What a character that Yrjö Engeström is. He explores a fictional relationship between three children as if it existed in reality in his 1999 article "Development as Breaking Away and Opening Up: A Challenge to Vygotsky and Piaget."He uses Peter Høeg's autobiographical novel Borderliners, and he uses it for a purpose: To consider three challenges to Vygotsky's and Piaget's theories of development based on the work of dialectics and cultual-historical activity theory (CHAT):
(1) instead of just benign achievement of mastery, development may be viewed as partially destructive rejection of the old; (2) instead of just individual transformation, development may be viewed as collective transformation; (3) instead of just vertical movement across levels, development may be viewed as horizontal movement across borders.
The novel focuses on three children at a boarding school; the children are described thus:
Peter is a 14-year old boy who has no parents and has grown up through severe troubles in institutions. He is transferred to Biehl's Academy, an elite private school in Copenhagen. The question is: Why? He is drawn to two other outsiders in the school, Katarina and August. Katarina has recently lost her parents through illness and suicide. August has murdered his parents after years of abuse. Why was August taken into Biehl's Academy?But that they took August was inexplicable. When they had the waiting lists and had no need to keep anyone. Why did they take someone like him? It was this question that made me sure there had to be a plan. (p. 31)
In the closed, controlled and tightly scheduled school environment, the three start a laboratory experiment to find out what is the plan behind their placement in the school and behind the school's functioning. It is truly an experiment in that it involves changing or disturbing the stable state in order to figure out its logic.
These three, brought to the school as individuals, develop as a collective. As Høeg writes, "It had never been just us two, never just Katarina and me. There had always been three of us, even before he came and I saw him for the first time."
Engeström, building on this idea, adds that when the three children act, take risks, put their very lives on the line for each other, they are working within a notion of reciprocity: Of doing something for another, who would do the same if given the change. Engeström writes:
Here development means changing one's course of life, including the destructive rejection of the old - but changing it together with significant others, in a process of constructing a collective. The challenge to developmental theory is to account for such processes of formation of new collectives.
There's more, of course. It's Engeström, we're talking about, after all--of course there's more. But let's leave it for now and ask the simple question: Are the Moonbats like the three children in Hoeg's narrative? Do they exist as a challenge to the positive, individual, and vertical aspects of developmental theory? In explaining them, and their coherence, is the solution as Engeström writes, "a combination of the positive and the destructive, individual and collective, vertical and horizontal aspects of development?"
More likely, Engeström argues,
the outcome is: not either one, not both combined, but both alone, connected and transcended. Development emerges as everyday creation or construction of the new in zones of uncertainty riddled with contradictions and surprises and heavily dependent on re-mediation by cultural artifacts. Developmental theory that takes these challenges seriously will be able to explain significant transformations in human life courses, at least partially.
I haz a ponder. And I hope someone out there has an ansur.
I would like you to please note that using characters with umlauts and funny slashes requires facility with html code. I would like you to please note that I worked with said code in polishing this post. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteNoted.
ReplyDeleteAn apt analogy moonbat Jenna. I'd like to add, that Engestrom (without the umlauts) emphasises that expansive transformations through collective activity are associated with a heightened state of consciousness. There's some interesting stuff by Illenkov on this we should read. But in my own rather pedestrian prose I would pose the question: how do people come to identify the tensions and contradictions that collective development? Learning to discern the object-motive of an activity system is difficult. Especially when those in power might have a vested interest in concealing it. Yet, accurate discernment is essential. A capacity to identify the deep rules of the system and know that you are in a double bind must precede an expansive transformation. History has show us that whole populations have been duped into misrecognising themselves as powerless slaves by a well coordinated minority who maintain tight control over economic resources.
ReplyDeleteI'd be interested to think about, not only the role of significant others in raising awareness but the affordances of particular socio-cultural niches, like firesides, that function in the capacity of a laboratory for collective reflection as a prequel to an expansive transformation.
I'd like to add that I very much liked the way you bought Shirky into the debate. I've spent the last few days pondering on his thoughts on 'the bargin' and the importance of allowing participants to maintain a sense of ownership over the products of their own intellectual labours. I feel his work on open source development communities could provide some valuable insights into why, no matter how well funded, research projects fail, and fail often.