisely at the institutional membrane differentiating the learning community within the classroom and other communities. Events purportedly beyond the classroom become alive in their present within this process. As hopefully will become more salient below, the dual moment of this process is arguably the point at which learners' knowledges become commodified, via their expression as exchange values. It is the likes of this context for learning for which the volume does not provide discussion. Yet, and this is the irony, the question arises whether the logic of this transformation of the meaning of knowledge at the boundary (where learning swivels from "process" to "product") is a context for learning which becomes alive within the learning process itself.

'Learning' and 'Context' as Political Economic Categories
In pursuing such a line of questioning, we should maintain vigilance of the fact that Vygotsky was attempting to formulate a psychology along the lines suggested by Marx:
"I want to find out how science has to be built, to approach the study of the mind having learned the whole of Marx's method. In order to create such an enabling theory-method in the generally accepted scientific manner, it is necessary to discover the essence of the given area of phenomena, the laws according to which they change, their qualitative and quantitative characteristics, their causes. It is necessary to formulate the categories and concepts that are specifically relevant to them - in other words, to create one's own Capital. The whole of Capital is written according to the following method: Marx analyzes a single living 'cell' of capitalist society - for example, the nature of value. Within this cell he discovers the structure of the entire system and all of its economic institutions. He says that to a layman this analysis may seem a murky tangle of tiny details. Indeed, there may be tiny details, but they re exactly those which are essential to 'microanatomy.' Anyone who could discover what a 'psychological' cell is - the mechanism producing even a single response - would thereby find the key to psychology as a whole." (from unpublished notebooks; quoted in Vygotsky 1978, p. 8; also quoted partially in Wertsch 1985, p. 193)

How did Vygotsky answer this call? He identified word meaning (or as he then called it "the phoneme") as the unit of analysis. (Vygotsky 1934/1986, pp. 1-11) Note that in this move Vygotsky opted for a cell that was in some sense analogous to the nature of value. He must have believed that a "psychological cell" would not be the nature of value itself, but rather some construct that would be analytically or functionally equivalent to it with respect to psychological phenomena. But when he substituted the phoneme for the nature of value, socio-historical psychology effectively lost sight of the methodological import of the dual nature of value. Researchers in the activity-theoretic tradition have since then attempted to deal with and supplant the limits wrought by this move.

Wertsch (1985) provides an excellent discussion and critique of Vygotsky's methodological choices. He offers that Vygotsky's own suggestion that "the meaningful word is a microcosm of human consciousness" actually suggests that 'word meaning" as a psychological cell needs revision in light of recent theoretical advances in the study of propositional and discourse referentiality." (p. 196.) In the methodological vein of Activity Theory, Wertsch goes on to develop the notion of "tool-mediated, goal-directed action [as] the appropriate unit of analysis in Vygotsky's approach." (Wertsch, p. 208) In articulating the terms of this unit of analysis, Wertsch discusses Marx's theory of the dual nature of value, and draws important connections between the theory of reification (Lukacs) and Vygotsky's account of decontextualization. As Wertsch notes, "although Vygotsky viewed abstract reasoning as a product of history, he never carried out a detailed examination of the sociohistorical forces that gave rise to it." (p. 223) Thus, Wertsch asks, "Do [Vygotsky's] assumptions about the deconexualization of mediational means reflect a reificatory tendency in his theory? If so, could a theory that is more self-critical avoid this?" (p. 223) Toward a two-fold correction of Vygotsky, Wertsch aims to characterize (the ways in which sociohistorical, institutional forces shape psychological phenomena) in a way which does not reify the psychological processes in the process. He does this by articulating a relationship between contextual mediational means (especially the roles of intra-linguistic indexical relationships in egocentric and inner speech), on the one hand, and dialogicality of voice (as theorized by Bakhtin) as a macrosociological, social-historical, and institutional level construct, on the other. "...a Bakhtinian extension of Vygotsky's account of contextualized sign functioning suggests that intrapsychological mediation is heavily influenced by this history of social institutional forces." (p. 230)

It is important to note that Wertsch and other activity theorists have taken a methodological challenge to correct or supplement Vygotsky's methodological limits through expansion, addition, and elaboration of the initial "psychological cell". Such methodological accomplishments are necessary to articulating a cell that is less reductive than Vygtosky's and that is more in line with Marx's principles.

Wertsch takes into consideration Marx's theory of the dual nature of value and Lucak's theory of commodity fetishism, and characterizes potential ways in which Vygotsky's initial unit of analysis reifies contextual mediational means in his theory of decontextualization. Wertsch does this in order to re-formulate a psychological cell that is not equally subject to such reifying tendencies. This is necessary because Wertsch is then able to characterize the relations among mental processes and sociohistorical institutions in a way which captures specific labor (conceived by Wertsch as processes of contextual semiotic mediation) that may otherwise be concealed. Wertsch considers processes of reification in order to develop a theory of mind that does not reify mental processes in the process. What his approach does not deal with, however, is the sense in which capitalist modes of production in their very existence reify use-values in spite of any formulatable non-reifying theory of mind. In spite of the possibilities for re-characterizing the social formation of mind in non-reifying ways, in the context of capitalist systems of production and exchange, use-values necessarily are concealed if they undergo a process of becoming exchange values. As Marx noted, use-value is expressed at the moment of consumption in capitalist economies. Though presupposed by society, use-value is held in suspension until its expression through consumption. (See footnote 4). When the problem of the dual nature of value is mapped onto the investigation of psychological phenomena implicated in learning processes, the question arises whether this process of concealment, which would be a moment of mind's entry into capitalist production and exchange relations, is itself a sociohistorical institution that plays a role in the shaping of mind.²⁰

Mapping Marx's originally articulated cell, the dual nature of value, to the domain of learning and education in capitalist context would not be an attempt to replace or subvert discourse-oriented articulations of activity systems (like those most operative in the present volume); it rather would attempt only to augment them by articulating mind (or learning and context) as a political-economic category.

In Grundrisse, Marx wrote:
"The first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity. The commodity itself appears as unity of two aspects. It is use value, i.e., object of the satisfaction of any system whatever of human needs. This is its material side, which the most disparate epochs of production may have in common, and whose examination therefore lies beyond political economy. Use value falls within the realm of political economy as soon as it becomes modified by the modern relations of production, or as it, in turn, intervenes to modify them (...) In fact, however, the use value of the commodity is a given presupposition - the material basis in which a specific economic relation presents itself. It is only this specific relation which stamps the use value as a commodity (...) Now how does a use value become transformed into a commodity? [The] Vehicle of exchange value. Although directly united in the commodity, use value and exchange value just as directly split apart. Not only does the exchange value not appear as determined by the use value, but rather, furthermore, the commodity only becomes commodity, only realizes itself as exchange value, insofar as its owner does not relate to it as use value. He appropriates use values only through their sale [Entasserung], their exchange for other commodities. Appropriation through sales is the fundamental form of the social system of production, of which exchange value appears as the simplest, most abstract expression. The use value of the commodity is presupposed, not for its owner, but rather for the society generally (...)" (Grundrisse, pp. 881-882)

It is arguable that capitalist institutions of production and exchange have consequences for pedagogical circumstances that cannot be captured solely by considering the constructive nature of knowledge that is nonetheless so important to the process of learning. Engestrom (1987) referred to the dual nature of the commodity as the primary contradiction driving activity systems in capitalist economies. "The essential contradiction is the mutual exclusion and simultaneous mutual dependency of use value and exchange value in each commodity. This double nature and inner unrest is characteristic to all the corners of the triangular structure of activity," he wrote. (Engestrom 1987, p. 85) How does this work?

"The division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important only when exchange has acquired such an extension that the useful articles are produced for the purposes of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labor of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labor, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labor of all, as a branch of the social division of labor that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labor is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labor of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others." (Marx, quoted in Engestrom 1987, p. 4)

The processes of abstraction at work in the expression of exchange value is inextricably linked with the division of labor in society, and the concomitant fact that it yields specific processes of exchange.²¹ The abstraction process then is bound with the modes of production and exchange, and this has to do not only with money and processes of profit and capital stratification, but also with what it is necessary for products to become in order to be part of the society characterized by a division of labor predicated on private property.

Assessment measures, as technologies of knowledge recognition or identification, in a sense come to play the same role as the money commodity in capitalist relations of production and exchange; and, then, further on this basis, they may again enter into a system of abstraction toward the expressions of relative and equivalent value vis-a-vis the money commodity in the form of wages.

Characterizing 'context' as discursive formations resists analysis of processes of production which are amenable to abstraction, to the expression of sameness necessary for quantitative differentiation: a process of representation upon which is contingent the transformation of use-values to exchange values. Put differently, the operative notion of context in the current volume does not anticipate the process of representation at use in value's crossing over into markets as exchange value. An everyday way of saying this is to say that, under current political economic circumstances, in some very real and important sense, aloneness and abstraction are requisite for knowledge recognition. What are the implications of this and how can we understand them in ways that do not force wholesale reproduction of the Credo, toward a hopelessness with respect to the social, the 'with others' learner?

Consider now the parallels between use values and context-specific knowledge construction. Some of the chapters suggested that knowledge is created through the real micro-social and material circumstances in which it occurs; materials and people serve here as the media of knowledge construction. If this be the case, then, traditional standardized assessment measures which purport to capture the knowledge constructed in those circumstances are doomed to fail precisely because, in the process codifying context specific knowledges in a language of quantification, they effectively lift the learner from those mediational means upon which knowledge construction depends. Yet standardized assessment measures seem in some sense to be utilized in the first place to discern whether everyone is learning the same material (the curriculum). This ostensibly equalizes or neutralizes humans entering the labor market. The notion of equalization, however, is crucial in that formulation, because it marks the crucial feature of the parallels between assessment measures and the money commodity form. Both are grounded in a real or perceived need to capture sameness in order to express difference. This is achieved, again, through the use of a medium which is qualitatively static but quantitatively variable across objects/products. In the case of commodities, it is the rule that the specific labor of use values will be concealed and in fact displaced by the medium which instantiates their capacity to be measured on qualitatively equal terms. The analogy with assessment measures is clear. Local, specific knowledges are concealed by the terms of the medium through which they are capable of being expressed in assessment settings. And the tools of (formal) "democratic" pedagogic practice are simultaneously compliant with capitalist economic arrangements and contradictory to their own aims. Because, ultimately, equalization in this sense is a pre-requisite to social stratification.²²

Epistemological and Political-Economic Categories of 'Learning' and 'Context'
Are uses of standard evaluation media irreconcilable with pedagogies that emphasize difference? And, perhaps more importantly, does that really matter in capitalist political-economic context? Can a homogeneous assessment medium (one that is the same across subjects) be responsive to very real diversity in knowledge and skills and in knowledge productive practices? My reasons for suggesting the pursuit of such questions are not meant to be in the service of maintaining capitalist social structure, but rather toward thinking through what can be done in the spirit of Vygotskian-constructivist pedagogy to anticipate the possibility that products of learning are commodified. What do we do when aloneness and abstraction become inherent to participating in markets structured by capital?

In one sense this calls for some format for identifying the products of learning. Though they eschew a focus on the products of learning, dynamic assessment researchers, and the contextualist methodologies capable of characterizing particular learning processes, are likely well suited to characterize the particularities of learning products in ways that can be mapped onto task demands typically understood in less contextualized manners.

Such characterizations are especially necessary in labor markets, where low wage is immediately coupled with low skill. Currently, the category designated by this coupling is to a too significant degree filled by persons whose skills are characterized as low precisely because they cannot be recognized as "high" by conventionally utilized measures. This requires devising modes of evaluation that recognize intellectual contributions in their variety of permutations, but at the same time are able to articulate these in objective representations that obtain across subjects.

References
Ayers, L. (1918) "History and Present Status of Educational Measurements." In Whipple, G. (Ed.) The Measurement of Educational Products. Seventeenth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Public School Publishing Company. Bloomington, IL. Pp. 9-15

Cole, M. (1996) Cultural Psychology A Once and Future Discipline. The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA/London, England.

Engestrom, Y. (1987) Learning by Expanding:: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Orienta-Konsultit Oy. Helsinki.

Linden, K. W. & Linden, J. D. (1968) Modern Mental Measurement: A Historical Perspective. Houghfton Mifflin Co. Boston.

Lunt, I. (1993) "The Practice of Assessment." In Daniels, H. (Ed.) Educational Activity After Vygotsky. Routledge Press. London/New York. Pp. 145-170

Marx, K. (1857-8/1953/1973/1993) Grundrisse. Trans. Nicolaus, M. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.

Marx, K. (1867/1967/1975) Capital. Trans. Moore, S. & Aveling, E. International Publishers Co., Inc. New York.

Minick, Stone, & Forman "Introduction" in Forman, E., Minick, N. & C. A. Stone (Eds.) Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children's Development. Oxford University Press. Pp. 3-16

Thorndike, E. (1918) "The Nature, Purposes and General Methods of Measurements of Educational Products." In Whipple, G. (Ed.) The Measurement of Educational Products. Seventeenth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Public School Publishing Company. Bloomington, IL. Pp. 16-24.

Vygotsky, L. (1934/1986) Thought and Language. Ed. Alex Kozulin. MIT Press.

Vygotsky, L. Mind in Society. Eds. Cole, M. John-Steiner, V., Scribner, S, & Souberman, E. Harvard University Press.

Wertsch, J. (1985) Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Harvard University Press.

Notes
1. Thanks for their help and encouragement to Mike Cole, Lia DiBello, Ellice Forman, and Jessica Kindred.

2. Moreover, we should note the future-orientedness of Ayers' framing of the child's knowledge. The Credo is interested not in what the child does, but what he can do.

3. Though finally overcome, there was resistance to the movement back then. This is documented in the Monograph itself (see chs. 1-3) See also Linden & Linden, 1968

4. Reviewed by Bill Blanton, Mike Cole

5. Reviewed by Helena Wortham

6. Reviewed by Dewey Dykstra, Jr., Genevieve Patthey-Chavez

7. Reviewed by Angel M. Y. Lin

8. Reviewed by Jorge F. Larreamendy-Joerns, Judy Diamondstone, Mike Cole, Jay Lemke, Timothy Koschmann, Stephanie Urso Spina, Peter Smagorinksy, Eugene Matusov, Dewy Dykstra, Jr.

9. Reviewed by Stephanie Urso Spina, Jay Lemke

10. Reviewed by Joan Kelly Hall

11. Reviewed by Francoise Hermann, Peter Smagorinsky, Vera P. John-Steiner

12. Reviewed by Teresa M. Meehan

13. Reviewed by Jacques Haenen, Angel M. Y. Lin

14. Reviewed by Gabriel Horenczyk

15. Reviewed by Bert van Oers

16. Reviewed by Stanton Wortham, Alfred Lang, Angel M.Y. Lin, Rolf Windward, Bill Penuel, Graham Nuthall, Francoise Hermann, Michael Glassman, Jesper Doeping, Eugene Matusov, Gordon Wells

17. Reviewed by Kathy O'Byrne

18. These differ at two levels. Static approaches, which focus on products, aim to find out what a child can do alone, while dynamic approaches, focusing on processes, aim to find out what the child can do with others and with mediational means. (pp. 151-155)

19. These differ in that the former aim to combine the strengths of a mediated learning situation with the benefits of comparison (by using a scripted prompt format designed to provide quantitative measure of the child's ability to be modified by instruction), while clinical approaches use a form of "mediated learning which is designed to produce qualitative information on the nature of the child's psychological processes and the kinds of help she needs to learn further." (pp. 162-163)

20. This idea raises a further question about the formulation of 'context' in socio-cultural research. In many instances, 'context' is functionally described as that which enables or constrains. Substantive descriptions in this vein refer to the mediators rules, tools, signs (resources and limiters/power/discipline). My question suggests an additional formulation, in which context is described functionally as that which requires and recognizes. Tentatively, substantive description works by appeal to mediating structures of ownership, production, exchange, and consumption.

21. In many actual studies following the Activity Theoretic approach, there is a tendency to consider 'division of labor' strictly or foremost as division of labor in production (not necessarily in society). The tendency is reflected in Cole when he writes that "the division of labor refers to the object-oriented actions among members of the community." (1996, p. 141)

22. Current political-economy in the U.S. is characterized by two opposed but in many ways entirely complicit aspects: formal systems of democratic participation in national systems of decision-making and production, on the one hand, and subsistence or species reproduction through systems of private ownership, competition, and accumulation, on the other. Notwithstanding the sense in which these bed-fellows immediately jointly construct the knowledge of the learner as private property, to what extent does it require particular dimensions of difference to be normalized (thus constituting 'equality') in order for difference at another level (where competition occurs) to be possible?