45 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2015
  2. doc-0g-ag-prod-03-apps-viewer.googleusercontent.com doc-0g-ag-prod-03-apps-viewer.googleusercontent.com
    1. transformative

      do we ever define what this means?

    2. a more dignified and humanizing analysis of young people, particularly those explicitly or implicitly framed from a cultural-deficit perspective

      I appreciate this awareness. Connects to Bell et al, too.

    3. within and across various social spaces and activity systems—particularly for non-dominant youth.

      this reminds me of our video game readings particularly Stevens et al "in game, in room, in world"

    4. immigrant and diasporic communities

      and how might the cultural practices of the same diasporic community in different locations differ based on the context they find themselves in? For example, Irish Catholics in Boston v. Irish Catholics New York? etc

    5. the interpretive task is not merely to uncover what participants say or imply about their experience—but to do so in ways that illuminate how “all persons are busy, active and making sense

      makes me think of LPP and the role of internships. actually seeing how persons are busy, active and making sense" physical proof

    6. Similarly, Gutiérrez and Rogoff (2003) argue for grounding “observations across multiple settings and communities and [assuming] various vantage points to understand the complexity of hu-man activity” (p. 23).

      Which in the end is the point, right? TO understand the complexity of human activity. This is also referencing the fields of knowledge

    7. [moving] out from the single sites and local situations of conven-tional ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space.

      Interesting way of combining and situating resources (objects), FoK (cultural meanings), and identities along with time-space.

    8. Do the questions raised in one setting by educators or peers become resources for learners’ expanded participation in another setting? When and how do young people make connections across seemingly distinct academic and/or extra-curricular domains (across settings, or across contexts with-in a single setting)? Are these connections recognized or cultivated b

      Here I think of islands of expertise to which the role parents play in cultivating children's islands, however taking it further to say that participation and learning move across spaces.

    9. As we have written elsewhere, “the researcher as a collaborative, reflective ‘observant participant’ may help make visible the practices, meanings, and contradictions that often become invisible to those closest to the action

      This advice would have served Nasir and Cooks a little better. It is important to own and understand your particpation as observer to see patterns and contradictions in social phenomena. Taylor and Hall really heed this advice in their "counter mapping" study.

    10. when we fail to move beyond nar-row or normative definitions of what counts as learning

      The point of this class is to push us out of this, and give us the theoretical lens to academically investigate it.

    11. Both problematize the analytic “snapshot” as the endpoint of inquiry, seeking instead to craft a moving picture of social practice and human development as it unfolds, geneti-cally, in real-time

      This seems a lot like Pickeing's need for temporal senses of agency in "the mangle." --- Opps sorry wrong class

      As Sarah spoke about it above, Kelton's dissertation (chapters 5, 6 and 7) spoke to this quite a bit, as she investigated salience (and dis-junction) between schooling and the exhibit, over multiple spaces (in "real time").

    12. the shifting roles of “teacher” and “student,” mani-fest and hidden curriculums, official and unofficial spaces

      Can the teacher become a student and the student become a teacher? Why is this idea so appalling to some?

    13. the additional set of developmental demands involved in boundary and border crossing, and the cultural and intellectual work of creating hybrid or liminal social spaces. As educators and researchers, we assume that the production of hybrid educational environments or “third spaces”

      I like this concept of the "third space" or what I've read as liminality in other pieces. I actually wrote in the margin of my notes for Lave & Wenger Ch 2 "liminality" so maybe my question before about if L&W would agree about this "horizontal" movement is answered here. No matter the situation, there is a period of liminality or existence in this "third space" as one learns to adapt to and become a member

    14. linear trajectories from novice to expert, often within a single set-ting or set of educational experiences. The risk here lies in overlooking a world of developmental experiences and processes that scholars within this tradition refer to as “horizontal” forms of learning

      I'm trying to determine if this is different to the AA examples in Lave & Wenger. There's a lot of discussion there about the movement from newcomer to old-timer, but do Lave & Wenger look at this movement as being vertical or are they more open to horizontal movement? I know in class we have discussed this horizontal movement (before we had a term for it) but I can't recall/find if Lave & Wenger discussed it in this way. I know they didn't use these terms, there are many times when the say something along the lines of "when the newcomer becomes an old-timer..."

    15. Such reinvention can open up new understandings of the self, and of possible trajectories

      This fluidity described here is reminiscent of Nasir's hurdlers. I find some similarities here between Nasir's idea that learning and identity are related, but still independent, and that the self is constantly changing due to interactions with "teachers" and through the process of learning.

    16. young people forge new connections and forms of resistance, and partici-pate in the creation of hybrid environments and tools

      This has me thinking of the youth activism piece on intent participation. Using this lens I think would have helped add to the study in ways I was hoping even when I read it - what did participation in the youth activist groups mean in terms of the rest of those youth's daily lives? And what aspects of those lives were they bringing into the activist setting that went hidden without this kind of lens?

    17. We draw from this definition a sense of the researcher as deliberately seek-ing out additional sites and lines of inquiry in the pursuit of a more com-plex and layered understanding of the phenomenon or cultural practice under study.

      This seems to be part of the perspective of the Kelton piece from last week in that she followed kids across settings. Her focus was in embodied learning, we might think of other phenomenons she might of look at as well.

    18. Interpretive research, therefore, involves working to un-derstand participants’ meaning perspectives on their own terms, rather than imposing external or normative categories

      This is interesting. How does 'disciplined subjectivity' work?

    19. This shift is particularly pressing for students whose out-of-school lives are treated as deficits or obstacles to be overcome, rather than resources to draw upon (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Gutiérrez et al., 1999; Lee, 2001), or whose interest-driven practices and expertise are devalued in school (Ito et al., 2013)

      This makes me think of FoK. Moll et al talked about students using their previous knowledge about wars to bring to the classroom discussion or about the students who have to deal with paperwork for their immigrant parents. This idea of outside school lives being a deficit is essential to thinking about why equity is not possible in the classroom. Also focussing on expertise as a strength speaks to the islands of expertise reading. If students master topics, then they are able to use that knowledge or the skills they gained to apply to new situations and understanding- this should be recognized as a strength!

    20. . In our experience, drawing on one’s home language or hybrid language practices as legitimate tools for reading and writing within a summer academic outreach program, or citing one’s personal experience as a form of evidence within an argumen-tative essay (Espinoza, 2009; Gutiérrez, 2008; Vossoughi, 2011a, b), entails the development of trust, the emergence of new intellectual tensions and possibilities, and the potential for deepening one’s sense of cultural and educational dignity

      This reminds me of Ball & Heath dance piece where students devised a new report script of a school report. They use a hybrid language (American standard and AAV) and everyday experiences (shootings) to construct their identity.

    21. A multi-sited sensibility can help widen and deepen our analysis by work-ing to bring students’ histories of participation and experiences with various educational ecologies into the interpretive frame.

      This reminds me of Becker's paper on the problems with school and how students are removed from curriculum & classroom planning. However, Becker didn't address students' 'histories of participation' as a lens for best practice learning ecologies.

    22. Taking a dynamic, rather than static, view of culture also means understanding learning as an ongoing process of shifting participation within a cultural practice—one that contributes to the continued development of practices and communi-ties (Rogoff, 2003

      This 'shift' in participation is very closely tied yo LPP (Lave & Wenger). They describe learning as a 'movement' understanding the mobility in one's participation within these practices, but also leave the possibility of a reinvention, or a new interest. `

    23. At the same time, we believe that engaging with a small group of learn-ers across settings, or studying the learning experiences and encounters of one student across the lifespan, can afford its own kind of interpretive depth.

      Don't you miss any real, open-minded account of the learning in the field trips piece? I mean, a positive view on the 'ups' students could have learned, not just the 'downs'

    24. In coordinating with each other, people show themselves, to those who would look carefully, to be orderly, knowledgeable, and precise.

      Funds of Knowledge all over the place. I mean, you always look "carefully" to the ones around you...

    25. the opportunities for learning that emerge as people, tools, practices, and interests move across settings and across the social contexts or activity systems that constitute any given setting

      This resonates to me as a missing piece of the Arizona border communities/FoK piece, as it was clearly stated that they changed jobs frequently but no indication of the learning and the transfer of information associated was made.

    26. In line with the cultural-historical approach outlined above, we also question the presumed reification of spatial, linguistic, and geo-graphic boundaries by understanding all learning as situated in multiple activity systems; some of these may be more overt and others of which may be less readily visible, but no less powerful in their organization of an experience.

      This seems to be a crucial piece of multi-sited work. I think this could apply to the case of the non-drinking alcoholics, because there is so much to this identity and the community of practice that occurs as activity systems outside of their "safe space" in AA meetings. Although maybe not as visible as the activity in AA meetings, daily activities, interactions, motivations are all linked to and inform the identity practice of being a non-drinking alcoholic

    27. intellectual work involved in navigating modern borders and their myriad macro- and micro-political manifestations

      This sounds almost as speaking to the mathmoves and the field trips pieces, the navigation of borders in terms of the norms (remember the enforced "ideal participants" in the field trips piece or the instruction to behave like already being in the exhibit in the matmoves piece?)

    28. In this way, researchers can substantively trouble the common dichotomies of home/school and academic/everyday by studying, rather than presuming, points of continu-ity or rupture across social settings.

      This is like music to me. Learning happens everyday, everywhere, and sometimes it is more pleasant, seems more useful, is easier to remember, or any other advantages. But understanding the learning beyond/without those dichotomies, mostly the academic/everyday, could be really helpful to understand in a deeper way pieces as the field trips, mathmoves, or the countermapping.

    29. A multi-sited sensibility would, therefore, involve approaching the out-of-school spaces young people occupy and create with the guiding assumption that one will find complex intellectual activity, and then stay-ing long enough to gain a deeper understanding

      I think this is a lot of the ethos that has permeated many of our readings - I think especially evident with the skatepark reading. They go on to say that this research would help "challenge the 'fallacy that school-like learning tasks necessarily require greater capacity for higher order thinking than do everyday tasks."

      I thought it was interesting how they feel the argument needs to be challenged, rather than the premise itself: It seems like we take it as fact that school tasks and everyday tasks are different things.

      This reminded me of the midwives examples in L&W, where I think the distinction between the "everyday" and the "learning environment" were naturally very, very blurred.

    30. As equity-oriented researchers, we emphasize the fact that such movement is always mediated by questions of power and politics. In this vein, we ask: Whose linguistic, cultural, and intellectual resources are free to move across settings or hybridize, and whose are prohibited, devalued, and marginalized?

      I really like this emphasis on power dynamics in movement. I think this comes into play in the Counter-Mapping article, which I understand to be actively and intentionally redistributing privilege for the young people. they are given the opportunity for movement and meaning-making which is historically relegated to dominant groups in power

    31. From this perspective, the work novices do to enter a practice, and the work all learners do to gain new understandings, tools, and exper-tise, is also the work of reinventing that practice

      This made me think of the skatepark discussion as well. It seems that the concept that they are discussing, the idea that "work novices do to enter a practice" is "also the work of reinventing that practice" can be tied to the idea of "editing" spaces that we saw in the skateparks reading.

    32. By understanding the individual and his or her cultural means in rela-tion to his or her contexts of development, this approach understands learning as a distributed phenomenon and, thereby, contests the tenden-cy to create the Cartesian divide between the individual and the social

      This notion certainly maps well to the example of the extended families that we see when we discussed Funds of Knowledge. The emphasis here on physical places could help us broaden our view of funds of knowledge, perhaps thinking that different physical spaces could themselves offer access to different funds of knowledge.

    33. o this end, we have articu-lated the contours of a multi-sited sensibility as an emergent tool, one that we hope offers new ways of seeing, listening, understanding, and working to identify spaces for potential and possibility across the settings young people experience and traverse in their everyday lives.

      Is FoK an example of this or are they the same?

    34. Rather, we are attuned to the social and political forces that cre-ate boundaries and borders with real, material consequences for young people, and seek to study how these boundaries are experienced as well as reproduced, ruptured, reimagined, and reshaped.

      This reminds me of field trips to "downtown," a downtown that was sterilized and produced. How the space was created sets boundaries for particular participants. Downtown becomes reshaped as a gentrified neighborhood, losing the characteristics that made it uniquely downtown.

    35. Despite post-colonial criticisms, oversimplified and deficit-oriented por-trayals often found a new “home” within education—a field that has historically reproduced and contended with “culture of poverty” frames (Leacock, 1977). As Pierides suggests, such frames are not dismantled by shifting locations, but by shifting assumptions and practices.

      Is Rogoff the only author that challenged the "culture of poverty?" Most authors challenged context of learning but not the student doing the learning. Is that correct?

    36. Rethinking culture as dynamic, instrumental, and co-created also takes us beyond deficit and essentialist views about cultural communities and provides a way to under-stand what is cultural about learning across the activities of people’s lives, as well as how culture and the individual are both transformed through the process of learning (Gutiérrez & Arzubiaga, 2012)

      This makes me think of the culture of skateparks. From the skaters I spoke to, the habits and work ethic developed by skaters carried over to other areas of their life. They identified as skaters even if they weren't still avid skaters and they felt it was a sign of integrity. They were transformed through this learning.

    37. How can a multi-sited sensibility help make visible the complexity and ingenuity of human development, particularly in the con-text of migration, diaspora, and other forms of transnational and inter-cultural movement? We argue that multi-sited perspectives contribute to this discussion by urging us to pay equal attention to the practices and forms of human ingenuity that emerge in and through the connections/tensions/contradictions within and across various social spaces and activity systems—particularly for non-dominant youth.

      As seen through Rogoff's families in the Arizona borderlands, they have FoKs and rely on each other as resources to make their transition to the states. Their resourcefulness cannot be discounted.

    38. Of particular significance to our work, multi-sited ethnography under-stands itself as an ethnography of movement, borderlands, hybridity, and change: “the habit or impulse of multi-sited research is to see subjects as differently constituted, as not products of essential units of difference only, but to see them in development—displaced, recombined, hybrid in the once popular idiom, alternatively imagined” (Marcus, 2009, p. 184).

      This idea reminds me of Azevedo's lines of practice. Subjects come to a hobby with varying degrees interest and motivations. It feels like the authors want us to consider what students come to learning with, what interests, motivations, backgrounds that inform and enhance their learning.

    39. While traditional single-sited ethnography emphasizes localized everyday practices, understanding the experiences of immigrant and diasporic communities in particular involves defining everyday practice as the “interplay of transnational, national and local pro-cesses” (Hall, 2004, p. 109

      I was thinking of L&W tailors when I read this. The taiolors' reading was very specific about their learning in that situation but did not offer anything in the way of what the apprentice brought to the workshop, their culture, their customs, that necessitated this arrangement.

    40. problematizing the view of out-of-school learning as “frivolous” or “incidental” does not mean that we should swing to the other extreme, “relegating all good things to out-of-school, with school only seen as a repressive space” (p. 83). This is particularly important for ethnographic research that seeks to understand learners’ experiences of educational exclusion and inclusion. Do the boundaries of certain educational con-texts or academic domains, inside or outside school, feel more or less

      [note that I couldn't create an annotation when I highlighted across two pages - I intended this to be commenting up until the end of the paragraph on the next page]

      This helps a bit to answer my question from above - but I think it also relates to our conversations this week about desettling disciplines vs. desettling learning in general. Desettling can (and should) happen both outside and inside school, but it's also important to remember that definitional boundaries do exist for a reason, and practitioners should use caution and not just desettle for desettling's sake.

    41. people are part of multiple activity systems, and that the relations and contradictions that exist between activity systems are central to the analysis of human activity and experience (Engeström, 2009; Gutiérrez & Arzubiaga, 2012). This insight becomes especially important for learning to recognize and meaningfully leverage the multiple activity systems, histories, and experi-ences that are present in a given educational setting, particularly those that may be marginalized or dormant in terms of their potential role in expansive forms of learning

      Here the authors are saying that understanding how cultural context affects learning across sites is critical to understanding how learning is happening.

      This connects with Nespor's (multisited) research on field trips, where the docents did not take any sort of context into account - they just gave over their script the same way they would have for any other group. Nespor described how this was especially problematic for a mostly African American group visiting Monticello, since they completely obfuscated any historical references to slavery.

      Using the kind of framework that Vossoughi & Gutiérrez are advocating for only further underlines Nespor's point that educators need to take into account an understanding of the whole person - including their cultural perspective - otherwise they'll lose interest before walking in the door.

    1. With the theoretical goa l of focusi ng on t he dy na m ica l ly evolv i ng scopes of possibi l it y or lea r ni ng i n l ig ht of diversities of structures for social practices, we focus on contextual dimensions of places, positions, and actions occurring in relation to the interests, forms of partici-pation, social relationships and varied identities tied to multiple social practices that make up the learning inf luences and outcomes.

      Utilizing the theoreitical underpinning of later Latour, the Bell, et al., are arguing for a theoretical framework that aims to interpret the reproduction of larger structures of inequity and heirarchy by examining the "social and material conditions" that surround interactions in everyday life. The focus on social-material is somewhat similar to the "multisited" theoretical lens described in the other piece. There they clamor for frames and tools to help with: "Understanding the ways material/intellectual borders function to shape and constrain young people’s experiences and developmental trajectories is also essential to recognizing the spaces available for generative transgression and remediation (Cole & Griffin, 1983; Gutiérrez, 2008)." (p.625 Vossoughi, S., & Gutiérrez, K. D., 2014)

      Both theoretical lens focus on how social-material contexts "shape and constrain" student identity and identity formation. However, Vossoughi and Gutierrez believe that this can be better understood by seeing similar groups in different contexts, and contrasting the phenomena that occur. While Bell, et al., and their cultural pathways, theorize stretching the specific phenomena across different spaces and time scales in order to get a better understanding of the different ways learner identity is shapes, can be shaped, and can shape contexts.

    2. This particular instance demonstrates how self-perceptions and the perceptions of others interact and inf luence one another in complex ways in the midst of con-nected constellations of situated events.

      Here we see that while Vossoughi & Gutiérrez focus on research methods on what to evaluate, here the author suggests that the student's perception of themselves plays a role. The previous article discussed how to think of students in these situations as not having deficits, but it seemed like a unilateral viewpoint, whereas this author evaluates learning from both standpoints.

    3. These variations inf luence what positions people occupy and confront as they move from one social context to another, driving their participation in different ways in pa r t icu la r contex ts [Dreier, 20 09]. In ou r et hnog raphic work on students w it h d is-abilities, variations in life-wide supports greatly impacted how youth perceived their abilities and identified as learners, depending on their access to valued rights and opportunities

      This is similar to multi-sited learning, but at the same time there are varying characteristics. Pathways focusses more on the socio-cultural situations that students inhibit, whereas multi-sited focussed more on their settings of learning.

    4. Learners need to figure out how to adapt their abilities, interests, and identities across a diverse set of locations on a routine basis as they attempt to accomplish their goals or respond to the interests of other social ac-tors.

      This is very similar to the multi-sited learning article. However, this is interesting because it puts the emphasis on the learner needing to adapt these skills, whereas the other article was focussing on the lens in which the learner is assessed.