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Jenna McWilliams: still not a seminal thinker

Sep 12th, 12 / 0 Comments

Almost three years ago I explained why I hate the words ‘seminal’ and ‘disseminate.’ Here’s the explanation, in brief:

Both words come from the latin root seminalis, or seed, from which we also get the word semen.

Now: seminal, disseminate, semen. All linked to the notion of the seed, the germination of all things that can grow: the sowing of ideas, of genes, of the next generation of people, texts, and theories. The terms, though we may not think of it in daily use, are innately masculine–innately male. A seminal idea is one that has taken root, has grown, has spread; it engenders offspring in which we can see (genetic) elements of the initial idea, text, or approach. There’s not even a feminine equivalent. What would we say? He’s an ovulant thinker in his field?

As a female scholar, I resent the notion that my ideas may, if I’m lucky, be likened to the very masculine process of impregnation. I resent the paradigm that leads us to consider seminal ideas that allow other thinkers to bear fruit.

Since that post, I’ve made some headway in convincing some members of my scholarly circle to either replace those words with the dozens of alternatives provided within the English language, or to use those words but be aware of the way they sound to some Alert Feminist Readers.

At the same time, I’m still finding myself in conversation with people who think I’m a) overreacting, b) looking for something that’s not there, or c) being overly simplistic in my analysis of these terms. Lately this issue has taken on fresh meaning for me, since I’m studying for my qualifying exams and the word seminal, in particular, keeps rearing its ugly head.

So, at the risk of repeating myself, I want to reiterate my objections to the ongoing use of these terms. This time I’ll do it by outlining some general principles:

1. Cultures simultaneously reflect and reproduce belief systems. These belief systems include ideas about what counts as knowledge, what kinds of behaviors, values, and beliefs are “better” than other kinds, and who gets to be in charge of things like government, schools, law enforcement agencies, universities, and religious institutions, and what sorts of authority we’re going to bestow upon those leaders and the institutions they lead.

2. Language is one key area in which a culture simultaneously reflects and reproduces its belief systems. This includes not only the words that come into use (or fall out of favor) in a culture but also extends into how a language is structured, what sorts of words, metaphors and analogies are available to its users and how words are appropriated and recruited for use in new contexts. For example, in America we use the term “kindergarten” (German for “children’s garden”) to refer to a child’s first year of school because it aligns with our schoolish metaphor of cultivating learners. But “kindergarten” is not a universal term for that first year.

3. Over time, a culture’s vocabulary changes. This is true for a big huge pile of reasons, three of which being that certain words or terms get recognized for limiting our thinking, for being too limited in scope for some new purpose, or for being overtly offensive. For example:

The word meme was first coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, but took off within the last decade to account for the wildfire spread of new cultural products, inside of which were contained new behaviors, values, or ideas. Think honeybadgers, lolcats, someecards.com, and Antoine Dodson. Before the emergence of the internet, there was no need for the widespread use of the word meme, and now there is a need for such a word.

In America, the terms Negro and colored to describe Black people and American Indians to describe Native Americans or First Nations people have long fallen out of favor and are generally viewed as racist.

4. Some words in a culture may reflect yucky aspects of that culture’s belief system. This is so regardless of whether individual speakers of a language are explicitly aware of the connection between that word and its connection to yuckiness. This is why we tell kids to stop saying “that’s so gay” even if they aren’t aware that the phrase is linked to homophobia and heterosexism.

5. Individuals who are part of a nondominant group (i.e., are removed from power by dint of their gender, race, class, physical attributes/abilities, neurologies, or other characteristics) are far more likely to recognize words that reflect yucky beliefs about their group than are individuals who come from dominant groups. For a long time, I used the word “lame” to refer to things I didn’t like. I used “lame” like it was going out of style. As a non-disabled individual, I wasn’t primed to notice on my own that “lame” is a term that is characteristic of ableist language.

6. If an individual from a nondominant group (or an ally who is not part of that group) is able to articulate why she thinks a given term reflects yucky cultural beliefs, the person who has used that term is responsible to either justify continued use of the term or agree to abandon that term.

7. Justifications that do not count as reasonable include:

“But there’s not a better term to replace it with!” (Because if a word reflects yucky cultural beliefs, there’s always a better term, although it may require you to think harder about language than you want to.)
“I think you’re overreacting / seeing something that doesn’t exist / focusing on something that doesn’t matter.” Members of nondominant groups (and their allies) often see things that are not recognized by members of dominant groups. Because dominant groups get to be dominant, they get to spend a lot of time ignoring people who see things differently. That doesn’t make them right; that makes them oblivious. It’s not even necessarily their fault! They’re conditioned to be oblivious by a culture of power whose continued existence relies on nobody questioning the culture of power.

8. Justifications that do count as reasonable include:

{this space intentionally left blank}

9. Because if a term feels yucky to a member of a nondominant group, why in the name of all things awesome would you want to keep using it? Seriously. That makes you part of the problem. And who wants to be part of the problem?

The words seminal and disseminate are yucky to me. Because they are linked to the word semen, and because the word semen is a definitively masculine term with definitively masculine connotations in our culture, they reflect masculinist views of knowledge production and reproduction. Dissemination–the literal spreading of semen, or seed–often happens without consent, and is therefore a matter of physical violence, most commonly perpetrated on women.

Dissemination–the literal as well as the metaphorical ejaculation of semen, or seed–also reflects a heterosexist worldview. If I’m a seminal thinker, that’s because my seeds have germinated–because they were fertilized, and took root, and grew. Because the spreading of seed also requires germination, now we’ve headed into the world of male-female sexual activity. You can tell me the root of the term is botanical, not biological, but you can’t argue that the root word, semen, is more strongly botanical in our culture than it is biological. Which means that in general use, the words semen, seminal, and disseminate are at least more strongly linked to the biological activity of heterocopulation than to the botanical activity of plant reproduction.

Here are some other words you can use. They may require you to think more deeply about what you’re trying to communicate, because each of these words means something slightly different than the others, but that’s what Good Thinkers do anyway!

seminal: critical, crucial, fundamental, important, influential, original, primary, distinctive, distinguished, esteemed, extraordinary, famous, foremost, incomparable, leading, notable, noted, noteworthy, preeminent, prominent, formative, generative, ingenious, innovative, unprecedented, untried, unusual

disseminate: distribute, scatter, broadcast, circulate, diffuse,disperse, promulgate, propagate, publicize, publish, radiate, sow, spread, strew, radiate, bestow, deal out, deliver, devote, disburse, dish out, dispense, mete, communicate, declare, decree, make public, spread, proliferate

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mike rose, the mind at work and how academics get working-class credibility

Feb 14th, 12 / 0 Comments

This post is about two recent works by Mike Rose, an educational researcher at UCLA who focuses, as he describes it, low-status places–working-class schools, blue-collar job sites, remedial classrooms–places not privileged by society or, frequently, by the institutions in which they are located” (Rose 2012, p. 2). The two works are:

Rose, M. (2004). The Mind at Work: Valuing the intelligence of the American worker. New York: Penguin.

Rose, M. (2012). Rethinking Remedial Education and the Academic-Vocational Divide. Mind, Culture, and Activity 19(1): 1-16.

I’ve been using The Mind at Work as an anchor text for an undergraduate educational psychology course, and I was just prepping to discuss chapter 4, “the vocabulary of carpentry” as I got distracted scrolling through the xmca listserv in which several members of the listserv were discussing Mike Rose’s article “Rethinking remedial education.

The article starts out with a bang:

What you see depends on where you sit, and for how long. You enter the classroom from the rear, wanting to be discrete on your first visit, and slip into the desk closest to the door. A few students 20 notice you, but most are walking around or leaning over to the person next to them talking. Except for one woman, the class is all men, 20s and 30s, a few White guys, the rest Black and Latino. Hoodies, baggy pants, loud profanity. The teacher is in front at a cloudy overhead projector. Three men are around him—each seems bigger than the next—and they are arguing.

The room is old and dingy, no windows, bare except for the irregular rows of desks, the table 25 with the projector, a cart holding pipes and metal bars, and in the corner a worn flag from the American Welding Society. You’re trying to take it all in when a sullen guy in an oversized T-shirt, a bandanna around his head, walks over to you and asks, “What are you doin’ here?”

Rose explains that “[t]his is an article about perception and ability, about the way beliefs about cognition blend with social characteristics—class, race, gender—to create both instructional responses and institutional structures that limit human development for people already behind the economic eight ball.” We read his opening paragraphs, we get a sense of what this classroom is like, what its students are all about. But, Rose explains, our first impressions are wrong: The surroundings, the foul language, the clothing choices–they belie an effort to develop serious vocational skills. They belie these students’ focus, sense of purpose, and intelligence.

And that guy who wanted to know what you’re doing here? Well, it’s a legitimate question, isn’t it? And everything depends on how you answer it. When it was posed to me, I said I was here to study programs like this one because we need to know more about them to convince our politicians that we need more of them. The man’s features softened, and we moved out into the hallway. “We need programs like this,” he said. “People like us.” “It’s the teacher that really makes a difference,” he continued. “He treats us like we’re people.”

In the chapter from The mind at work that I’m prepping for today’s class, Rose writes: “What testing vocabulary do we have, for example, to discern the making of judgments from the feel of things, or the strategic use of tool and body, or the rhythmic spacing of tasks, or the coordination of effort and material toward the construction of a complex object?”

Certainly the purpose of this book, and of a lot of Mike Rose’s work, is not to show how skills developed through welding, for example, or waitressing or carpentry or what-have-you can help you advance beyond a given vocation. In fact, in the introduction to his excellent book, he gently criticizes a discourse that treats working-class activity as romantic because of its physicality. He writes:

How interesting it is…that our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission. Yet there is a mind at work in dignity, and values are intimately related to thought and action.

I’ve also been interested to watch how Mike Rose and other scholars focusing on blue-collar work establish their orientation toward blue-collarness–primarily by establishing credibility by pointing to personal experience with blue-collar work. I do this all the time: I say that I grew up in a working-class household. I say that I am public school-educated all the way from kindergarten to graduate degree(s). I say that before I came to academia I was a groundskeeper, a cashier, a phone operator, blah blah blah. This is designed to, perhaps, “prove” I have access to the exotic world of the blue-collar worker, to “prove” I have cachet.

Yet if I were to tell Ray, the pseudonym for the aspiring welder in Mike Rose’s “rethinking remedial education” who asks Rose why he’s in the classroom, about my “working-class credibility,” what do you think he would do? Me, standing there, a white, well educated academic who can choose when to enter his classroom and when to leave, whose livelihood both does not depend on whether I can learn today’s math lesson and rests on the backs of those learners who are trying to do precisely that?

I think it’s far less common for researchers to use their personal backgrounds to “prove” they “understand” research participants who come from more privileged backgrounds–say, students in a gifted and talented program or students completing advanced graduate work. Perhaps researcher credibility does not need to be established in these cases; perhaps its existence is simply understood.

“I used to ______, but now I _________.” When we demonstrate our class-ness, when we offer our personal histories, we assume we’re confessing our relationship to the phenomena of interest. And certainly that’s part of it.

But when we say “I used to _______” or “before I came to academia I _______” are we attempting the opposite of “going native”? Are we actually simultaneously feigning distancing ourselves from academia while in fact embracing it fully? We have the best of intentions, but to what extent do our best intentions serve only to further stigmatize and Other our research participants without actually leaving us with any taint of Other?

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2012: the year of productivity

Jan 2nd, 12 / 2 Comments

Back in 2006, when I was trying to make a living as an adjunct instructor teaching composition and literature classes at a small pile of Boston-area colleges, I spent an awful lot of time rushing around. My 13-mile commute in to Boston took about an hour, and the 5-mile train ride from one college to another took about another 45 minutes. I had no office, just a common area for meeting with students. I had no money–anyone who’s done adjunct work knows why–and I eventually snagged a part-time job on top of my full time course load. The money was nice, but I spent so much of my life running around, you know?

Also in 2006, I stood opposed to new technologies. I refused to get a cellphone. A friend gave me an iPod as a holiday gift and I worried about whether I would use it. In fact, I worried about whether even owning an iPod would degrade my life. Out of the mouths of babes, right?

That year, I required all of my students to read a NYTimes opinion piece bemoaning humanity’s move toward constant technological stimulation. The piece, called Feet and minds need a chance to wander, argues that creativity, powerful ideas, and genius of all sorts require silence, time for daydreaming, and an unplugged mind. The author, Clyde Haberman, offers the insights of several MacArthur Genius Fellowship winners:

If you ask MacArthur fellows about creativity, you find near-unanimity on the importance of staying unwired.

It is not always easy to do so, said Dorothy Q. Thomas, a human-rights consultant in New York and a 1998 winner. Work requires her to be on her cellphone ”even while walking, even while eating.” She accomplishes a great deal that way. But no doubt, Ms. Thomas said, it ”drains a lot away from reflection.”

Christopher Chyba, an astrophysicist and a 2001 fellow, recalled a light-bulb moment that came some years ago while he was taking a walk. The thought struck him that water from comets played a role in creating the earth’s oceans. ”It is probably true,” Mr. Chyba said, ”that if I had been listening to music or to Books on Tape, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.”

”The thing that is so precious, which becomes so hard to get, is uninterrupted time,” he said.

AND cellphones are, if nothing else, time thieves.

”Nonconnectivity becomes a commodity, something to cherish,” said Jonathan Lethem, a Brooklyn novelist and a new MacArthur fellow. ”You won’t hear different, particularly from novelists. You need so much ruminative time to build these elaborate alternate realities. Every novelist is running away from the telephone. Has been for 100 years.”

It troubles Majora Carter, another 2005 winner and founder of a group called Sustainable South Bronx, that many young people are wired all the time. ”They don’t have the ability anymore to create things in their own head, to create fantasies, to create dreams for themselves,” she said.

For that matter, young or old, people seem also to have lost the ability to whistle melodically. When was the last time that you heard someone whistling sweetly on the street?

In 2006, I agreed wholeheartedly with Haberman and his MacArthur Geniuses that feet and minds need a chance to wander.

By 2009, I had changed my tune.

I had acquired my first cellphone, then my second: a smartphone with unlimited data and messaging to best accommodate my mobile technology needs. I was on my third laptop, for which I purchased extra memory and two external hard drives–necessary for holding the videos, music, and creative work I was generating. I was on my second iPod, one with more memory (but that still was unable to hold all of the media content I wanted to carry with me). You get the idea, right?

Now it’s 2012. My awesome mom gave me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I immediately purchased insurance for my Kindle because I carry all my technology with me all the time, and I’m so hard on my stuff that I bust basically all of it. I’m reorganizing my house this week, partially around my need for a charging station near my desk, partially around the chaotic nest of plugs and chargers and cords that stretch around every seat in my apartment.

And recently, I talked to my pal Nick, a doctoral candidate who’s serious about finishing up his dissertation right nao, about his productivity strategies. He purchased the software tool Freedom, which blocks your laptop’s connectivity for a time period that you set. The only way to disable Freedom once you turn it on, he said, is to restart your computer–”which is just humiliating.”

When Nick sits down to write, he turns on Freedom and puts his cellphone in a closet on the other side of his apartment. In 2006 I would have admired him for his self-discipline. In 2009 I would have scoffed at him for hiding from his technology. And now, in 2012, I admire him for his self-discipline.

Here’s a NYTimes article I ran into this morning: The joy of quiet. The author, Pico Iyer, explains that

[i]n barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

It’s a new year, and I want nothing more this year than to rein myself in. I want to shed my distractions and up my productivity. I want to find ways to separate my professional and personal lives, intertwined primarily because of my constant connectivity.

And I’m considering buying Freedom, even though I could easily just turn off my internet connection. (Though if it was “easy,” wouldn’t I already have done it?) I’m considering leaving my technologies at home, docking my laptop to my desk. (Making it a desktop computer?) I often shut off my phone’s email app, and when I charge my phone at bedtime, I like to do it across the room from my bed to stop myself from checking it when I wake up during the night.

Nothing feels better than productivity. And there’s a lot that I’m willing to do to get the good feeling back.

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I guess I’ll be submitting proposals for the 2012 AERA Annual Meeting

Jul 13th, 11 / 3 Comments

At the end of my last trip to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), I decided I no longer wanted to submit proposals or attend the conference. I had lots of reasons, but here are some of the biggest:

The AERA Annual Meeting embraces mainstream (nonthreatening) research. As researcher and activist Jeff Duncan-Andrade pointed out in a session I attended, AERA offered up Diane Ravitch at its opening plenary session. Ravitch, after 30 years of supporting standardized testing and teacher accountability based on test results, recently reversed course and stood up against standardized assessments. “Which is super,” Duncan-Andrade said, but added that Diane Ravitch should be spending the rest of her career in apology to all the kids whose lives she helped to destroy.
The AERA Annual Meeting does not support dissenting or alternative voices. It’s true that lots of individuals and a handful of sessions introduced radical or controversial theories or ideas, but those were drowned out by the plenaries, featured speakers, and sessions designed to promote the general mainstream of educational research.
The AERA Annual Meeting does not effect or result in any significant, lasting change in education.
The AERA Annual Meeting is expensive. Which wouldn’t be a problem if the membership and attendance fees resulted in any significant, lasting change in education. But it doesn’t.

So. Here we are, a mere 9 days before the submission deadline for AERA 2012, and I’m preparing to submit at least four different proposals, and I’m hoping to have at least one accepted so I can go to Vancouver in mid-April. I haven’t changed my mind about any of the points above. So why in the world am I spending so much time and energy on a conference that goes against everything I believe comprises good educational research?

Someone’s gotta be the chainsaw. I know lots of people who feel like I do about AERA, and some of them have chosen to no longer attend. It’s a good decision, choosing not to participate in the AERA circus, and it means those people can spend their energies in far more awesome ways. But we also need people to work on tearing AERA down, and I’m willing to do my best.
Someone’s gotta bring the heat. If accepted, I promise to introduce dissent, to introduce an alternative perspective in my presentations, in my participation as an audience member, and in my attendance at business meetings for the Divisions and SIGs of which I am a member.
Someone’s gotta bring the challenge. I am planning on organizing a protest against the fees and ineffectuality of AERA. Tentatively, I plan to organize attendees to commit to donating the $70-$205 they would spend on registration fees for the Annual Meeting to one or more local educational initiatives. Attendees could announce their participation in this protest by wearing an armband indicating their refusal to pay the registration fee. Let’s say that just 4% of the estimated 13,000 attendees donate their registration fees. That would result in a pool of at least $70,000 to support local initiatives–a drop in the bucket to some, but a much needed income source for others.

What do you think, dudes? Wanna join me in taking a chainsaw to AERA?

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just in case you were considering becoming a college professor

Mar 27th, 11 / 0 Comments

via MinnieMouse1224.

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my ‘I come from’ poem

Jan 13th, 11 / 2 Comments

I’m helping to teach a course this semester for pre-service secondary writing teachers. On the first day of class, we all wrote “I come from” poems. This is an activity that comes from Linda Christensen’s fantastic book Teaching for Joy and Justice. Here’s the poem I wrote.

Where I Come From

I come from the thumb of the mitten
knuckled under by desperation, the ‘out of a job yet?
keep buying foreign’ sticker slapped to the slanted back of a ford.
I come from the shame of sweet lilac, of watching the scoop
of a girl’s calf, the scoop of a shirt, the scoop and lift of faces turning away.
I come from normal, from keep it down, from the deep yellow shame of pack it away.
I packed it away. I got a job. I bought American until I wanted something
in my life to last and that’s when things got really fun.
I come from learning to unpack boxes and theories and complications,
from learning to feel a woman’s glance and return it. I come from a place
that binds and packs and calls it freedom, calls it normal, calls it turn it up.

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wanna take online graduate courses in Learning Sciences, Media, & Technology?

Nov 22nd, 10 / 1 Comment

Indiana University’s Learning Sciences Program has recently launched an online certificate program in Learning Sciences, Media, and Technology (LSMT). Below is a list of the spring courses that will be offered through this program, along with descriptions of each.

I’m a graduate student in the Learning Sciences Program at IU and have taken each of the courses listed below. I’ve found each one of them to be incredibly formative and useful in my own development as an educator and learning theorist, and I strongly recommend all three to anyone who’s interested in a) learning about the intersection of learning, media, and technology; b) stacking up some professional development credits; c) figuring out if they have the chops for graduate school; or b) figuring out if they have an interest in pursuing the learning sciences.

Here’s the official description:

Online Courses Available Spring 2011 from Indiana University
Learning Sciences, Media, and Technology (LSMT)
In-State Tuition Rates for Most Non-Residents
All Courses Taught by IU School of Education Faculty

Three exciting graduate courses uncover current learning theory for the 21st century, and its intersection with media and technology. These are not traditional “distance education” courses. Engaging networked projects will connect you with other students and relevant external resources and communities. You will be able to establish yourself in broader digital professional networks via these courses.

These courses will advance your education and career goals in schools and industry, and will prepare you for advanced degree programs in the Learning Sciences or related fields. At Indiana University, these courses will count towards the 12 credit hour LSMT certificate program (currently in the approval process), the Learning Sciences Master’s and Doctoral Degrees, and many other graduate degree programs.

Want to enroll? For more information on these courses or other opportunities at IU Learning Sciences visit http://www.iu.edu/~lsmt or email learnsci@indiana.edu. Current IU students should email deregstr@indiana.edu to request authorization to register via OneStart. Students not currently enrolled at IU can enroll via the IU distance education website at http://education.indiana.edu/disted.

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neutral as in ‘Grandpa’s arsenal,’ not as in ‘Switzerland’

Nov 10th, 10 / 1 Comment

John Cage: "I have nothing to say and I am saying it."

Image by Joe Salmon, taken from http://www.uiiu.co.nz/neutral.html, sort of without permission so I hope he's ok with it.

I’m a fist-shaking, bleeding-heart, critical pedagogy, politiciany sort of guy. I believe that it’s useless and even potentially damaging to treat learning as apolitical, and I believe that learning theorists of all political bents do themselves a disservice and learners an injustice when they assert an ideologically neutral stance. Because there is no such thing as an ideologically neutral stance.

We may mean ‘neutral’ as in ‘Switzerland,’ as in ‘we choose not to get involved.’ When we choose not to get involved, we choose not to throw our weight against any particular wheel. We choose to allow the people with the most guns to have their way.
We may mean ‘neutral’ as in ‘agnostic,’ as in’ no opinion either way.’ When we choose not to state an opinion, we choose not to throw our weight against any particular wheel. We choose to allow people with the loudest voices and the most microphones to have their way.
We may mean ‘neutral’ as in ‘multipurpose,’ as in ‘there is no ideology built into this theory,’ as in ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ Nope. Cotton balls don’t kill people. Kool-Aid packets don’t kill people. Why? Because their design makes it really hard to use them as murder weapons. Whereas guns are a tool of choice for killing people, because they’re designed to be very good at sending projectiles at a very high rate of speed toward people’s heads.

We are reminded by Kris Gutierrez (2002) that “culture is encoded not only in practices, experiences, and beliefs; culture is also indexed in language” (p. 313). It follows, then, that the very crafting of theoretical claims about learning indexes individual and shared beliefs and value systems, and that, therefore, the most dangerous utterance a learning theorist can make is: “I am ideologically neutral in my approach to learning.” Any theory that claims to be “ideologically neutral” is probably simply so well in line with dominant cultural practices that the beliefs it indexes are simply too broadly accepted to strike anyone as worth challenging on the level of ideology.

I believe, then, that claiming that a learning theory is ‘ideologically neutral’ is so deeply troubling, so dangerous to all learners and to education in general, as to make it effectively and practically indistinguishable from educational malpractice.

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brb running with the big dogs

Oct 10th, 10 / 0 Comments

Last week, I had the incredible honor and thrill of sitting in on a Skype conversation with learning theorist Michael Cole. Mike–which is what I call him now, since we’re like this *crosses fingers to demonstrate close friendship*–is one of the most prominent educational researchers currently working in America. There are two main reasons for this: First, Michael Cole introduced America to L.S. Vygotsky, thereby changing the course of psychology and learning theory for good, forever. Second, Michael Cole showed us how to use L.S. Vygotsky, through his work with the 5th Dimension and his enormous collection of published articles, chapters, and books.

Michael Cole has been working in psychology and educational research for more than 50 years. That’s 50–five-oh–years. So there’s no reason why he would feel particularly interested in talking with a bunch of bright-eyed and shiny-faced graduate students about learning theory, mediation, and Russian psychology.

Can’t hurt to try, right? And it turns out that sometimes asking is all it takes.

Well, okay, I should also make it clear that Michael Cole is one of the nicest academics I’ve ever spoken to, and that he carries a reputation for his commitment to supporting young scholars. So he gave us an hour and a half of his time and ended the conversation by offering to join us via Skype for even more conversations in the future.

Video of the conversation is embedded below. It was recorded with Call Recorder, a Skype add-on for Macs that I recommend heartily.

For all you Vygotsky fans, I want to direct you to two really important points made by Mike in the conversation: First, Vygotsky’s book Mind in Society is not about learning; it’s about instruction. And second, we have it wrong when we say that Vygotsky argued that learning leads development.

See, up until Vygotsky, people assumed the opposite: that development precedes learning–that a child’s brain develops, which makes it possible for the child to learn to do something new. The opposite approach–that it’s through learning, or accomplishing a new task, that development is made possible–is at the heart of sociocultural approaches to cognition and instruction.

But according to Mike, what Vygotsky actually said was not that “learning precedes development” but that “learning can be organized in such a way that learning can precede development.” Which to my mind suggests two important things: First, that it’s not necessarily the case that learning leads development; and second, that it’s desirable to create instructional conditions such that learning can lead development.

Okay, anyway. Here’s the video.