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A Cultural-Historical Approach to Education
My perspective on development and education is based largely on what
Cole (1996) refers to as “Cultural Historical Activity Theory” (CHAT).
An essential premise of this approach is to view development as
inseparable from the contexts in which it occurs (Gauvain, 2001). In
this section, a CHAT perspective is discussed and extended with work
that examines additional aspects of social relations. Note that terms
used to facilitate the discussion serve as markers, linking fluid
processes between people and artifacts. Diverse concepts are engaged to
reveal often neglected elements of social relations.
A CHAT perspective on education is based in the work of Lev Vygotsky
(Cole, 1996; Valsiner, 1997), and the following excerpt introduces
central concepts:
An essential feature of
learning is that it creates the zone of proximal development; that is,
learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are
able to operate only when the child is interacting with people in his
[or her] environment and in cooperation with his [or her] peers. Once
the processes are internalized, they become part of the child’s
independent developmental achievement. From this point of view,
learning is not development; however, properly organized learning
results in mental development and sets in motion a variety of
developmental processes that would be impossible apart from learning.
Thus, learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of
developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological
functions. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 90).
The idea that “learning leads development” (Holzman, 1997) is
central to CHAT, and the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is
a major device used to explain school activity. It offers a basic
paradigm for the role of instructors and instruction.
The ZPD, however, is not the focus of this project: The
instruction-related interactions between teachers and
students--theoretically where the ZPD would be located—is not studied 2.
Internalization, despite problems with the term (Packer,
1993), is used to indicate the process by which learning can
bring about development. Genuine internalization is recognized
as having taken place when a student comes to “own” the new material
(concepts, theories, technologies, etc). Chaiklin (2003) raises
concerns about what Vygotsky intended by the term development,
but it is here recognized as having occurred when mediated activity
(Wertsch, 1985) begins to be initiated by the person in question and
used with personal intent. Development is understood as becoming
visible when a tool (such as a video camera but elsewhere discussed in
terms of a child’s use of language) is used to structure an activity in
a way that is new to that individual.
The process of internalization and subsequent externalization is an
essentially social process. It always retains some elements of the
contexts in which activity has been experienced and relates to the
contexts in which it later emerges. Though not obviously related, an
irregularity in the connection between learning and development is
recognized: “Development in children never follows school learning the
way a shadow follows the object that casts it. In actuality, there are
highly complex dynamic relations between developmental and learning
processes that cannot be encompassed by an unchanging hypothetical
formulation” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 91). The problem of explaining the
dynamics of these relations has not been resolved. Though not always
recognized, the quality of social relations—the nature of relations
between a student and school—are necessarily a part of the dynamics of
internalization.
Note that the notion of individuality—of what it means to be an
individual student—differs from common uses: “The boundary between
individual (i.e., intramental) and group (i.e., intermental) mental
processes is often more difficult to maintain than we tend to assume in
the discourse of Western psychology” (Wertsch, Tulviste, &
Hagstrom, 1993, p. 340). There is a constant dialogue between
individuals and contexts that is maintained during internalization.
Individuals, therefore, cannot meaningfully be studied apart from the
social and material contexts in which they act. Nevertheless,
individuals have unique positions and bring unique histories to a
shared context. Everyday uses of language as well as some theoretical
positions tend to emphasize the uniqueness and lose the social
embeddedness of student activity. This dissertation attempts to
maintain a tension between individual positions and social contexts.
My purpose is to use this theoretical tension to illuminate actual,
frequently sub-textual, tensions in classroom activity. Litowitz argues
that there are:
two elements missing from
discussions of the zone of proximal development and the learning theory
based on internalization: identification and resistance. What motivates
the children to master tasks is not the mastery itself but the desire
to be the adult and/or to be the one the adult wants her or him to be.
(1997, p. 475)
Inversely, failures to “master” a task may often have to do
with resistance to being that type of person.
Throughout a student’s life, influential adults express a variety of
values about what is and is not worth doing, and students learn these
values and who they belong to. It is not only the adult who teaches the
student in a given context, therefore, that students may identify with
or resist; it is an abstract notion of the teacher as the owner of
ideologies. Ideologies, in this sense, refers to the abstract version
of the world as it should be (Hodge and Kress, 1988, p. 3).
School activities as they are supposed to occur are then “owned” by a
system—a system of which teachers are the most visible representations
yet to which they are ultimately subservient. A student’s relationship
with school is therefore a dynamic entity that involves teachers, other
students, other staff, programs, subjects, and histories, as well as
some abstract sense of school. This student-school relationship is put
forth to address individual positions within the institution of school.
In this way, a student adopting a “mastery orientation” is viewed as
making the decision to belong to that part of that system.
The key is that wanting to participate in learning activities seems to
have a great deal to do with how students see themselves, how they want
others to see them, and whom they see meaningfully engaging in related
activities. As Litowitz wrote, “Mastering activities and establishing a
sense of oneself are not two distinct lines of development but are,
rather, entwined in complex ways—so that one cannot ‘study’ one
without the other” (1993, p. 184).
The student-school relationship is, therefore, partially about
defining which motives are engaged. Checking off a list of observed
motives, however, will not reveal the relationship’s dialogic nature.
Motives must be contextualized to be meaningful (Hickey, 2003, p. 409).
The task, then, in understanding a particular school context is to
define the values inherent in it—the place—as they interact
with the
values brought by the individuals who participate in activities located
there.
Hickey (2003) argues that motivation is about engaged participation.
Engaged participation, however, is only one option for students: The
students who do not visibly participate in classroom activity or who
participate mostly by disrupting academic activity—in short, those who
are un-engage—are nevertheless engaged in a student-school
relationship that is as important to understand as any other. And like
Litowitz who stresses identity and resistance, Hickey writes that
“Engaged participation is about negotiating one’s identity with
different and potentially conflicting and competing communities of
practice” (p. 412). Resistance, from this perspective, arises
when the dominant community conflicts with the one to which a student
is identifying. Hickey describes further how this perspective shapes
theory and research:
Viewing motivation as engaged
participation in knowledge practices places the burden for motivating
engagement on those practices rather than on the environment (in a
mechanistic, behaviorist view) or on individuals (as in a
contextualist, rationalist view). In other words, if the “community” in
a classroom does not value participation in knowledge practices
associated with the intended curriculum, it will be difficult for any
individual to participate in those practices (2003, p. 411).
The environment and the individual are thus relevant in how
students participate in ongoing activities.
Valsiner (1997) extends the notion of ZPDs to include the context as an
active part of development. His two zones exemplifly the similarity
between real and metaphorical spaces. The “zones of free
movement” (ZFM)
and “zones of promoted action” (ZPA) describe the two ways in which
learning activity involves more than teacher-student interactions. The
ZFM embodies the constraints and resulting affordances within the
context: Movement within the zone is without restriction, but movement
is bounded by both the sharp and “fuzzy” borders that contain it. “The
ZFM structures (a) the child’s access to different areas in the
environment, (b) the availability of different objects within an
accessible area, and (c) the child’s ways of acting with the available
objects in the accessible area” (p. 188). Within this zone, activity is
free, but movement outside it—whether it is a physical area or a
bounded activity—is not permitted. Class requirements and assignments
create ZFMs by defining acceptable activity. The area within ZFMs is
the space students have to initiate, choose, and explore. The
constraints on student freedom determine how much space is
available.
The ZPA, on the other hand, focuses on how particular activity is promoted
along certain lines and is indicated by people’s expectations. Activity
is promoted through discussion, in the tools made available to
students, and by example. An assignment to read a particular passage
from the textbook is understood as creating a ZFM, but a ZPA is
contained in the text’s content. For example, particular uses of a
video camera are promoted by the textbook’s position on proper usage,
in the features built into the camera, and with the accessories
available for use. Most often, Valsiner argues, the zones occur
together—some activity being prevented while other activity is
encouraged. According to Valsiner, education is necessarily about
preventing students from participating in some forms of activity and
has increasingly become about promoting “goal-directed” behavior (p.
195). ZPAs limit movement within the available space but only
to the extent that students are unaware of other options.
Each zone has a place in education, influencing activity in
unique ways: The ZFM defines what affordances are available while the
ZPA describes which affordances are illuminated by demonstration,
speech, or other action. An underlying question concerns whether there
are developmental consequences of using one of these zones more than
the other; it is a question about what consequences may result from
differences in the available space. This dissertation studies the
contexts of three high school video programs in terms of how they
constrain (ZFM) and promote (ZPA) activities. The space in
student-school relationships is thus found by defining what is promoted
and forbidden. Students, however, bring unique histories to the
relationship that engage dynamically with the school’s context so that
these influences are non-determinate.
The peculiarities of student-school relationships can be expected to be
stronger and more influential for adolescents than for children.
“Students who have worked in school for 5, 8, or 10 years have very
well grounded beliefs about what people do in school” (Lee, 2003, p.
47). High school students have a substantial history with school, and
they will soon have a significant change in societal status; they will
soon be (some legally are) adults. Adolescent students are
“engaged in the process of forging individual identities” and can
easily come to resent the constraints imposed by school (Schofield
& Davidson. 2003, p. 76). Therefore, the constraints that are
apparently a necessity of educational pursuits may at times be an
obstacle. Even when an activity is consistent with a student’s
identity, the compliance required to participate correctly may
lead to resistance.
Thus the role of power, which is asserted most directly in constraint,
deserves further attention:
Vygotsky. . . . focus[ed] too
exclusively upon the facilitation of skills and abilities that
took place in the ZOPED [or ZPD]. He often omitted its negative
aspect-both the censuring and “extinction” of behaviors irrelevant to
the learning task and the shaping and inculcation of only those skills
and actions “fit” for the social position the neophyte was accorded. .
. . We miss the elements of power, status, stratification, and
ownership . . . (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998, p. 176)
Power in education is an important part of understanding
activity in high school and its meaning for students.
Power is expressed in rules, aims, and agendas that do not necessarily
include the perspectives of its students. These are at times in
explicit opposition to the students’ ways of thinking. This set of
contrasting perspectives is explicit in Hodge and Kress’s “ideological
complexes,” defined as:
a functionally related set of
contradictory versions of the world, coercively imposed by one social
group on another on behalf of its own distinctive interests or
subversively offered by another social group in attempts at resistance
in its own interests. . . . It is the actual opposition of interests
which creates the necessity for contradiction within the complex. . . .
Ideological complexes are constructed in order to constrain [and
promote] behavior by structuring the versions of reality on which
social action is based (1988, p. 3).
The school’s ideologies are (ordinarily) the dominant ones,
and students are put in a position to accept or resist them.
Discussed in this way, student-school relationships seem necessarily
oppositional; there is an aspect of colonization that is exaggerated
when the students have a minority status. But the more antagonistic
aspects are not the only ones. After all, teachers, as well as parents,
tend to have some noble reasons for establishing ZFMs and ZPAs.
Diamondstone (2002) “refer[s] to resistance . . . as a
misreading of dominant discourse, arising from sociocultural
perspectives and purposes that have been marginalized. . . . [And
resistance] must be recognized as . . . resourceful ” (p. 3).
Resistance in these terms is about an inability as much as an
unwillingness to adopt official ideologies, and it is only through the
little, daily acts of resistance that an awareness of differing
perspectives becomes possible. Diamondstone continues, “Negation
affords an opportunity to learn, to do otherwise; it opens a gap in the
world as is, a space for a subject to perform, to do something, to
speak” (2002, p. 7). Similarly Butler (1997) argues that consciousness
comes about only through a resistance to the universal subjugation of
children. Litowitz also stresses the necessity of resistance: “The
desire to move beyond participation to responsibility is in itself an
act of resistance, a resistance to being dependent and controlled by
another” (1997, p. 482).
To some degree, then, all engaged participation by students can be
considered resistant. By choosing to act (or not to act), a student
renders the teacher less necessary. De Certeau’s (1984) distinction
between strategies and tactics are fundamental for this research
because of the spotlight it places on resistance and the role of power
in everyday activity. Accordingly, a strategy is activity from a
position of power, and it is associated with the designation and
ownership of places. Power arises in defining what is appropriate
behavior within a particular place, a term which is used in
this dissertation to distinguish a location that has semiotic value. A
place is “borrowed” when one aligns
oneself with the activity structure of the place. A tactic, on the
other hand, is activity from a position of weakness and is associated
with time in that a tactic must take advantage of moments in time to
either use the structure to achieve alternate ends or to subvert the
meaning of a context entirely. Note that de Certeau argued that
“consumers” are increasingly left only with tactics because “the system
in which they move about is too vast to be able to fix them in one
place, but too constraining for them ever to be able to escape from it”
(p. 40). Therefore, teachers as well as students lack significant power
and are only able to act strategically when they embody the institution
that is the true power in education.
In line with de Certeau, activity is assumed to serve individual
purposes even when it serves institutional ones. De Certeau’s division
of acts into strategies and tactics opens the door for viewing
cooperation as similar to resistance. As Diamondstone described one
event, a student “asserted her own agenda but concealed her resistance
behind a cooperative façade” (2002, p. 14). Though usually not
so apparent, playing along can enable students to realize their
own agendas, and these agendas may have nothing to do with the task
students are engaged with. Knowing what motivates a student in any
given moment is impossible, probably even for that student, but the
occurrence of an action nevertheless affects the actor’s position
within that context: It can be “read” as benefiting the actor.
The choices students make in how to participate, therefore, are central
to this project but should not be understood as a return to traditional
individualism (Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004). The agency represented
in such a choice is rarely calculated or made in isolation; it is a
product of the context, particularly when it is tactical. As
Diamondstone describes it,
The idea that individuals act
in their own interests through operations half out of awareness implies
a view of agency that is embedded in cultural settings, realized not in
deliberative acts but in the fleeting response to unpredictable
conditions of the moment (2002, p. 10).
As she describes it, a choice is an assertion of agency that
“is embedded in collective activity, embodied in a collective subject”
(Diamondstone, 2002, p. 5).
The difference between tactics that are resistant and those that are
cooperative is, however, significant; the significance is illuminated
by the addition of a second dimension. Hodge and Kress (1988) proposed
that relationships are routinely defined along two dimensions: power
and solidarity. “Solidarity is an effect of power just as power is an
effect of solidarity” (p. 39). To be in a position of power, one needs
the cooperation of the less powerful to maintain and further the
dominant ideologies. There must be some alignment—some shared sense of
purpose, some positive affiliation—for leaders to lead. On the other
hand, when conflict arises, regardless of the relative power, there is
a distinct lack of solidarity. Solidarity defines group membership
regardless of the status within the group and therefore reflects
identity.
The criteria for investigating student-school relationships thus arise
from both power and solidarity. Schools, being in the position of
power, always act strategically through their various representatives,
but they can communicate high and low levels of solidarity. At the
extremes, schools can only constrain students when solidarity is low,
but as solidarity increases, promotion increasingly becomes possible.
Students, on the other hand, can be in both positions of power or
weakness, though power is never truly owned. Students can thus act in
more or less strategic ways, keeping in mind that at their most
strategic their acts maintain some tactical qualities. Students can
constrain and promote activity when they act strategically. More often,
though, student activity is clearly tactical in nature. As such,
cooperation represents the highest levels of solidarity, while
resistance communicates the least solidarity. These criteria facilitate
comparisons between schools and across the different levels of activity
that are studied.
When considering power and solidarity, the process of internalization
needs to be reconsidered: The possibility of learning and whether or
not learning promotes development are influenced by the nature of
social relations; the questions concern how and to what extent. General
problems with the concept of internalization have already resulted in a
number of interpretations and substitute terms, frequently to avoid the
loss of the dialogic nature of the process, but Smith (1996)
distinguished two basic approaches: “transmission models,” in which the
material that is internalized resembles the original, and
“transformation models,” in which the resemblance can be minimal.
Transformation models explicitly recognize the potential of a
problematic relationship between teachers and students. The
introduction of power and solidarity to the discussion raises the
possibility that the process of internalization may vary according to
the relations the student has with the teacher and the material being
learned. When problems do not entirely prevent engagement, it may be
found that the processes of learning and development vary as some
students obligingly adopt the values as well as the concepts a teacher
presents and other students resist at every opportunity. Perhaps
acknowledging the difference and valuing both routes would lead to
greater success in promoting more development, but thus far little is
known about the consequences.
Within high school video production, there is, however, a more basic
question: What is development in video production? Recognizing some
sort of progress that can be conceived as development is particularly
difficult when programs approach the subject in radically different
ways. An exploration of development in video production is therefore
rooted in the comparison of “video communication” with speech. Bakhtin
(1986) described speech acts as being fundamentally constrained by the
available speech genres, and thus development is equated with the use
of genres:
The better our command of
[speech] genres, the more freely we employ them, the more fully and
clearly we reveal our own individuality in them (where this is possible
and necessary), the more flexibly and precisely we reflect the
unrepeatable situation of communication-in a word, the more perfectly
we implement our free speech plan. (p. 80)
Video genres are therefore viewed as the fundamental
constraint with which students must work, and the most developed
communication is that in which a genre is employed to most fully
indicate what is intended and, when appropriate, to communicate an
idiosyncratic message. Personalization and, even more so, intentionality
thus demonstrate a degree of internalization of the means for
video communication such that the techniques for recording and editing
video truly become tools for achieving ones purposes.
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