Re: [xmca] Where and What Is A Boundary?

[Nancy Mack <nancy.mack@wright.edu>]

Third paragraph mentions class conflict.

Nancy Mack

Professor of English 
Wright State University

http://www.wright.edu/~nancy.mack





----- Original Message -----
From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Date: Monday, September 13, 2010 9:40 pm
Subject: [xmca] Where and What Is A Boundary?
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

> First of all, many many thanks to Professor Peter 
> Smagorinsky for his incisive but very fair summary of the study, 
> and above all for opening up issues that really go far beyond 
> the study itself. 
>  
> As we see! With all due respect to Professor Engestrom and the 
> folks at the Change Lab, I think that the issue of profit, and 
> salaries, and even critical peer review and publishing is much 
> more interesting to the writers of a study than it is to its 
> readers. So I think that Professor Smagorinsky's 
> understanding reflects, accurately, the reader's point of view. 
>  
> It certainly reflects mine. Studies like the one that Professor 
> Engestrom reports on in "Perspectives in Activity Theory" (CUP 
> 1999: 377-404) as essentially examples of business consultancy 
> discourse, in that they focus on enhancing collaborative 
> production, often through negotiated consensus, and leave the 
> underlying issues of class conflict in the background. 
> Nevertheless, it seems to me that precisely these issues are the 
> key to understanding the 'boundary" concept.
>  
> I usually have a lot of trouble with articles like this. I am a 
> deep breathing reader, and I can stay under water for a very 
> long time without a good definition. But my imagination (and 
> understanding) is too visual and concrete and I cannot really 
> even begin to get a good picture of what the author is going on 
> about unless I have a good example. 
>  
> And I find I don't really get a good example of the "boundary" 
> concept until p. 223, where we get a pretty clear boundary 
> between what the trainees have been told to do as trainees and 
> what they will actually do as teachers. This comes up again near 
> the end, where there is a boundary set between "goals" (as 
> defined by the NC) and "work", as defined by the teachers. 
>  
> I found myself wondering, as I read the study, if this boundary 
> is not a temporary mirage created by the fact that we are 
> talking about PRE-SERVICE teacher education, a situation where 
> the student teachers still have to jump through hoops to get 
> their certification, and where, because the student teachers do 
> not have the experienced teachers' source of authority, viz, 
> their chalkface experience, they are more or less at the mercy 
> of mentors, the professors, and of course the examiners.
>  
> Pre-service programmes focus on what is teachable in preservice 
> programmes. That is why they focus so much on lesson plans, 
> which in real life are notorious unreliable guides to classroom 
> interaction for the simple reason that they largely pre-empt it 
> with "goals" and "targets" and "projected outcomes". They also 
> focus on the kind of teaching knowledge that is statable and 
> testable. But a great deal of this statable, plannable, 
> rehearsable, and testable teaching knowledge is what Whitehead 
> would call "inert" knowledge.
>  
> For example: one of the really key problems that teachers face 
> when they start teaching in English is being able to reduce 
> questions to the point where they are manageable and then expand 
> them again to the point where they are challenging to 
> learners(who can be of widely varying degrees of proficiency, 
> communicative capacity and even amiability). This was the point 
> of the distinction our teacher Ms. Yi Minkyeong made between 
> "nonverbal response wanted", "verbal response wanted", and  
> "verbal thinking wanted". 
>  
> This knowledge is not only largely unconscious, it is largely 
> undescribable, because it includes (at least) three undescribed 
> things: familiarity ("Have I said this before?"), structural 
> complexity ("How long and complex is the question? What about 
> the answer?"), conceptual complexity ("How 
> concrete/visualizeable abstract/conceivable is the question? 
> What about the answer?"). It's not the sort of thing we can 
> teach in our pre-service programmes, although we are making some 
> inroads with the in-service ones (where I am teaching this very 
> afternoon). 
> One of my grads is now studying the possibility of discarding 
> the "artificial zone of proximal learning" of the pre-service 
> programme altogether and going to the naturally occuring sort of 
> "legitimate peripheral participation" that we find in 
> apprenticeships, what we found in for centuries in the arts and 
> even in teaching before colleges of education were invented. (I 
> remember travelling on trucks in the Sudan and watching how 
> young Sudanese boys learned to become "drivers" in this way.)
>  
> Shin Jiyeong has already found a significant difference in one 
> novice teacher in the use of visual prompts and also in what she 
> calls "non-repetition questions", that is, questions which 
> produce the target sentences (specified by the NC) without 
> actually asking for "Listen and Repeat". This is interesting 
> because Shin Jieun and Kellogg 2007 failed to find ANY 
> improvement in another co-teacher in any part of the lesson 
>  EXCEPT the greeting.
>  
> What makes the difference? I think that Jinyeong's 
> apprenticeship is NOT a mentorship, where the relations found 
> between examiners and examinees invariably reproduce themselves, 
> and change the focus from the kind of indescribable knowledge 
> we are looking for to the more describable sort. It's also NOT 
> the crazy situation I started her out on (silly me) where the 
> two teachers had to teach the same thing at opposite ends of the 
> classroom looking at each other teach. 
>  
> First of all, the two teachers have good reasons to take turns 
> watching and teaching. One is an inexperienced native speaker of 
> English and the other is a highly expert non-native speaker, so 
> they both have (different) things to do and so different things 
> to look at. 
>  
> Secondly, there is a clear cycle of "watch this" and "now you 
> have a go" for both teachers. It seems to me where the actual 
> teaching "work" is not statable, this is essential: there is 
> literally no other way for the knowledge to be internalized 
> except through imitation, and the way our short term memories 
> work, there has to be a very short window between the 
> observation and the imitation for the imitation to be accurate 
> and useful.
>  
> Finally, there is, actually, an emergent concept, which neither 
> teacher was aware of at the beginning of Jiyeong's research, and 
> it's not "goal" whether of "work" or of "lesson" or of the NC. 
> We started out just looking at what kinds of behaviors produced 
> long answers (more than one word) from the kids, and we found to 
> our distress that "Listen and Repeat" were virtually the only 
> ones that did. I think the idea of a "non-imitative" or "non-
> repetitive question" is still a bit of a broad brush. But I also 
> think that when the research is really done, this is where the 
> real source of improvement will come in, and I think, not 
> coincidentally, that this is where pre-service programmes really 
> have to butt out.
>  
> I was reading the "Boundary" article, I set up a 
> gedankenexperiment, which I think reflects pretty well the kind 
> of class conflict underlying the "boundary" concept. Let us say 
> that there is a fundamental dispute over a curricular issue. 
> Imagine, for example, that a party comes to power that wishes to 
> remove a fundamental concept from the curriculum (e.g. the 
> welfare state, or Norway's membership in the NATO alliance, 
> participation in the invasion of Iraq, and active involvement in 
> the Afghan War). 
>  
> Do I, as a teacher, want the decision making in the hands 
> of a CONSERVATIVE teacher (they do exist; I have quite a few as 
> grad students) or in the hands of a LIBERAL, even a RADICAL 
> Department of Teacher Education?
>  
> Well, OK, it's a thought experiment. The idea of a radical DTE 
> is really a little like one of Einstein's relativistic trains, 
> or Schrodinger's cat; there are none such, and none likely. But 
> I think that in actual fact the real curricular decisions are 
> ENTIRELY in the hands of the teacher, for much the same reason 
> that decisions over learning are in the final analysis in the 
> hands and heads of learners. And I think that's where they 
> should be too.
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
>       
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